Einstein

Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Fascinating and lovingly crafted. Isaacson approaches his subject with the utmost regard and a clear desire to explain what we might call ambiguous or controversial aspects of Einstein's life. The book certainly doesn't lack in detail. There are 550 pages of narrative biography and a massive list of sources and notes from correspondence between Einstein and colleagues as well as family and friends as well as his notes and personal papers and archival material that must have been painstakingly researched indeed.

Isaacson takes a three-fold approach to Einstein's life that is clear from the way the chapters are separated, though he does attempt a somewhat chronological approach. Einstein's life is divided into three major themes: his scientific work, his personal life, and his political or public life. I have to admit I was much more comfortable with the first and third than the second. Reading his love letters or learning the personal details about how he kept his house seemed a bit too voyeuristic to me. One can debate philosophically whether or not that is the just consequence of so public a life, but it still feels wrong. Nevertheless, the other two elements are more than enough to joyfully push the narrative along at a fascinating clip.

Isaacson portrays Einstein as an iconoclast, a rebel that did most of his best scientific, political and even religious thinking standing in direct contradistinction to the prevailing currents. This is certainly true in his younger years within the realm of science and to a certain degree even with his political involvement between the World Wars. Relativity, both the special and general theories, certainly met with a lot of opposition among the scientific establishment at the time and faced a long uphill battle before gaining acceptance. In his older years, Einstein became more attached to the classical physical world that he grew up with and was very reluctant to accept advances in Quantum Mechanics that were producing eminently consistent results experimentally. He sums up the transition in his life with typical self-reflective good humor, "To punish me for my contempt of authority, fate made me an authority myself." Einstein is a solid work with a strong scientific background that explains fundamental concepts quite well. Having read a lot of popular physics stuff lately, I thought I'd find a lot of the descriptions of the laws and discoveries to be tedious. This was not the case. What Isaacson adds is the subjective elements of discovery, the historical context for such ideas that makes them fascinating in an altogether different light. The ideas aren't stated as maxims, they're proposed as radical departures from prevailing wisdom and debated, often in the voices of Einstein's contemporaries - Bohr, Born, Heisenberg, Planck, Poincaré and too many others to do them sufficient justice. Underlying the ideas that transformed science is a running philosophical theme that Isaacson also does a fantastic job at highlighting: the nature of reality and humanity's ability, or inability, to know it, capture it, and explain it. You get more than a biography of the legend, but a biography of the turn of the century with all its prejudices, excitement, fervor and imagination. Even the quaint seems historically momentous and precious to preserve.

Counterintuitively, I found the second half of the book recounting Einstein's "unproductive" years to be more interesting than the first. I liked the older Einstein and it was a joy to read about all the anecdotes that contributed to his quite real absent-minded professor image. In these years Einstein took to politics, philosophy and religion, proving that he was not only probably the greatest scientist that ever lived, but the greatest thinker and humanist as well. Isaacson notes several instances of intense debate over political issues that Einstein held passionately. It was nice to see, in spite of these passions, that he was magnanimous when proven wrong and was quick to abandon positions that became untenable or that he learned were incorrect like his modified views on pacifism, religion and his own Jewish cultural identity.

On a personal level, Isaacson is deeply and uncomfortably probing and probably more than a little too forgiving of Einstein for several rather large personal lapses in judgment, shrugging them off as personal quirks. Skirting the issues of his personal relations, I found sections of analysis on his celebrity and his reaction to celebrity rather interesting. It's hard to imagine, even in todays age where science has been popularized by other great minds like Sagan, that a scientist, especially one dealing in abstruse theoretical and in the case of general relativity and unified field theory almost purely mathematical concepts, could garner the fame that he did, almost without effort. Thousands would come to see him and it seemed from newspaper accounts that the public almost reveled in the fact that they had no idea what he was talking about. As Chaplin once said to him at a movie premier: "They cheer me because they all understand me, they cheer you because no one understands you." I think there's some truth to this and I think part of the reason we love Einstein so much is because he represents the idea that human beings can transcend the limits of life and push the boundaries of what we think real or practical. The fact the he's still the icon for such thinking in a world where science has moved on to the truly complex and mind-boggling is a testament to just how much he really revolutionized our understanding of the way the universe works.

