A Forum of The American Physical Society
Volume IX No 5 Fall 2005
HISTORY OF PHYSICS NEWSLETTER

REPORT FROM THE CHAIR

2005, the World Year of Physics, has been a good one for the History Forum. I want to take advantage of this opportunity to describe some of FHP’s activities during recent months and to look forward to the coming year.

The single most important forum event of 2005 was the presentation of the first Pais Prize in the History of Physics to Martin Klein of Yale University. It was only shortly before the award ceremony, at the Tampa meeting in April, that funding reached the level at which this honor could be promoted from “Award” to “Prize”. We are all indebted to the many generous donors and to the members of the Pais Award Committee and the Pais Selection Committee for their hard work over the last several years that has led to the establishment of the first-ever History of Physics prize. Professor Klein delivered his Pais Prize lecture (“Physics, History, and the History of Physics”) at the Tampa meeting, in a session jointly sponsored by the Forum on Physics and Society, a session at which the Szilard Lecture was also given. We thank FPS for generously sharing their time with us; the combination of Pais and Szilard lectures in the same session seems to be an event well worth continuing.

And now the second Pais Prize winner has been announced – John L. Heilbron of UC-Berkeley. Professor Heilbron will officially receive his prize in the spring of 2006. All those who wish to suggest names of possible future awardees are encouraged to send their suggestions to Professor Michael Nauenberg of UC - Santa Cruz, who now becomes chair of the Pais Selection Committee.

The Forum sponsored several sessions of invited lectures at the March meeting (in Los Angeles) and the April meeting (in Tampa), which are more fully described elsewhere in this Newsletter. At Los Angeles we had two invited sessions under the general rubric of “Einstein and Friends”. At Tampa, we had a third such Einstein session, as well as a good session on “Quantum Optics Through the Lens of History” and then a final series of talks on “The Rise of Megascience”. A new feature of our invited sessions this year is the “named lecture”. The purpose of naming a lecture is to pay tribute to a distinguished physicist while simultaneously encouraging donations to support the travel expenses of speakers. This new idea was suggested by Virginia Trimble, and as a result of action by the APS Council any forum is now authorized to have one such talk at any meeting at which it sponsors invited sessions. Naming the talk honors the physicist so designated, but the talk need not be on the particular topic on which that person did his or her work. Thanks to the generosity of the Goldhaber family, we were able to provide travel support to Lillian Hoddeson whose April talk was entitled “Megascience on the Prairie: The Powers and Paradoxes of Pushing Frontiers at Fermilab (The Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber Lecture)”. And I myself was pleased to be able to honor my own thesis adviser, Robert H. Dicke, by assisting with the travel expenses of A. J. Kox, whose talk at the March meeting was called “Einstein and Lorentz (The Robert H. Dicke Lecture)”. We hope that named lectures will continue, with other physicists being honored in this way in future years; send your suggestions to Bill Evenson, who will become Program Chair next year, with responsibility for organizing talks for 2007.

Contributed papers are on the increase, with eight at the Los Angeles meeting and twelve at the Tampa meeting. In recent years, we have been able to assign a 24-minute block of time to each contributed paper, twice the usual time. APS’s willingness to do this, however, is contingent upon our having only a relatively small number of submissions. Of course we hope to attract more and more contributed papers, even though the result may well be a reduction in time allowed for each paper.

Several of us have recruited quite a few new members for the forum by rather aggressively passing around sign-up sheets at various meetings. We invite those interested simply to put down their names, even if they think they may already be members of the forum; we then send the lists to College Park, where APS staff will check for duplication and then enroll the new ones. In my own department, I acquired half a dozen new members simply by walking the hall and asking my colleagues. In this small department, I was embarrassed to learn that I was the only forum member. I should have taken that trip before, and I urge forum members to follow my example. Remember that membership in the first two fora is free, and even beyond that, the annual cost of an additional one is only $7.

At the April business meeting, it was my pleasure to deliver an APS Fellowship certificate to Bill Evenson, who did valiant work for the forum as newsletter editor for many years and is now once again a member of our executive board, this time as Vice-Chair. At the April meeting, we also said farewell, for the second time in twelve months, to Ken Ford, who has done noble work as Secretary-Treasurer, retiring from that important position in the spring of 2004, only to be pressed into an emergency 9-month stint beginning in the summer of 2004. Ken, on behalf of all forum members, thank you again!

Forum finances are in rather good condition at the moment. We were able to offer more generous than usual travel support to some of our invited speakers this year, and we are also able – for now – to continue to print the Newsletter in paper as well as electronic form twice a year. However, the long term outlook is not so clear. The current happy situation is highly dependent on donations from a number of benefactors; I want to mention in particular the financial help provided by Virginia Trimble, without whom we probably could not afford to produce paper copies of this newsletter.

I will briefly mention several other new ventures. The Historic Sites Committee has now chosen an initial set of sites and is at work arranging for the installation of plaques; see John Rigden’s report elsewhere in this issue. Thanks to a donation from the Bardeen family, we provided partial travel support to the March meeting for one student who was giving a contributed paper. And in cooperation with the APS Topical Group on Gravitation, we were able to help send speakers to a number of institutions, primarily four-year colleges. For reports on both of these programs, see Virginia Trimble’s reports in this issue.

