Einstein vs. Quantum Orthodoxy, Revisited

Bob and Alice go spinning?Essential reading for all those reading the current Einstein biographies is a NY Review of Books article titled The Other Einstein by Lee Smolin. Smolin, a theoretical physicist, takes the biographers to task (although he does prefer Neffe's biography, as I have - see my review) for not really answering the most essential questions about Einstein. One such question is whether Einstein's childishness in later years was pre-meditated. Smolin writes:

The question that needs to be answered, although none of the biographers do so, is how this arrogant, charismatic revolutionary turned into the otherworldly sage who was said to be an "emblem...of the mature and reflective human being." The man who was once seen as childish became admired for being childlike. How did this happen? Had Einstein become resigned after facing political and personal tragedies, or was his new character, as Overbye and Neffe both suspect, at least partly an act? "Einstein the lonely genius," as Neffe writes, "was partly a creation of his own making."

Smolin does provide some fascinating stories that lend credence to this suggestion. He also has a very interesting take on Einstein's later years - years though to be "wasted" by many scientists and biographers because of Einstein's failed attempt to find a unified theory, and his stubborn battle against the probabilistic and non-realistic view of quantum mechanics in the Copenhagen Interpretation. According to Smolin, Einstein's "act" worked against the acceptance of his fight against quantum orthodoxy:

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Relative Time and Swiss Clocks

The recent books on Einstein by Isaacson and Neffe (see reviews) cover the development of special relativity in great depth, with special attention to the development of an operational definition of time duration that vanquishes the prior notion of simultaneity. Indeed, simultaneity is now accepted as observer-dependent, thanks to Einstein's Special Theory.

Both books do refer to the role played by Poincaré- although "role" is not necessarily the operative term here. No doubt Poincaré was thinking deeply about time, but did not make Einstein's leap to codify the relative nature of time duration.

An excellent book on the Einstein/Poincare connection is Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, by Peter Galison. Here Galison tries to relate Einstein's experience as patent clerk who most likely saw patent proposals for clock synchronization between different Swiss cities to his ongoing thought -experiments in the foundations of physics. ( In a generally very favorable review by R. Wald for Physics Today, this idea is called into question.)

But the Poincaré connection is fascinating because it is not clear to what extent, if any, Poincaré's writings on time were even seen by Einstein. (And the title of the book is itself a play on words, because a Poincaré Map is a fundamental analysis/visualization tool of chaos and fractals.)

The new Einstein bios have really opened up new avenues of thought on how Einstein came to be Einstein. The Poincare connection is fascinating, and a potentially important piece of the answer.

Most amazing of all is the pictures these books paint of the intellectual ferment taking place in Europe at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It is hard to imagine a similarly exhilarating time of new, earth-shattering theories that can possibly duplicate these years for excitement and creative brilliance.

Chaos and Compatibilism

Chaos Theory is often cited as a way out of the determinsim-free will paradox. The explanation usually goes like this: OK, everything is determined by physical law, but the laws themselves are non-linear and the output of a particular equation that codifies a law often leads to a pseudo-random process and/or sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Ergo while we are governed by strict physical laws, our behavior - and by implication our decisions - do not give the appearance of being constrained in any way.

The philosophical position that free will can co-exist with determinism pre-dates chaos theory, with Hume and Hobbes early proponents. Known as compatibilism, it stands on its own without chaos theory. Much of the compatibilist argument rests on a careful definition of what it means to act freely, leading to a so-called category error.

The compatibilist definition of free will states that free will is not the ability to choose as an agent independent of prior cause, but as an agent who is not forced to make a certain choice. Determinists argue that all acts that take place are predetermined by prior causes. Because human decision is an act that is not exempt from prior cause, by this definition, some determinists known as hard determinists believe that free will thus becomes an illusion.

A compatibilist, or soft determinist, in contrast, will define a free act in a way that does not hinge on causal necessitation. For them, an act is free unless it involves compulsion by another person. Since the physical universe and the laws of nature are not persons, they argue that it is a category error to speak of our actions being forced on us by the laws of nature, and therefore it is wrong to conclude that universal determinism would mean we are never free.

