Some things never change: Pais and Uhlenbeck

The late physicist Abraham Pais is perhaps best known for his Subtle is the Lord, the greatest of all Einstein biographies. I hadn't realized that Pais had written his own memoir (A Tale of Two Continents: A Physicist’s Life in a Turbulent World) until I came across it accidentally today in the library. If you've read any of Pais' historical writing you can probably guess that his autobiography is full of wonderful stories.

There is a condensed version of Pais' life story in his Wikipedia entry. He grew up in Holland, completing his graduate studies under Uhlenbeck in 1941 (see below). He survived the war in hiding in Amsterdam (not far from Anne Frank) and eventually immigrated to the US, becoming a member of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Here is Pais' recollection of how he became of student of Uhlenbeck's (p.31). Amazingly, I had the same experience, and so have all of my students ;-)

I ... told Uhlenbeck of my hopes to become a graduate student in theoretical physics under his guidance.

Uhlenbeck's response was unexpected. "If you like physics," he asked, "why don't you become an experimentalist? Or if you like mathematical aspects of theoretical physics, why not become a mathematician?" In explanation he noted that the practical future of a theoretical physicist in the Netherlands was extremely limited. At that time there were only five professoriates in the whole country. ... [more dissuasion] ... Furthermore, he added, theoretical physics is very difficult, it would be a life of toil with many frustrations and disappointments.

I was quite taken aback and mumbled, "But I like theoretical physics so much." Uhlenbeck's reaction was again unexpected. "If that is really true," he said, "then by all means become a theorist; it is the most wonderful subject you can imagine." As he later told me, his preliminary attempts at dissuasion were exactly like those he himself had been exposed to when he wanted to start his own graduate studies, adding that he used the same routine whenever anyone applied to study with him.

...Years later I told Uhlenbeck how that first afternoon with him had affected me. He told me with a smile that he had gone through the very same treatment, had the very same reactions, when he had visited his revered teacher, Paul Ehrenfest, for the first time. Ehrenfest in turn had received the same treatment from the great Ludwig Boltzmann in Vienna. This tradition is part of teaching in the grand old style, concentrating on but very few students. In my time I was the only student Uhlenbeck had taken on. Because of that privilege I may count myself as a spiritual great-grandson of Boltzmann. Meanwhile the old style has gone forever, I think, because of the large number of students now clamoring for higher education.

Pais wrote some important papers with Gell-Mann, including ones on Kaon oscillations and Strangeness. The result on Kaon oscillations, despite being a simple exercise in elementary two-state quantum mechanics, was not accepted by other theorists (the reactions of Racah and Dyson are recounted) until verified experimentally! (p.338: In 1956 a Columbia experimental group reported that the "rather startling properties of [neutral K's] ... predicted by Gell-Mann and Pais ... have been confirmed" :-)

Later Pais and Gell-Mann had a falling out, and Gell-Mann's hostility caused Pais some distress. In the memoir he describes reading the following inscription in St. Paul's church in Baltimore, which he liked very much (p.339).

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender, be at peace with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly, and listen to others, even to the dull and ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself to others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater or lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.

...

-- Max Ehrmann

Pais: Pauli aspie?

From The Genius of Science, a portrait gallery of 20th century physicists by Abraham Pais.

So it came about that I met Pauli for the first time in Denmark, in early 1946, at a dinner party in Bohr's home. At that time he had already long been recognized as one of the major figures in 20th century physics ... I witnessed for the first time his chassidic mode, a gentle rhythmic to and fro rocking of the upper torso... "No, perhaps you don't know much, perhaps you don't know much." A moment later: "Ich weiss mehr" (I know more). That was said in the Pauli style, without aggression, merely an expression of a statement of fact.

More from Pais.

More from Pais: Einstein and bordellos?

More excerpts from the memoir (A Tale of Two Continents: A Physicist’s Life in a Turbulent World) of Abraham Pais. See earlier post.

p. 375: ... In early September we went back to Berkeley ... The physicist Otto Stern, a Nobel laureate, lived in retirement in the area. He had known Einstein well when both were in Prague, where - he told me - they would visit bordellos together, "quiet places for discussing physics." ... :-) [See also here.]

One November morning I stood in the shower when the doorbell rang... It was Don Glaser, beside himself with excitement. "I just received ... the Nobel Prize! Now I'm a free man, I can leave physics." He did not care at all for the recent style of doing experiments in large teams [modern experimental particle physics]. Indeed, soon after he returned from Stockholm he became a molecular biologist.

I met with Glaser (inventor of the bubble chamber) once when I was a grad student, about the possibility of working on computational neuroscience and vision (his focus at the time). Had I gone that route I probably would have bumped into Jeff Hawkins, who was there doing biophysics.