It was also interesting to see how the lay public reacted to such mind and universe altering ideas. Particularly exasperating for Einstein was the conflation of relativity with a philosophy of moral relativism, which he lamented frequently. The press, then as now, with nothing better to do speculate and speculate and speculate until all they're left with is absurdities. "Does relativity mean there's no such thing as right and wrong?" Which is more of a question of semantics than the result of the research and findings of Einstein himself. These questions would haunt him the rest of his life in the public forum as Nazis and anti-Semites used it to cast a lurid glow over what "Jewish science" was doing to the moral fabric of Germany or American conservatives thought were clear indications of Soviet sympathies. Absurd, to be sure, but an interesting historical theme: the uneducated, yet vitriolic grasping on to key words and bending their meaning to their political advantage (like Socialism in the press today). Einstein himself was a proponent of socialism. I wonder how that would fly in the red states today? Would they act like conservatives in Germany and Europe and use it as a basis to reject not just the man's political ideology, but his science as well? I'd like to think not, but humanity still tends to have the rather unfortunate habit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's a disease in politics today as it was in Einstein's time.

Review-wise, Isaacson does a remarkable job with a lot of source material, and while some of it can be redundant, he tightly focuses his narrative around readily identifiable themes that give purpose and meaning to Einstein's place in history. His prose is unpretentious, dignified, and direct, features that Gleick's biography of Newton probably could have benefited from. With all the biographies of Einstein on the market, it's still hard to imagine any that could top this one. Very highly recommended.

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The Universe in a Black Hole

Dr. David Lowe of Brown University recently won a research grant from FQXi to research something very peculiar: whether or not our entire universe exists in something like a black hole. The title and the proposal sound enigmatic and groundbreaking, but it is doubtful that our entire universe exists inside a literal black hole. Instead, what Lowe is proposing is the expansion of an idea first proposed by physicist Gerard 't Hooft when studying information loss and entropy with respect to black holes, namely, the Holographic Principle.

What 't Hooft and other physicists like Stephen Hawking were curious about was what happened to objects and the information they represent when they crossed the event horizon of a black hole, that mysterious point of no return on approach to a black hole where the force of its gravitational attraction is so strong that even an escape velocity equal to the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) would not be enough to free you from its pull.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics basically states that the entropy of the universe always increases with time. It's a fundamental concept that most physicists think gives direction to the arrow of time and why we perceive things moving in a certain direction and why we can remember the past and not the future. The Second Law has gone through a number of formulations as the field of physics has evolved, but has stayed true nonetheless. In the mechanical age of Industrialization it was used by thermodynamically oriented engineers and physicists to simply state that heat never flows from a colder body to a hotter one. Makes sense right? If you put a cube of ice in a room temperature glass of water, the ice cube doesn't give off heat making the water warmer and the cube colder. On the contrary, the opposite happens and the water heats the ice cube until it goes through a phase transition and becomes water as well. With the advent of atomistic theories toward the end of the 19th century and Boltzmann's creation of a statistical way of examining and explaining this behavior the Second Law was recast yet again. This time, the definition included a new word: entropy (a statistical measure of the amount of disorder in a system). Boltzmann mainly studied gases, hypothetical boxes of gases and the interplay between the particles of gas and how they occupied and their arrangements evolved over time. He found that another way of saying the Second Law is this: ordered things tend, over time, to evolve into disordered things. If we take a box and place a divider in the middle and fill one side with oxygen, we have an ordered system. Exactly half the box contains all the oxygen particles, the other is a vacuum. Remove the divider and let the oxygen move freely. If you came back in an hour, chances are you'd find a more disordered box. Particles of oxygen would be all over the place and would no longer be neatly arranged on one side or in one corner. The gas would fill the space to create a sort of equilibrium. Imagine the same thing happening with two gases in the box instead of one - oxygen on the right, nitrogen on the left. Remove the divider, and the gases would mix and it would be incredibly difficult to separate them again. Why does this happen? Simple statistics. It's far more likely to find something mixed, heterogeneous and disordered than it is to find something neatly arranged. Therefore, the system will tend toward the most likely scenario. It's not that the box can't spontaneously separate, it can, but it's exceedingly unlikely to find the atoms in their original configuration neatly arranged with nitrogen on one side and oxygen on another.  Atoms are constantly moving, never standing still, and as a result, ordered systems break down. With the dawn of the information age, Claude Shannon put another twist on the Second Law. All of the particles in a box of gas represent bits and pieces of information. In order to describe the state of the box at any given time we have to be able to describe the position and momentum of given particles. The more particles, the more information required to describe the box accurately. In its initial state, the box is easy to describe. "There are 30 atoms of oxygen on one side and 30 atoms of nitrogen on the other." Not a lot of information is necessary to describe this. Once the gases mingle freely, it becomes increasingly more difficult to describe the state of the box. You need to convey more information about each individual particle to get an accurate picture. "Oxygen atom #1 is in the upper left corner of the box at this particular moment, but moving away from that corner at a speed of..." For each of the 60 atoms. Entropy (disorder) can also refer to the amount of information in a system as well. So if entropy always increases, so does the amount of information needed to describe a system.