Robert H. Romer, Amherst College , Chair

JOHN HEILBRON RECIPIENT OF PAIS PRIZE

John Lewis Heilbron, Professor Emeritus of History and History of Science at the University of California at Berkeley and a Member of the Modern History Faculty of the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow in the Oxford Museum for History of Science and Worcester College, Oxford, is the winner of the 2006 APS/AIP Prize for History of Physics “For his ground-breaking and broad historical studies, ranging from the use of renaissance churches for astronomy, through 17th and 18th century electrical science, to modern quantum mechanics.”

 Heilbron was educated at the University of California at Berkeley where he received A.B. and M.A. degrees in physics in 1955 and 1958 and a Ph.D. degree in history in 1964 under Thomas S. Kuhn. After a term as Assistant Director of the Sources for History of Quantum Physics Project, he began his academic career as an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania (1964‑1967) and then returned to Berkeley, rising through the academic ranks to become Professor and Director of the Office for the History of Science and Technology in 1973, Class of 1936 Professor of History and History of Science in 1985, and Professor Emeritus in 1994. He also served as Vice Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley from 1990 to 1994. He has held visiting appointments as Andrew Dickson White Professor at Large at Cornell University (1985-1991), the California Institute of Technology (1997), and Yale University (2002-2004). Since 1996 he has been a Member of the Modern History Faculty of the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow in the Oxford Museum for History of Science and Worcester College, Oxford.

Heilbron’s publications on the history of physics have been groundbreaking and of astonishing breadth. As one writer said, “his major books deal with a stunning variety of subjects including electricity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Max Planck and his moral dilemmas, the use of churches in early modern Europe as solar observatories, the development of geometry, Henry Moseley, and Ernest Lawrence and his laboratory.” These works, and the large number of papers he has published, are uniformly of outstanding quality and display an ability to deal with the technical aspects of science as well as the social, political, and institutional contexts in which science has been pursued in the past. His book, The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Harvard University Press, 1999), was awarded the Pfizer Prize of the History of Science Society, its highest book award, in 2001.

Simultaneously with producing this splendid body of work, Heilbron has enthusiastically and effectively taught many undergraduate and graduate courses and has directed a variety of doctoral dissertations. He also has edited, for the past twenty-five years, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences (which he expanded in 1986 to include the biological sciences), one of the leading journals in the history of science. As an editor he has had an enormous and beneficial influence on work done in the history of physics, both because he has published only work that meets his own exacting standards, and because of his legendary critical and clarifying editorial comments and revisions of the papers he has published in this journal.

Heilbron’s scholarly work has brought him widespread international recognition. He has received the Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society (1993), its highest award, the Pictet Prize of the Association for the History of Science and the Société de Physique et d’Histoire Naturelle (2004), and honorary doctorates from the University of Bologna (1988), the University of Pavia (2000), and the University of Uppsala (2000). He has been elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as a Foreign Member (1987), to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1988), the American Philosophical Society (1990), and has served as President of the Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences.

Allan Franklin, University of Colorado Boulder

THE LIFE OF PHYSICS-- by  Associate Editor Michael Riordan

Lately we are awash in biographies of important physicists. A new one appears almost monthly. Just in the past year or so, we have seen biographies of Max Born, Robert Hooke, William Thomson and Robert Noyce — plus three of J. Robert Oppenheimer, no doubt timed with the 60^th anniversary of Trinity. I often receive unsolicited copies of these biographies from authors and publishers hopeful I will anoint their latest efforts in the periodicals for which I write reviews. I wish I could accommodate them, but usually can’t.

Why are we witnessing this flood? Is the reading public suddenly starved for the intimate details of the lives of great physicists? Are these men and women such paragons of scientific virtue — or examples of moral turpitude — that they deserve all this attention and scrutiny?

I believe this publishing phenomenon occurs, at least in part, because the biographical form solves one of the thorniest problems that historians and writers face: organizing large amounts of often confusing material into a logical, coherent whole. The rhythms of a major life in physics can provide a convenient structure on which to build a narrative. Find those rhythms and effectively convey them to your readers, and you are well on the way to composing an engaging literary symphony. The scientific biography also gives the writer a means to portray a particular moment in history, as viewed through the eyes of an important figure. If he or she is a major physicist, then of course there will be frequent interactions — some of them not very pleasant — with their now-towering contemporaries. All of this makes for good reading, but it is also an effective way to do the history of physics.

In The End of the Certain World, a recent biography of Max Born by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan, for example, we get a close-in account of how quantum mechanics emerged in Weimar Germany from the viewpoint of one of its major protagonists. Born discourses almost daily with Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, James Franck, Werner Heisenberg, David Hilbert, and other physics luminaries of the 1920s. But looming in the background of all the intellectual ferment is the rise of National Socialism and the Third Reich, eventually driving this now-famous Jewish physicist into self-imposed exile — along with many of his colleagues. The dispersal of this innovative scientific community lends poignancy to the story of Born’s life.

In a scientific biography, we of course get such glimpses of the community activity that is essential to doing almost all good science. This is certainly one way to portray these interactions. But here the biographical form suffers from putting too much focus on one person’s contributions, often to the neglect or exclusion of other important work. Stray too far from your protagonist’s role in the research, and you can easily lose your narrative way. In my own attempts at writing physics history, especially The Hunting of the Quark and Crystal Fire (coauthored with Lillian Hoddeson, who recently published True Genius, a biography of John Bardeen), I have sought effective ways to relate this essential community activity. There have to be major and minor characters in the drama, of course, but by using a diverse cast I have powerful discursive tools in hand. I can employ these actors, for example, to illustrate the varied and often contradictory interpretations that almost always accompany surprising new scientific data. But like many other non-fiction writers, I will probably feel incomplete until I’ve written the biography of a major scientist. It’s an undeniable itch. One day I’ll just have to give in and scratch it.