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The Art of Biography - Einstein and Goethe

I recently read an interesting review by J. Parini in the May 11, 2007 Chronicle of Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination From the Great German Poet by John Armstrong. According to Parini, Armstong's approach is non-chronological, instead focusing on different thematic "nodes" in Goethe's life. This style of biography is remarkably similar to that of Jürgen Neffe in his recently translated Einstein: An Autobiography. Unlike Isaacson's best-seller Einstein: His Life and Universe, Neffe presents Einsteins's life prismatically in chapters that go over the same events, but with different emphases. (See my review of Isaacson and Neffe)

Here's Panini writing about Armstrong's Goethe:

In the case of Goethe, there were many observers, and the factual record is not much in doubt. Hardly anyone crossed his path who did not feel compelled to record an impression. And so biographers have a wealth of material, some of it quite marvelous. Armstrong plucks the choicest bits from that vast record, but refuses to narrate the life in conventional terms. Instead, he picks 10 key words and gathers his work around those nodes: Luck, Love, Power, Art, War, Friendship, Nature, Peace, Happiness, Death. There is an underpinning of chronology here, as one might expect; but the timeline is folded back upon itself, even discarded for long stretches as Armstrong lunges into meditations on the meaning of the life itself in the context of those seminal words.

The image of "timeline folding back upon itself" is a wonderful way of describing this biography of connected "nodes."  Panini goes on to describe the effect of reading such a biography...

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When Monty Met Erwin

It may be that only Monty Python's exquisite blend of slapstick/farce/erudition/absurdity can take on the infamous cat of Erwin Schrödinger...

Schrödinger, one of the giants of Quantum Mechanics, truly believed that his cat presented an absurdity that undermined the probabilistic interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. QM was not undermined, and still continues to beguile and bedevil all who try to grasp its implications about the nature of the world.

Cecil Adams' "epic" poem The Story of Schrödinger's Cat, is a great riff on the Krazy Kat. A choice excerpt:

Now, you'd say the cat either lives or it don't
But quantum mechanics is stubborn and won't.
Statistically speaking, the cat (goes the joke),
Is half a cat breathing and half a cat croaked.
To some this may seem a ridiculous split,
But quantum mechanics must answer, "Tough @#&!

Of the many thousands of S-Cat web sites, one of my favorites is The Well-Intended, but not quite interactive Schrödinger's cat: A Rather Silly Experiment in Quantum Mechanics.Click here to try your luck at predicting whether you can indeed let the cat out of the bag...

Cartoon info: By Paul Dlugokencky, concept by Zachary H. Levine, for the American Physical Society

Poker, Popper, and Wittgenstein - This Ain't No Love Story

It's hard to imagine a time when big-time philosophers roamed the earth as true public figures, in search of weighty issues, faculty positions, and total intellectual superiority over fellow philosophers who dared to argue with them.

Such was the time in the first half of the 20th Century, with one of the main battlegrounds the post-war scene at Cambridge University, home base of Bertrand Russel, GE Moore, and of course Ludwig Wittgenstein - the iconoclastic bad boy of philosophy, cult figure, and master of cryptic utterances who had a devastating penchant for eviscerating the work of philosophers he disagreed with - which was most other philosophers without the initials LW.

The scene was the Moral Science Society, which was was holding their monthly meeting on October 25, 1946. Karl Popper - at that time just starting a position at the London School of Economics, was already causing a stir with his The Logic of Scientific Discovery - was in town presenting a talk titled Are There Philosophical Problems?

The head of the MSD was none other than Ludwig W. Wittgenstein, scion of one of the wealthiest families in pre-war Austria, who had renounced all his wealth to live an ascetic life of the mind, spirit, and body that is so improbably eccentric that he and his ideas are recurring figures and themes in many fictional stories that need a touch of the bizarre (e.g. The World As I Found It, by Bruce Duffy, A Philosophical Investigation by Philip Kerr, Wittgensteins' Mistress by David Markson).

Apparently Popper was no no shrinking violet either : a truly fesity, take-no-philosophical-prisoner scold according to many contemporaries.

Back to the dom's room at Cambridge. You get the picture: smoky, with drab walls, scuffed, darkened oak chairs and table, leaded glass separators on the casement windows, bottles of port, an old fireplace with soot-covered bricks inside, and... a fireplace poker soon to be infamous for the briefest of philosophical battles. What happened in that room is the stuff of philosophical lore - 10-minute argument that flashed between Wittgenstein and Popper that is still recounted and debated today.

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Thomas Kuhn in High Def - Paradigm Shifts, Blu-Rays, and the NFL

Until I read James Gleick's Chaos: The Making of a New Science in 1987, I had only a passing knowledge of  paradigm shifts, one of the defining features of science described by Thomas Kuhn in his Structures of Scientific Revolution. Gleick used the paradigm shift idea to describe the break with the overly linear science brought on by the new discoveries of Chaos Theory - a usage of the paradigm shift concept that seems to adhere to Kuhn's definition.