http://cde.nwc.edu/SCI2108/course_documents/stars/smallest/black_holes.htm

Black holes presented a bit of a problem. Once an object, a particle for instance, is sucked into a black hole, it is forever beyond our cosmic horizon, we can never see it or gain any information about it ever again. In fact, the "no hair theorem" states that all black holes are essentially the same, and information about what they potentially swallowed or how they were created is forever lost. This is a direct contradiction of the Second Law. Information cannot be lost in these black holes. If it was, the entropy of the universe as a whole would decrease as more and more stuff was swallowed up.

Back to the Holographic Principle. What t'Hooft and others like Hawking discovered was that information isn't really lost. You can't tell what exact particles were swallowed by a black hole, but you can tell how much it has in it. When a particle like a photon is consumed by a black hole, the size of the black hole's event horizon increases in three dimensional space. A better way of putting it is that it's surface area increases. The area is what's important to us because we can't know what's beyond that surface. Think of an opaque balloon being blown up. The more air inside the balloon, the larger the balloon gets - it's surface area stretches to compensate for the new material inside. From the outside, we can't tell what filled up the balloon because we can't see into it through the rubber, it could be oxygen, nitrogen, helium, hydrogen, whatever, but we know that there's more stuff in it if it gets bigger (yes I know we can kind of guess based on how the ballon interacts with the atmosphere, whether it's lighter than air or not...) Similarly, black holes get bigger when they're fed and we can calculate the entropy (the amount of information in a black hole) as a function of that surface area. Specifically, the entropy is equal to (1/4*Area)/(hG) where h is Planck's constant and G is the gravitational constant. In reality, information is not lost because it is encoded on the surface area of black holes. If the universe as a system includes those black holes, then the total entropy of the universe never decreases because the loss of visible information about the universe is captured and recorded on the surface areas of all of the black holes in the universe.

What's interesting is that the universe seems to preserve three dimensions worth of information (particles have length, width, and depth) on a two dimensional surface. Like a hologram. A hologram is printed in two dimensions, but when reflected in the light, forms a three dimensional image. What physicists like Lowe are beginning to speculate is whether or not the entire universe behaves the same way. If we went to the outer boundaries of the universe, would we find that the universe, like a balloon that is inflating, preserves all the information about everything that's inside it on its surface area? More radically, is the universe fundamentally two dimensional with the third dimension a mere projection? We experience three dimensions because we're inside the hologram, but that third dimension could be an illusion. This line of reasoning could have profound implications for the laws of physics. Newton's laws and relativity are postulated on the assumption that the universe has three spatial dimensions and these laws successful predict mechanical motion, but the more we delve into the realm of the very small, the more we see a disjoint between the way tiny things behave and the way larger objects behave. Newton and Einstein break down in the realm of the very small. Could it be because those laws only explain what life is like in the simulated third dimension and don't apply to a "reality" that's only two dimensions? Maybe.

There's quite a bit of research going on in this field and results are coming out all the time confirming it or signaling its death. I'll give a couple examples tomorrow.

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton by James Gleick

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Perhaps I'm predisposed, keeping figures like Einstein and Feynman in mind, to the idea that great minds are inherently liberal. Not in politics necessarily, but in personality. It's hard to imagine someone of the intellectual stature of the inventor of the calculus and modern mechanics not being magnanimous, generous, giving and wanting to share his success with the world; being encouraging to fellows pursuing difficult questions and charitable in his political stances toward the accumulation and practice of new scientific knowledge. Gleick's cutting biography of Newton has disabused me of this notion.