Michael Riordan
University of California, Santa Cruz

FORUM AFFAIRS

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTED PAPERS

Yes, the time has come to contemplate what you might want to talk about at the March (13-17, Baltimore MD) and/or April (22-25, Dallas TX) 2006 meetings. Each member of APS is entitled to give one contributed talk at a Forum session at each meeting in addition to one you might give in a technical session without having either placed on the supplementary program Anyone, APS member or not, who attends ONLY forum sessions need not pay the registration fee, but we need  to know well in advance if you plan to go this route.

The March meeting web site goes up in August with a 30 November abstract deadline, and sorting code for history = 18.3
www.aps.org/meet/MAR06

The April meeting web site goes up in October with a 13 January abstract deadline and sorting code for history = P
www.aps.org/meet/APR06

It would be a kindness to send a copy of your abstract to the program chair, vtrimble@astro.umd.edu when you submit it, to provide some advance guidance on numbers and range of topics.

Whether the contributed papers will be scheduled for 24 minutes (a recent FHP privilege) or 12 minutes (the norm for the rest of APS) will depend on how many there are. Thus we won’t know which it is until after the abstract deadline. Everyone who submits a contributed abstract will be notified as soon as possible after the deadline whether the talks will be 12 or 24 minutes. In the long run, we would probably all benefit from having lots of contributed papers in the shorter format.

ANNOUNCEMENTS FOR MARCH AND APRIL MEETINGS

The highlight of these will, of course, be your contributed talk (see previous item). But there will be some attractive invited sessions as well.

March will feature history of critical phenomena (session chair and co-organizer Joel Lebowitz) and topics in history of low temperature physics (session chair and organizer George Zimmerman).

April will include, first and foremost, the second Pais Prize Lecture by John Heilbron (see p. ___). In addition, there will be two sessions, shared with the Divisions of Nuclear and Particle Physics, marking the 50th anniversary of the discovery of parity-nonconservation (organizer for FHP, Noemie Benczer Koller); two sessions, shared with the Division of Astrophysics, on Cosmology: Past, Present, and Future (co-organizers J. Ryan for DAP and V. Trimble for FHP), and a session shared with   Committee on Status of Women in Physics (program chair M. Sher) on pioneering women in astronomy.

If you have an idea for an invited session for 2007 and are willing to do some of the work, the person to talk with is the 2007 program chair, William Evenson, (bill.evenson@uvsc.edu).

WORLD YEAR OF PHYSICS SPEAKERS BUREAU

Throughout 2005, FHP has been helping the APS Topical Group on Gravitation to operate a speakers bureau to provide talks on general relativity, history of physics, Einstein and his work, and the parts of astrophysics related to relativity (black holes, cosmology, and such). The primary audience is 4-year colleges, with the goal of helping to encourage their graduates to remain in physics. About 150 requests have been received, from many kinds of organizations, and about half of these (including nearly all from 4-year colleges) have been filled.

The program will continue to operate for at least another year, still hosted by the University of Texas, Brownsville. They paid for the first year, and we are in the process of hunting up the $15,000 that will be needed for the second year. There are three things we hope you will consider doing:

a. Volunteer to be a speaker, by sending a message to vtrimble@astro.umd.edu, providing your name, coordinates, and what topics you would be willing totalk about at the undergraduate level

b. Host a speaker at your institution, go to http://www.phys.utb.edu/WYPspeakers/REQUESTS/howto.html

c. Make a donation in support of this, or indeed any other FHP activity. Just mail a check to American Physical Society, One Physics Ellipse, College Park MD 20740, with a cover note explaining that it is to support the FHP/TGG speakers bureau or FHP activities in general.

We will probably need a name different from World Year of Physics for future operations. There will be a small prize for the best idea, sent along with your offer to be a speaker.

BARDEEN STUDENTSHIP AND LECTURE

FHP expects to be able to provide partial travel support ($500) for one student giving a contributed talk at the MARCH APS meeting in an FHP session, thanks to a donation from the family of the late double Nobelist John Bardeen. Either the student or the advisor should be a member of APS and FHP.

If you have, or are, a student who plans to give a history of physics talk at the March Baltimore meeting, when the abstract is submitted, please send a copy to vtrimble@astro.umd.edu with a note indicating that it is a candidate for the Bardeen studentship. FHP will let you know as soon as possible after the 30 November abstract deadline whether you are getting the money. The March sorting code for history papers is 18.3.

It is probable, but not certain, that there will also be a Bardeen Lecture at one of the FHP March invited sessions.

Virginia Trimble   
University of California, Irvine
Vice-Chair

CALL FOR OFFICER AND COMMITTEE NOMINATIONS

As we do every year, we hold an election in the Spring for a new Vice-Chair, who will eventually succeed to Chair, and for several member-at-large of our Executive Committee. People in these positions play crucial roles in determining the health and vitality of the Forum. We urge that our members consider suitable candidates for these positions, including possibly themselves, and are encouraged to forward nominations to the Chair or any of the members of the nominating committee, with accompanying material as deemed appropriate. The members are:

Nina Byers Chair, byers@phys5.harvard.edu , C. Gearhart, cgearhart@csbsju.edy, C. Holbrow, cholbrow@center.colgate.edu, J. D. Jackson, jdjackson@lbl.gov, H. Lustig, h_lustig@yahoo.com, G. Trilling, ght@lbl.gov

CHECK OUR WEBSITE!