Confirmation bias and the Einstein myth

The story that Einstein was a poor student is appealing, but entirely untrue. It's yet another example of confirmation bias -- the tendency to embrace information that confirms our preconceptions (in this case, confirms some romantic notion about how human achievement works), and to reject information that contradicts them. The truth is that Einstein was (unsurprisingly) a brilliant student.

See pages 37-39 of the magisterial biography Subtle is the Lord (Google books) by eminent physicist (and IAS colleague of Einstein) Abraham Pais.

At age 4-5 Einstein became fascinated by the workings of a compass. As an adult he still remembered the moment as the first miracle in his intellectual development. The second miracle was his discovery of the beauty of Euclidean geometry at age 12: "the clarity and certainty of its contents made an indescribable impression on me" -- the reaction of an average 12 year old? Einstein taught himself calculus between the ages of 12 and 16. He regularly ranked first in his classes in elementary, middle and high school. From age 10 to 15 he had weekly discussions about science and philosophy with a university student and family friend named Max Talmud. Does this sound like a slow learner?

Pais even writes (p. 38): "The preceeding collection of stories about Einstein the young boy demonstrates the remarkable extent to which his most characteristic personal traits were native rather than acquired."

Schwinger meets Rabi

Seventeen year old Julian Schwinger meets Columbia professor I. I. Rabi (Nobel Prize 1944) and explains the EPR paper to him.

Climbing the Mountain: The Scientific Biography of Julian Schwinger [p.22-23] ... Rabi appeared; he invited Motz into his office to discuss 'a certain paper by Einstein in the Physical Review! Motz introduced Julian and asked if he could bring his young friend along; Rabi did not object, and so it began.

The Einstein article turned out to be the famous paper of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, with which young Julian was already familiar. He had studied quantum mechanics with Professor Wills at the City College, and discussed with him the problem of the reduction of a wave packet after additional information about a quantum system is gained from a measurement. 'Then they [Rabi and Motz] began talking and I sat down in the corner. They talked about the details of Einstein's paper, and somehow the conversation hinged on some mathematical point which had to do with whether something was bigger or smaller, and they couldn't make any progress. Then I spoke up and said, "Oh, but that is easy. All you have to do is to use the completeness theorem." Rabi turned and stared at me. Then it followed from there. Motz had to explain that I knew these things. I recall only Rabi's mouth gaping, and he said, "Oh, I see. Well, come over and tell us about it." I told them about how the completeness theorem would settle the matter. From that moment I became Rabi's protege. He asked, "Where are you studying?" "Oh, at City College." "Do you like it there?" I said, "No, I'm very bored."''

Watching young Julian demonstrate such 'deep understanding of things that were at the time at the frontier and not clearly understood,' Rabi decided on the spot to talk to George Pegram, then chairman of the physics department and dean of the graduate faculty, to arrange Julian's immediate transfer to Columbia. He and Motz left Julian waiting and went to see Pegram ...

Hans Bethe (Nobel Prize 1967) supported the transfer :-)

[p.24] Bethe provided an enthusiastic letter of support after he read Julian's notes on electrodynamics.'' Bethe's letter, dated 10 July 1935, reads as follows:

Dear Rabi,

Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to talk to Mr. Schwinger. When discussing his problem with him, I entirely forgot that he was a sophomore 17 years of age. I spoke to him just as to any of the leading theoretical physicists. His knowledge of quantum electrodynamics is certainly equal to my own, and I can hardly understand how he could acquire that knowledge in less than two years and almost all by himself.

He is not the frequent type of man who just "knows" without being able to make his knowledge useful. On the contrary, his main interest consists in doing research, and in doing it exactly at the point where it is most needed at present. That is shown by his choice of his problem: When studying quantum electrodynamics, he found that an important point had been left out in a paper of mine concerning the radiation emitted by fast electrons. That radiation is at present one of the most crucial points of quantum theory. ...

Climbing the Mountain is one of the best scientific biographies I have read, on par with books by Pais on Einstein and Oppenheimer, and by Schweber on QED. The account of the early communication between Schwinger and Feynman about their very different formulations of QED is interesting. See also Feynman's cognitive style and Feynman and the secret of magic.

Schwinger was one of the 64 mid-career scientists studied by Harvard psychologist Anne Roe.

Schwinger, of course, did not believe in wavefunction collapse or other Copenhagen mysticism: see Schwinger on Quantum Foundations.

Galison: Poincare and Einstein

A colleague and I recently discussed Peter Galison and his book Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time . (See also here and here.) The book explores how practical concerns of the era (in particular, clock synchronization -- important for longitudinal navigation as well as for the European train system) influenced the discovery of special relativity.