Revealed through Mr. Newton's own personal correspondence and notes comes to light a figure that is craven, withdrawn, and as petty and vindictive as he was absolutely, stunningly, incomprehensibly brilliant. His mind and his achievements put into perspective what we might call "genius" by modern standards and force us to see how short that term falls. Around his work is built the edifice of modern science, a three hundred year quest formulated and enabled by the "tools" Newton created mostly in seclusion during the plague years 1665-1666 from his family home in Woolsthorpe. A more brooding significant historical figure can hardly be imagined, except perhaps for some of the later histories and accounts of the life of Lincoln.



I'd read some spurious anecdotes about Newton's proclivities form other historians of science, mainly Bill Bryson in his Brief History of Nearly Everything that created some cracks in the lustrous portrait we've painted of the legend since the time of his death, but Gleick's account delves much further to reveal just how unstable and truly friendless Newton was. Not that he was without admirers, though perhaps he accumulated those in far greater numbers after he was dead and not around to harangue, cajole, manipulate and condescend to them any more. He spent thirty-five years at Cambridge, most of them as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics and in the entire time there, produced not a single friend. He was introspective and fearful of the judgment of others to the point of hysteria at times, and his writings, painstakingly collected and organized by Gleick reveal it.



Gleick is a phenomenal historian of science in that he is perfectly comfortable with the ideas he is trying to convey as well as the historical impact of the ideas themselves. His prose fluctuates from the intimidatingly terse, in a Cormac McCarthy style of recounting, to the lofty and eloquent, elevating the figures of his narrative and their achievements to awe-inspring status. It's at once revelatory and myth-making - a balance of the real and pragmatic and the idyllic and I like it a lot. That being said, I think that the book's narrative also fluctuates between really captivating anecdotes and analysis to pages of quotations from Newton or his contemporaries that attempt to let them tell the story themselves with little analysis in between on the historical import of such events or happenings.



Having read The Information first, I can clearly see this book as a period of gestation for those later themes and ideas, particularly the role that information and it's effective communication was going to have on the technological and scientific developments that were to come. Of particular interest to Gleick again in this work is symbology - the connection between words, symbols and ideas and the literal things they represent. It's difficult to imagine talking about things like Newton's laws of mechanics without the proper terminology, which he had to invent, or re-appropriate from their common usage. Words like force, mass, gravity, all had to be redefined to fit into a new paradigm of motion broken free from the millennia long grip of Aristotelean philosophy. But whereas The Information had a unifying theme, this book does not. Granted, it is biography, the objective of which is to tell a life story. Perhaps it's a wonderful conceit that Gleick avoids making judgments on Newton and lets the man speak for himself across the centuries, but at the same time, I was hoping for more. What do we make of Newton? What place does he hold in history? Is he a fundamental figure that defines the beginning of the modern era in reason, science and mathematics? Was he the last of a line of animists who believed in magic and superstition (he was a devoted and secretive alchemist most of his life as well)? Was he a bridge between? The reader is left free to interpret his life on its own, but as such it feels more like an encyclopedic entry, or a tome of primary source material than an historical analysis.



Think this one is about three and a half stars for me, but I'll choose to be conservative and round down. I guess that makes it 3.4999. Still, a great book if all you know about Newton is what your math or physics teacher told you about in passing and the amount of work put in to the research for this book is no laughing matter at all. Gleick's bibliography and notes run almost seventy pages. He knows his stuff and he knows how to organize it and he's definitely cemented himself in my opinion is the finest science historian and commentator of the present era, a true successor to people like Thomas Khun.



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It from bit

 "It is not unreasonable to imagine that information sits at the core of physics, just as it sits at the core of a computer. 

It from bit. Otherwise put, every 'it'—every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. 'It from bit' symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes–no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe."                                                              

- John Archibald Wheeler

Having just finished James Gleick's The Information, and since we've spent so much time on cosmology, I thought I'd try to make a brief post encapsulating one of the more esoteric views of the universe - the digital view. There's a big debate in physics as to whether or not reality is digital or analog. Simply put, is the universe continuous, or can it be divided up, or sampled, into discrete bits. A growing number of physicists and philosophers have taken the novel approach towards conceptualizing the universe as information, usually leaning toward the discrete view. It's not just that information and its transmission is important in the universe - it's that that is the purpose of the universe. 