Please note that in addition to the posting of this and all past Newsletters, our website offers up-to-date information on a variety of FHP activities . Here you will find complete listings, with addresses and affiliations, of all committee members, FHP By-Laws, and other material of interest.

REPORTS OF INVITED PAPERS AT MARCH AND APRIL 2005 MEETINGS.

A slew of invited papers relating to Einstein were presented at both the March (condensed matter) and April (general physics) APS meeting, held in Los Angeles and Tampa this year. See the Spring 2005 FHP Newsletter for a listing of all the papers presented. We offer here summaries of some of these talks and of several others of interest to our readers,  mostly prepared  by their presenters..

EINSTEIN AND CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS-SPECIAL SESSION AT MARCH MEETING  Marvin L. Cohen Department of Physics University of California, Berkeley and Materials Sciences Division Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Berkeley, California 94720

The international community of physicists chose 2005 as the "World Year of Physics" (WYP). The choice of 2005 was motivated by a desire to associate the WYP with the 100^th anniversary of Einstein's marvelous year when in addition to his work on special relativity, Einstein explained the photoelectric effect and did seminal work on Brownian motion and molecular sizes. Einstein considered his paper on the photoelectric effect as his truly revolutionary work of 1905. It was this paper which earned him the Nobel Prize in 1921. This paper answered the question, "Is light a particle or a wave?" Einstein's answer essentially was "yes". Although there is a great deal of evidence that Einstein was "uncomfortable" with quantum theory throughout his career, his paper on the photoelectric effect laid the foundations for this fundamental field of physics.

In 1905, the concept that macroscopic matter was made of atoms and molecules was not universally believed by scientists. It is said that this nonacceptance of the atomic/molecular theory of matter was a contributing factor in Ludvig Boltzmann's decision to commit suicide. Much of his pioneering work in statistical physics relied on this concept, and in 1905 Einstein clearly believed and contributed both to the establishment of the atomic/molecular model of matter and to the statistical physics approach to studying properties of groups of atoms and molecules. Einstein's thesis focused on molecular sizes and his work on Brownian motion explored statistical physics approaches to explain Brown's 1828 experiments.

Although special relativity and its famous equation E = mc² along with Einstein's classic work on general relativity around 1915 have attracted the lion's share of attention when Einstein's work is discussed, the other papers of 1905 and his work on Bose-Einstein condensation have had as big an impact and perhaps a bigger impact on science as a whole. It is this fact that motivated the special session at the 2005 March Meeting of the American Physical Society in Los Angeles. In contrast to the more usual presentations of Einstein's scientific work on relativity and gravity, this special session focused on Einstein's contributions to the foundations of condensed matter physics or solid state physics.

The first talk by Professor Alex Zettl from the University of California at Berkeley began with the doctoral thesis proposals Einstein made to his professors. As Zettl listed the proposals, seven in all, except for the final one on molecular sizes, he described how each was rejected. Zettl then went on to illustrate how influential Einstein's thesis work has been on science in general and condensed matter physics in particular. Because this work considered the size, geometry, and interactions of nanoscale objects, it is essential for modern day nanoscience. Zettl showed examples of applications to condensed matter physics and his own work on nanoscience and gave the impression that if Einstein were alive today, he would be working in these fields.

The next presentation was made by Professor Moses Chan from Pennsylvania State University. Professor Chan recently observed evidence that solid helium could be a "supersolid" that has undergone a Bose-Einstein transition. Bose and Einstein's suggestion that a condensation of many Bosons into a single momentum state arose as a consequence of the Bose-Einstein quantum distribution function which differed from Boltzmann's at lower temperatures. The condensed state exhibits quantum coherence over macroscopic distances. Chan used examples like liquid He-4 at temperatures below 2.176K and alkali atoms in the vapor phase as examples of systems that have undergone Bose-Einstein condensation. Chan also made the observation that He-4 is a superfluid and there is evidence for superfluidity of the alkali atoms system.  He then described his current experiments which appear to demonstrate superflow in solid helium and discussed models for interpreting this "counter to intuition" phenomena. Again, it was mentioned that Einstein would have greatly enjoyed experiencing all these developments associated with Bose-Einstein theory.

The final talk in the program was by Professor Zhixun Shen from Stanford University. Professor Shen has spent much of his career studying solids using photoemission spectroscopy. He emphasized how over the last 100 years we have learned an enormous amount about solids, molecules, and atoms by studying how "Einstein's photons" liberate electrons from solids. Because photoemission can be used as a direct method for measuring electronic structure, Shen emphasized that it is a special probe for exploring some of the "deepest questions of quantum physics." He also emphasized how there has been "enormously improved resolution" in photoelectron spectroscopy. This improvement allows investigation of superconducting gaps in addition to detailed electronic structure useful for materials physics and for studying correlation effects among electrons. Again, it was felt that if only Einstein could see what happened to the photoelectric effect. . .

As chair of this session, I was pleased to hear the long applause after each speaker and at the end. When the session was over, the audience stood around and recounted Einstein stories feeling perhaps that the presentations had gone by too quickly. It seemed that by identifying our roots and the paths back to Einstein's work, we felt we could claim him as our own. Of course, we knew we could only claim part of him, but that was enough.