Both my friend and I are great admirers of Galison. After earning his doctorate in the history of science, he wrote a second dissertation in particle theory under Howard Georgi while a Junior Fellow at Harvard. Other than particle theorists turned science historians like Sam Schweber or Abraham Pais (see here and here), I can't think of anyone more qualified to work on the (underdeveloped) history of modern physics.

When I learned about special relativity as a kid, I first went through a phase of suspicion about Einstein's operational approach -- how could one be sure, I wondered, that light beams were the best primitive for the operation and synchronization of clocks? After I accepted this idea, I was shocked that someone could be so imaginative as to come up with his clever gedanken experiments, involving moving trains, light beams, lattices of clocks. I thought to myself -- I could have never invented that! It was only much later that I learned about his patent office work on clocks and how synchronization of time between distant rail stations was an important practical problem of the day. I agree completely with Galison that practical concerns had a strong influence on both Einstein's and Poincare's thinking.

NYTimes: ...Einstein's relativity has long been regarded by scholars as a monument to the power of abstract thought. But if Dr. Peter Galison, 48 -- a Harvard professor of the history of science and of physics, a pilot, art lover and nascent filmmaker -- is right, physics and Einstein have flourished more in their connections to the world than in any ivory tower aloofness. And one clue to the origin of relativity can be found in something as mundane and practical as a 19th-century train schedule. ''It's in as plain sight as it could possibly be,'' he said.

As Dr. Galison relates, before the advent of factories began to standardize life, and railroad systems with crisscrossing tracks made it imperative to know which train was where and when, there were too many times, one for every village.

In the last part of the 19th century, the coordination of clocks and the standardization of time had engaged the passions of nations, business leaders, astronomers and philosophers. The patent office in Bern, Switzerland, where Einstein worked, was a clearinghouse for patents on the synchronization of clocks.

In New England, the Harvard and Yale observatories were competing to sell time signals to the public, and in Paris pneumatic tubes snaked under the streets to synchronize the city's clocks with blasts of air. Far from being a bit of abstraction by a loner genius, the clocks that Einstein used as examples in his papers were as familiar then as computers are today.

...In addition to all his high-flown academic activities, Poincaré was immersed in practical work. He was a mining inspector, for example. Most important, he was deeply involved with the French Board of Longitude, even serving as president, sending teams of soldiers and surveyors across the oceans to map the far-flung empire.

Coordinated clocks were central to this enterprise. To measure the longitude of some mountain or port or gold mine in the New World, it was necessary to measure the difference between the time some star crossed the meridian there and the time it did back in Paris. The leaders and rivals in filling in this ''electric world map,'' as Dr. Galison calls it, were England and France, even though for several years they were embarrassingly unable to agree on the distance between their own principal observatories, Greenwich and Paris. Paris lost out to Greenwich as the locus of zero longitude, but in 1909 Poincaré used the Eiffel Tower to broadcast time signals to the world.

...In his papers Einstein was always using modern machines to illustrate his ideas, Dr. Galison noted. ''There is something wonderful about Einstein invoking trains and telegraphs to get a transformation of space-time, Poincaré turning the Eiffel Tower into a radio,'' Dr. Galison said.

''In the long run I think what's happened to them is that we, partly through our own doing and partly through our doing to them, removed these physicists from the concrete situations that they were involved in. And I think in a way lose some of the fascination that these ideas had for them and still could have for us in a way.''

It's our loss, he said.

Galison: "My question is not how different scientific communities pass like ships in the night,'' he wrote in Image and Logic. ''It is rather how, given the extraordinary diversity of the participants in physics -- cryogenic engineers, radio chemists, algebraic topologists, prototype tinkerers, computer wizards, quantum field theorists -- they speak to each other at all."

Intellectual history

I want to recommend a book I've been reading recently, The Eighth Day of Creation by H.F. Judson. It's the most detailed intellectual history of molecular biology I've yet found, covering not just the science but the scientists as well. Someone described it as a New Yorker-style book covering the discovery of DNA, RNA and protein synthesis.

It may be chauvinistic, but I can't help noticing the prominent role played by physicists who crossed over into molecular biology: Bragg, Delbruck, Crick, Wilkins, Gamow, Szilard (yes, the Gamow and Szilard you know from big bang cosmology and the atomic bomb, respectively), Walter Gilbert, etc. The influence of Schrodinger's little book What is Life? is pervasive.

It's hard for me to think of many scientific histories as good as this one, in which the writer has a deep understanding of both the science and the personalities involved. Two examples are Subtle is the Lord (Abraham Pais on Einstein) and QED and the Men Who Made It (Sam Schweber on quantum electrodynamics), but these border on unreadable for the non-specialist. Perhaps Genius, Gleick's biography of Feynman, and The Enigma, Andrew Hodge's biography of Turing, also qualify. Can anyone suggest others?