A concise summary of  Kuhn's ideas can be found in Lawrence van Gelder's June 19, 1996 NYTimes obit:

His thesis was that science was not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge. Instead, he wrote, it is "a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions." And in those revolutions, he wrote, "one conceptual world view is replaced by another."

Thus, Einstein's theory of relativity could challenge Newton's concepts of physics. Lavoisier's discovery of oxygen could sweep away earlier ideas about phlogiston, the imaginary element believed to cause combustion. Galileo's supposed experiments with wood and lead balls dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa could banish the Aristotelian theory that bodies fell at a speed proportional to their weight. And Darwin's theory of natural selection could overthrow theories of a world governed by design.

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Luminiferously Aethereal Dark Matter and Energy

Star Traveler from Angelbert Metoyer's Dark Energy Splitting the Universe . Click to enlarge.At the end of the 19th Century century many physicists were still searching for the luminiferous aether - the mysterious, invisible substance that permeated the universe - the medium that (it was presumed) needed to exist in order to support light waves.

At that time, waves were understood to be mechanical disturbances in a medium - in effect, shapes that propagate through the medium transporting energy from source to receiver with a speed dependant on the medium itself . Water waves, waves on a string, sound waves in a column of air - all of these phenomena relied on matter to support these moving shapes.

The Aether was supposed to be the invisible stuff that somehow oscillated as the shapes of light waves passed from point A to point B. It had to be really odd stuff - invisible, for one thing, and also incredibly resilient, because it had to support an unbelievable speed - the speed of light.

Nevertheless, by this point the mechanical qualities of the aether had become more and more magical: it had to be a fluid in order to fill space, but one that was millions of times more rigid than steel in order to support the high frequencies of light waves. It also had to be massless and without viscosity, otherwise it would visibly affect the orbits of planets. Additionally it appeared it had to be completely transparent, non-dispersive, incompressible, and continuous at a very small scale. (wikipedia)

In other words, aether couldn't be seen, weighed, touched or tasted, but it was stronger than anything known to man. And it was everywhere - in your shoes, hair, mouth, nose, and subway tunnels. A really strange thing for physicists to believe in.

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Locally Localized Gravity, or If I Only Had a Brane

The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), at the University of Pennsylvania will be running a very interesting show titled Locally Localized Gravity from January 20 - March 25, 2007.  From the ICA website description:

Locally Localized Gravity responds to an alternative mode of art making wherein artists produce events, run collectives and galleries, publish zines and small artist's books—generally acting as catalysts in their communities. In other words, they rarely focus only on traditional object-based practices. The exhibition, which will include over 100 artists, musicians, designers, lecturers, performers, and creators from Philadelphia and other cities, will be one non-stop event and on view in ICA's first floor galleries and terrace.

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The title is borrowed from string theory, a complex scientific term describing four-dimensional gravity (three dimensions of space and one of time). It was suggested to the curators by artist Matthew Ritchie, whose own work explores ideas of string theory, among many things. The term locally localized gravity can be applied to art scenes where artists, by generating a huge amount of energy, can create centers of gravity.

This description of the meaning of LLG is maximally condensed for public consumption.  It is not the point of the exhibit, nor the role of ICA to give a detailed explanation.  However, because I have participated in an ICA in the past, I was asked to send them a more detailed blurb on locally localized gravity. While my piece might not make the ICA material, I am posting my submission here because LLG touches on the most extreme questions one can ask of any physical model, namely what is the ultimate nature of the universe?

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On the Mathematical Nature of the World

I had one of those very rewarding teaching moments yesterday in my General Physics lab.  Some students and I got into a discussion of just what is physics, what is the connection between mathematics and physics, and whether the world is itself mathematical.

The nature of the world as mathematical is a common theme in the Chaos and Fractals course.  I have developed a seminar module  that has one main reading, and I keep finding supplemental readings every time I teach the course. I list a few of these here in order to collect them in one place - for future renditions of the course, and as a post that will hopefully generate some debate from interested readers.

The main reading is John Barrow's The Mathematical Universe in which he poses the question "The orderliness of nature can be expressed mathematically. Why?"  This article is an excellent summary of the main schools of mathematical philosophy - realism, inventionism, formalism, and constructivism.

Anyone interested in deeper views of  mathematical realism must read The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.  This 1960 article by Eugene Wigner is definitely the  "mother-of-all mathematics and the world"  arguments for realism.  In it he describes the uncanny connection between mathematics developed as part of pure, formal, abstract systems and physical observation, which naturally leads to ontological questions on the  mathematical nature of the world:

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