Einstein and Millikan Charlotte E. Erwin, California Institute of Technology. The author is indebted to Judith R. Goodstein for her prior work on this subject and for her helpful discussions during preparation of this paper.

Albert Einstein traveled to California to talk with scientists at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena over the cosmological implications growing out of the theory of relativity. Einstein was one of a stream of distinguished visitors invited to campus by Caltech’s head, physicist Robert A. Millikan. He came to Caltech for three consecutive winter terms, 1931, 1932 and 1933. He also came to confer with astronomers at the nearby Mount Wilson Observatory where by 1930 the researches of Edwin Hubble on the velocity-distance relationship of galaxies challenged Einstein’s cosmological constant—his concept of a static universe. Ultimately Einstein did accept Hubble’s expanding universe. In Pasadena he discussed his theory and its interpretation with Caltech’s physicists Paul Epstein, Richard C. Tolman, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and with astronomer Fritz Zwicky; with the Mount Wilson staff, including the Observatory’s director, George Ellery Hale, Hubble, Charles St. John, Walter Adams; and with visitors including the Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter and William Wallace Campbell from the University of California’s Lick Observatory. In Pasadena Einstein also met for the first time A. A. Michelson, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in physics (1907), for measuring the speed of light.

In California Einstein received continuous attention from the press and public. He posed for pictures, attended banquets, gave speeches, toured movie studios, dined with stars. He attended local concerts, played chamber music on a borrowed Guarneri violin, and enjoyed trips to the California desert. His observations on the local scenery, the people, culture, politics—and science—are recorded in three diaries kept during the California visits.

Einstein’s visits to Pasadena were part of Millikan’s campaign to make Caltech into a world center of physics. But Millikan’s plans to secure Einstein permanently met with increasing difficulties. Einstein’s liberal social and political views, such as his declared pacifism and support for disarmament—which he openly expressed in America—became a source of worry to Millikan. He felt that Einstein was being manipulated by extremists. Meanwhile, the political situation in Germany and in the world deteriorated. In 1932 Einstein had met and spoken with Abraham Flexner, who was in the process of founding the new Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. During Einstein’s third Pasadena visit, Hitler became chancellor of Germany. By the time Einstein openly declared that he would not return to Berlin—in March of 1933—he had already accepted a permanent appointment at Flexner’s new institute. The position imposed no duties on him, and it included support for his mathematical assistant, Walther Mayer. The careful Millikan had let Einstein slip through his fingers. Einstein never returned to Caltech. Millikan succeeded nonetheless in building a solid edifice for physics in Southern California.

Einstein, Mach, and the Fortunes of Gravity
David Kaiser, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Early in his life Albert Einstein considered himself a devoted student of the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach. Mach's famous critiques of Newton's absolute space and time -- most notably Mach's explanation of Newton's bucket experiment -- held a strong sway over Einstein as he struggled to formulate general relativity. Einstein was convinced that his emerging theory of gravity should be consistent with Mach's principle; in fact, Einstein was the first to coin the term, "Mach's principle." Yet Mach's principle, then as now, was a bit of a moving target. Sometimes, Einstein used it to mean that there could be no such thing as absolute acceleration: a body's acceleration must always be described as caused by and relative to other bodies. Other times, Einstein invoked "Mach's principle" to mean that a given body's mass should arise via "gravitational induction" from all other masses in the universe. If several large masses were moved near a test object, Einstein maintained, its own mass should increase. Finally, at other times Einstein said that "Mach's principle" held that the sum total of the universe's masses should completely determine a metric field, which in turn would determine local inertial effects. Late in 1916, Einstein told his friend Willem de Sitter that Mach'sprinciple (in any of these variants) had played an important "psychological" role, spurring Einstein on his quest for a relativistic theory of gravity even when he despaired of finding satisfactory equations. Yet it is not clear that any of Einstein's variants of "Mach's principle" would have pleased Mach himself. The famous positivist might well have wondered if we can ever have definite, positive experience of all the masses in the universe.

Once completed, Einstein's general relativity enjoyed two decades of worldwide attention, only to fall out of physicists' interest during the 1930s and 1940s, when topics like nuclear physics claimed center stage. Gravity began to return to the limelight during the 1950s and especially the 1960s, and once again Mach proved to be a major spur: Princeton physicists Carl Brans and Robert Dicke introduced a rival theory of gravity in 1961 which, they argued, satisfied Mach's principle better than Einstein's general relativity did. They introduced a new scalar field in addition to Einstein's metric field. In the Brans-Dicke scheme, Newton's gravitational constant -- which fixed the strength of gravity -- varied over time and space, as the inverse of their new scalar field. All matter interacted with the new scalar field, which in turn led to matter's observed inertial behavior. The Brans-Dicke theory, and the new generation of experiments designed to test its predictions against those of general relativity, played a major role in bringing Einstein's beloved topic back to the center of physics. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the quest for the relativity of inertia has thus proven remarkably productive.