This is a radical and pretty mind-blowing idea that is self-consistent and probably just as valid as any other worldview when it comes to the purpose of the universe, or why we are here - after all these are mainly philosophical questions. The suggestion is that all of the processes in the universe are designed to preserve and pass on information. At a very basic level information is preserved about everything that has ever happened in our universe. Astronomers and cosmologists study the early history of our universe by examining the imprint of those early times and events upon the world around us today, the cosmic microwave background, light emitted from extremely distant sources, extremely long ago. As discussed in the previous post, the entire history of the motion of the particles of the universe is preserved in the current motion and direction of those particles. If one were to reverse their positions and momentums, one could (theoretically) construct a perfect picture of the past by rewinding everything to some previous point simply by following Newton's laws in reverse. The information about a star going supernova is transmitted via light (photons) and the momentum of heavier elements ejected from it's core to leave its imprint on the neighboring parts of the universe. What Wheeler is getting at is that every particle, and every property of a particle is a physical manifestation of information no different from a 1 or a 0 in a binary code that transmits instructions in an algorithm to the next process. Spin up, spin down, polarity, left-handed, right-handed, charge - it's all just information contained in something and that information is transferred and exchanged when particles come in contact with one another. This information is processed, absorbed by other parts of the universe, molded, shaped, used to create new processes or simply observed and wondered at by groups of particles we call sentient life. 

And what is life? Life, as Richard Dawkins argues in The Selfish Gene, is nothing more than a vehicle for the preservation of genetic information. Complex, macroscopic, multi-cellular life serves the all powerful genetic code imprinted on our DNA, a chemical construct at its most basic level, to replicate itself and to transmit the information of its existence, its chemical arrangement, into the future. In short, life may exist in the information-theoretic model, as a means by which chemical components make copies of themselves like files that automatically copy on your computer. Yet it can be even more abstract than that. Life itself can be made to serve ideas, information in its truest sense. Buried within The Selfish Gene, is a chapter in which Dawkins coined a term popular on the internet today: memes.

From Wikipedia: "A meme ( /ˈmiːm/) is an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. While genes transmit biological information, memes are said to transmit ideas and belief information. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures. Memes can be viewed as purely informational, having no real physical existence. It can be conceptual: the notion of love, for example, musical or artistic, a composition by Asian Kung-Fu Generation. What is music anyway? Are the notes on a piece of paper music? Are the instruments? Is the recording of a song, the actual song? It's an idea - yet it's an idea that lives, almost akin to a virus, by spreading from host mind to host mind through a variety of mediums from spoken word to the internet via Youtube. Life serves these ideas by channeling them and transmitting them - passing them on. And this isn't an anthropocentric view either. The idea of using tools for example and even some basic cultural behavior, traditions, for lack of a better word, can be seen being passed on in primates as well. Species specific hunting techniques can be learned in a group setting, particularly among the brighter of Earth's inhabitants, like Dolphins.

Moreover, ideas, even purely abstract ones (communism?) do indeed have a physical existence in the universe. The idea of communism is stored electrochemically in the memory of human brains, on pages in books, on bits of magnetic tape on hard drives and these ideas feed off one another, grow in complexity and evolve as the universe does.

We've left the realm of physics here and strayed into philosophy, but it's an interesting idea and one well-worth pursuing. Perhaps the most fundamental, basic interactions and explanations of what the universe is made of and why it exists will forever be beyond our reach if we keep looking for physical or chemical explanations like String Theory. Perhaps, strings exist only as an idea, and the idea itself is enough to give rise to the entirety of the universe. I know, I'm really pushing it here. Or am I? Nobel prize winning scientist George Wald once said, "It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms." Or, if you prefer Neils Bohr's more succinct version, "A physicist is just an atoms way of looking at itself." Either way you parse it, both scientists seemed to be way ahead of the information revolution in saying that the universe is information and we are merely the way that the universe thinks about (or processes) itself. What would the universe be doing if sentient life weren't around to experience it? Tree falling in the woods anyone?