Einstein, Noether, and Energy Conservation  
Nina Byers, Physics Department, UCLA

While working on the general theory of relativity, Albert Einstein wrote to David Hilbert "Yesterday I received from Miss Noether a very interesting paper on invariant forms. I am impressed that one can comprehend these matters from so general a viewpoint. It would not have done the old guard at Göttingen any harm had they picked up a thing or two from her. ..." Noether was in Göttingen at that time and following Hilbert's discovery of the Hilbert-Einstein lagrangian proved two theorems, along with their converses, which resolved the conundrum of the absence of local energy conservation in the general theory. These theorems are of great generality in establishing the fundamental connection of symmetries and conservation laws. They have profoundly influenced modern physics. This talk told the tale of how Noether came to do this work. It was a detour from her main line of research which was the development of modern algebra. The talk presented a description of those two theorems and a brief account of Noether’s scientific life. She is universally acknowledged as one of the leading mathematicians of the twentieth century, It is worth noting that scientific societies generally did not admit women at that time and her paper was read to a meeting of the Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen by Felix Klein. ( See E. Noether, "Invariante Variationsprobleme," Nachr. v. d. Ges. d. Wiss. zu Göttingen 1918, pp235-257; the paper in German or in English translation is available in CWP at http://cwp.library.ucla.edu.) The absence of local energy conservation in the general theory had been of concern to Klein along with Einstein, Hilbert, and others. Noether’s paper enabled them to solve the problem regarding energy in the general theory on which they had been working.

(For further details, see Byers’ paper at http://cwp.library.ucla.edu/articles/noether.asg/noether.html.)

Max Born and Albert Einstein: A Friendship (originally scheduled to be given by Diana Buchwald, under a slightly different title)—Nancy Greenspan

Berlin, 1918. Two friends, one meticulous in the uniform of the Prussian army, the other slightly disheveled in the recognizable black suit of an academic, both lean from the severe deprivations of the war. They had spent the last three years becoming close, bonded together in part by their assimilated Jewish backgrounds, their abhorrence of Prussian militarism, their dedication to the pursuit of truth through science, and their love of music. Lunching at one of their homes or at a neighborhood café, friends Max Born and Albert Einstein often found respite from the politics and gloom of war through long discussion about the general theory of relativity. Born later described this theory with a sense of awe – “the greatest feat of human thinking about nature.”

Born treasured his relationship with Einstein: He considered this “dark, depressing time … with much hunger and anxiety… as “one of the happiest periods of our life because we were near to Einstein.” He spoke for both himself and his wife Hedi, who was equally close to the Einstein family, Einstein’s step-daughter being one of her best friends. The two physicists had first met years earlier when Born was trying to derive a theory of the electron based on Einstein’s insights in special relativity. Einstein had not been particularly impressed. At that time the neophyte physicist Born was too mathematically oriented for the intuitive Einstein. Working out the problems of the general theory, mostly alone as was his want, the latter had discovered the virtues of this discipline.

Born’s work environment sharply contrasted with Einstein’s. During the war years, when he directed a branch that applied physics to weapons technology, he discovered an ability to organize a research facility. This talent, together with a knack for finding brilliant young assistants, led Born to collaborate. At the University of Göttingen, where he was head of the Institute for Theoretical Physics from 1921 to 1933, eight of his assistants and students later received Nobel Prizes, a group that excluded other of his well-known assistants such as Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller.

Einstein’s solitary work atmosphere echoed his general style of relationships. Born later wrote, “For all [Einstein’s] kindness, sociability and love of humanity, he was nevertheless totally detached from his environment and the human beings included in it.” Both men looked to science as an escape from the social world, but the reserved and cautious Born was acutely sensitive to his surroundings. His emotional involvement frequently blocked this escape route. Einstein never seemed similarly hampered.

In letters to Born, Einstein often painted an overly optimistic picture of world events that allowed him to evade dealing with quandaries. Where Born worried deeply about the effect of increasingly desperate economic conditions in 1921 Germany, partly resulting from the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Einstein viewed the slovenliness of the French and the growing disunity among the Allies as undermining the intent and impact. He told Born, “You need not be so depressed by the political situation. The huge reparation payments and the threats are only a kind of moral nutrition for the dear public in France, to make the situation appear rosier to them. The more impossible the conditions, the more certain it is that they are not going to be put into practice.” Born disagreed. “We are not going to pay as much as is asked for,” he wrote. “But I can see the effect of this power politics on the minds of the people; it is a wholly irreversible accumulation of ugly feelings of anger, revenge, and hatred. … It seems to me that new catastrophes will inevitably result from all this. The world is not ruled by reason; even less by love.” Certainly uncannily prescient remarks.

By the mid-1920s, the two came to see the physical world differently as well. In the early summer of 1925, Werner Heisenberg, working with Born in Göttingen, provided the final conceptual breakthrough for a quantum theory, from which Born, with the help of his assistant Pascual Jordan and then Heisenberg, expanded to the basic formulation of quantum mechanics. Einstein wrote, “The Heisenberg-Born concepts leave us all breathless, and have made a deep impression on all theoretically oriented people.” It is Einstein’s only comment on the initial stages of quantum mechanics in their letters.

A year later, Born added another foundation to quantum theory – the statistical interpretation of Schrödinger’s wave function – that the waves were not continuous clouds of electrons, as Erwin Schrödinger proposed, but rather represented the probability of finding an electron in a certain place after a collision. Born’s theory was the death knell of determinism. Here, Einstein was more judgmental, “Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us closer to the secret of the ‘old one.’ I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at dice.” Over the years, as the friends argued the nature of the universe, Einstein did not deem Born’s theory wrong, just incomplete.

They never agreed and had a final go at it as Born retired from the University of Edinburgh in 1953, his permanent home after exile from Germany in 1933. But when Born won the Nobel Prize a year later, Einstein graciously wrote, “it was your … statistical interpretation of the description (of quantum theory) which has decisively clarified our thinking. It seems to me that there is no doubt about this at all, in spite of our inconclusive correspondence on the subject.”

The last round in their scientific argument may have covered feelings of a more personal nature. The previous fall, Born had told Einstein he was retiring to Germany. Einstein was one of the last, if not the last, friend that Born informed. Given Einstein’s attitude – that all Germans were responsible “for the monstrous crimes of the Nazis” – Born obviously feared disapproval. In fact, a few years earlier, when Born was keeping secret that he would return, he had tried to soften up Einstein by writing, “I did share your opinion, but now come to another conclusion. I think that in a higher sense of responsibility, en masse does not exist, but only that of individuals. I have met a sufficient number of decent Germans, only a few perhaps, but nevertheless genuinely decent. I assume that you, too, may have modified your wartime views to some extent.” In response to this tepid defense, Einstein replied that he had not. Consistent with this, he reacted to Born’s proposed move by referring to Germany as “the land of the mass-murderers of our kinsmen.” The phrase shook Born, perhaps because down deep, he agreed. He did not share with Einstein that he was returning only to placate his wife.

Against a global backdrop of two world wars, the Holocaust and the atom bomb, Max Born and Albert Einstein exchanged views and debated politics, religion, and science, early on replacing ‘Sie’, the formal German for you, with ‘Du’, the form used among family members and close friends. Over the years, their lean figures filled out; Born reunited with his homeland while Einstein scorned it; they clashed over the nature of science. Yet, even though they never saw each other after 1932, their friendship endured for forty years until Einstein’s death in 1955.

Nancy Thorndike Greenspan
Author of The End of the Certain World: The life and Science of Max Born (Basic Books, 2005)

Bose and Einstein

Kameshwar C. Wali, Physics Department, Syracuse University, Syracuse NY, 13244-1130

On June 4, 1924, a relatively unknown Satyendranath Bose from Dacca University in East Bengal, India sent a short article to Einstein with an accompanying letter, which said in part,

Respected Sir,

I have ventured to send you the accompanying article to your perusal and opinion. I am anxious to know what you think of it. You will see that I have tried to deduce the coefficient 8pν²/c³ in Planck’s law independent of the classical electrodynamics only assuming that the ultimate elementary regions in the Phase space has the content h³. I do not know sufficient German to translate the paper. If you think the paper worth publication, I shall be grateful if you arrange its publication in Zeitscrift fur Physik.

He goes on to add

Though a complete stranger to you, I do not feel any hesitation in making such a request. Because we are all your pupils through profiting only by your teachings through your writings.

Yours faithfully,

S.N.Bose

Einstein’s reply came in the form of a postcard on 2nd July, 1924:

Dear Colleague,

I have translated your paper and given it for publication to Zeitscrift fur Physik for publication. It signifies an important step forward and pleases me very much. However, I do not find your objection to my paper correct. For Wien’s law does not presuppose the wave theory and Bohr’s correspondence is not used. But this is unimportant. You have derived the first factor quantum-theoretically even if not quite rigorously on account of the polarization factor 2. It is a beautiful step.

With friendly greetings,

Your A. Einstein

In a note appended to his translation and submitted for publication, Einstein said.

Bose’s derivation of Planck’s law appears to me an important step forward. The method used here also yields the quantum theory of ideal gas, as I shall show elsewhere.

Indeed, it appears, within a week or so after he received Bose’s paper, Einstein presented his paper on 10th July, 1924 to the Prussian Academy of Sciences . It was an extension of Bose’s work, titled, “ On the Quantum theory of the Monoatomic Gas.” He followed it up with two more papers in 1925, the second of which is well known for the prediction of a possible new state of matter that took 50 more years to demonstrate its existence ( Bose-Einstein Condensation).

On the other side of the world, Einstein’s postcard, saying that his derivation was an important step forward, was influential enough for Bose to be awarded a two year study leave in Europe. He had applied for such a fellowship in January of that year with no response. But as soon as the Vice-Chancellor saw the postcard, all the problems were solved. It gave Bose a sort of passport, a study leave for two years with a good stipend, a separation allowance for the family, sumptuous travel allowance with round trip fare. He also got a visa from the German consulate just by showing them Einstein’s postcard. No fee required! He left for Europe in early September aboard a steamer of the Lloyd Triestino Line and arrived in Paris in mid-October.

Abraham Pais, the author of ‘Subtle is the Lord,’ The Science of Life of Albert Einstein, says in his book,

Bose’s derivation of Planck’s law was the fourth and the last of the revolutionary papers of the old quantum theory (the other three being by, respectively Planck, Einstein and Bohr)

High praise indeed! Pais continues “For Einstein this period was only an interlude. He was already engrossed in his search for a unified theory. Such is the scope of his oeuvre that his discoveries in those six months do not even rank among his five main contributions main contributions, yet they alone would have sufficed for Einstein to be remembered forever.”

To appreciate Bose’s accomplishment and Einstein’s own realization of its importance and its extension to ordinary matter, one needs to take a look at the struggle over several decades to unravel the true nature of blackbody radiation, that ultimately would lead to one of the two fundamental (Bose-Einstein) statistics based on the New Quantum Mechanics, the other being the Fermi-Dirac Statistics.

In 1859, Kirchhoff, based on pure classical thermodynamics, proved the theorem that the emissive power or the related spectral density (energy per unit volume) was a function, independent of the nature of the black body, of only the frequency and temperature. He had challenged theorists to find the precise formula for the spectral density (rn, T)). Various theoretical attempts had failed to find such a formula until 1900, when Max Planck derived the well-known Planck distribution law that fitted perfectly the high precision experimental results that had taken nearly fifty years to obtain. But Planck’s derivation would raise questions the next twenty years and occupy major figures of the time including Einstein. Recapitulating briefly, Planck had accepted the classical theory of electromagnetism to obtain the number of stationary vibrations, but had introduces a radical hypothesis of discreteness in calculating the average energy per degree of vibration. The thermal equilibrium of radiation at a temperature T was due to the exchange of energy between radiation and hypothetical material resonators that absorbed and emitted energy in discrete energy quanta of magnitude hυ. Einstein, in 1905, invoked Planck’s quantum hypothesis to explain the photoelectric effect, but was critical of Planck’s derivation. He noted that if the energy of a resonator could alter only in jumps, then for the evaluation of the average energy of a resonator in a radiation cavity, the electromagnetic theory [in calculating the number of independent vibrations, the first factor] cannot be used, for the latter does not admit any distinctive energy values for a resonator.

Between 1905 and 1923, several attempts including those of Debye and Planck(1910), Einstein (1916), and Pauli (1923) followed, but none of those was completely satisfactory. As Bose would say at the beginning of his paper, “in all cases it appears to me that the derivations are not sufficiently justified from a logical point of view. On the other hand the light quantum hypothesis combined with statistical mechanics (as adapted by Planck to conform to the requirements of quantum theory) appears to be sufficient for the deduction of the law independent of classical theory.”

Indeed Bose’s derivation of Planck’s law was simple and straight forward. But it implied novel radical features: 1). Black body radiation consisted of zero mass particle-like light quanta of momentum and energy, hυ/c and hn, respectively 2). No reference to classical theory. Independent stationary vibrations replaced by the number of cells in one particle phase space 3). The probability law Bose used in distributing the number of quanta in the frequency range n and υ +dυ among the cells corresponding to the same frequency range, implied a new kind of statistics. It introduced a new type of statistical dependence or interaction between light quanta and also between material particles in Einstein’s extension. This feature is often characterized as indistinguishability.

It is also remarkable that Einstein embraced Bose’s distribution law and extended its application, almost immediately, to material particles with suitable modification to take into account the conservation of the number of particles. It was a giant leap towards a unified description of matter and radiation. Subsequently, in his second paper, Einstein linked it with de Broglie’s matter waves that indirectly led to Schrödinger’s wave mechanics and ultimately, in the hands of Dirac, led to types of quantum statistics based on the symmetry properties of the wave functions.

At around the same time Bose sent his first paper to Einstein, he sent also a second paper for Einstein’s opinion and request to get it published in Zeit.fur. Physik. It dealt with Thermal Equilibrium in Radiation Field in the presence of Matter. Einstein translated it and sent it for publication as well, but with an added critical remark concerning Bose’s derivation of the probability coefficients of interaction between matter and radiation. It contradicted Einstein’s own derivation of the famous emission and absorption coefficients. Whether it is because of Einstein’s criticism or because of the advent of new quantum mechanics, Bose’s second paper received no further attention. A third paper of Bose, replying to Einstein’s criticism was never published and there is no trace of it in Einstein archives.

After spending a year in Paris, learning mostly experimental work in the X-rays laboratory of Maurice de Broglie, Bose went to Berlin in October 1927. He met Einstein, who introduced him to several prominent physicists including Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner. It was an exciting time in Berlin. It was the beginning of the New Quantum Mechanics with colloquia on Heisenberg’s Matrix Mechanics and Schrödinger’s Wave Mechanics and their phenomenal success. Einstein proposed two problems to Bose to work on: first, the question whether the new statistics implied a novel type of interaction between the light quanta; the second was to see how the statistics of the light quanta and the transition probabilities shaped in the new quantum mechanics. Apparently Bose made no progress on either of the two problems. Bose had to return to his university after the two years of study leave. He devoted himself almost exclusively to teaching and guiding research. Then in 1953-54, within a span of less than a year, he wrote some five papers on the Unified Theory of Einstein, mostly mathematical in nature. In reply to Bose’s letter sent presumably along with one of his papers, Einstein wrote,

Dear Professor Bose,

Thank you for your letter of September 20 th. I am glad to see that you are interested in this theory and that you have devoted so much work and penetration to the solution of the equation.

I believe, to be sure, that the solution of these equations is not of great help toward the answer of the question: Do the singularity free solutions of the equation system have physical meaning? Are there at all singularity-free solutions which correspond to the atomistic character of matter and radiation? It seems to me that the mathematical methods available at present are not power enough to answer this question.

With kind regards,

Albert Einstein

4 October 1952

Bose was ever grateful and appreciative of Einstein’s help in his early career, although he felt a certain amount of chagrin for Einstein’s interpretation of the factor of 2 as due to “polarization,” and not as, Bose had apparently attributed it the intrinsic spin of the light quantum. This has been historically a controversial point since the original paper that Bose sent to Einstein is not to be found any where. If it was true, Bose deserves the credit for postulating intrinsic spin to photon.

From Bohm to Aspect: Philosophy Enters the Optics Laboratory Olival Freire Jr., Dibner Institute – MIT, Universidade Federal da Bahia – Brazil

Quantum non-locality, or entanglement, is the key physical effect in the burg