Einstein's Greatest Mistake - with David Bodanis

it really is a great pleasure to be here everyone knows about Einstein as an old man and I want to first show him as a young man there that's Einstein as a young man not the way we think with the big white hair and all that as a young man and what he did when he was young was incredible I rarely at a loss for words as I hope you might find out but what he did was awesome I have here in my pocket a mobile phone this wouldn't work without what Einstein came up with in 1905 he came up with the notion of he clarified what happens when electrons hit metals and that's our cameras in the phones would not have worked without it in 1916 he came up a casually over a weekend while he was resting he came up with the notion fundamental to lasers without that no internet in 1905 and in 1915 he came up the notions which are fundamental to our GPS GPS navigation satellites if I'm saying hadn't done that we wouldn't be able to do exciting things like find a Starbucks around the corner the world would be a weaker place and not to forget he also came up with relativity for most of us coming up with the theory of relativity would be really good Einstein came up with two theories of relativity the first one in 1905 was really very very good that's the one that led to equals mc-squared that i talked about earlier and of course horribly the atomic bomb but if he hadn't come up with that there was a Frenchman Poincare a and a Dutchman Lorentz and they were really close probably within five or ten years they would have reached a special relativity but in 1915 after eight incredible years of labor I'm thank came up with something better he came up with what he called general relativity that's what I'm going to talk about more tonight and this was a theory for all time if he hadn't been a born many people many historians think nobody at least for a century or more could have come up with it it's a magnificent thing now on top of being the ultimate class SWOT I'm Stein was also a funny guy he had a particular sort of whimsical German Jewish humor his whole family was like that his sister magic kept a memoir of what it was like growing with growing up with him one time when Einstein was little he got a bit overexcited when he was around seven and he threw a bowling ball at her and he hit her she wrote about it later and she said that shows it takes a sick skull to be the sister of a world famous physicist I love that sense of humor that sort of ease with the world and also it's an ability to step back and look at things afresh instead of having a stimulus ball and a direct response ah bad brother do you have that humor admittedly this is humor that she wrote a few years later we don't know what she said at the time anyway sadly all that was destroyed something terrible happened in Einsteins life it wasn't just a scientific mistake I think we can show I really think by the end you'll feel there was a psychological mistake that he made a psychological mistake and it left him isolated and lonesome even when he was world-famous for 10 years for 20 years almost for 30 years he was sort of well the general public's what he was incredible but two physicists working scientists ignored him and shunned him it wasn't just a matter of being old some physicists do only their good work only when they're young that's not always the case Chandrasekar did who for whom the x-ray satellite is named and came up the notion of black holes did wonderful work in his 50s and 60s Einstein's best friend for a long time was Nels Bohr one of his closest friends and when Nels Bohr was 50s and 60s and even 70s his Institute in Copenhagen was world-famous bright young grad students came there from all over and Bohr was full of ideas pulling out fresh stuff so it wasn't just age and we'll see later in the talk Einstein kept his intellectual faculties he was as a cut he was he had the same capacity he had when he was younger he had that later but something got in the way something left him isolated really terribly isolated look at that that's Einstein walking home from the campus and Princeton New Jersey where he did where he lived for the last 20 more than 20 years of his life and he was walking home alone and that look on his face it wasn't just it was cold weather in Berlin he was never like that in Berlin in the 19-teens and 1920s he was where it was at but somehow then it's an old man walking by the side of a road how did that happen how did that happen that's what I want to tell you about okay to see why we have to go back in time here and I'm not going to recap his his whole life I'm going to concentrate on this great thing the general relativity that he came up with in um it he finalized it in 1915 it went up and it was down he really he really made a lot of efforts and to do this we have to use several I don't know they're called audio-visual techniques I'm going to use a three-dimensional space the first thing I'm going to do is bring out this mysterious object if you want to have a good demonstration at the August Royal Institution do you need chocolates right anybody who collects a white sphere can come up to me afterwards and in exchange get some lovely chocolates which were purchased by my lovely wife who couldn't be here tonight in Milan last week so these are very very good chocolates to also explain general general relativity often considered one of perhaps one of the great achievements of all time you need something else you need ping-pong balls ping-pong balls are very useful for general relativity now along with ping-pong balls and brace yourselves we need a paddle okay suppose you weren't actually sitting in this magnificent feeder at the Royal Institution we're actually in a spaceship the Starship Enterprise I'm Simon Pegg or Scotty I'm a very Chicagoan Scotty I'm in at the front of the spaceship you're at the back and we're zooming through space okay suppose every four beats I have a little clock here and I just sent out a photon to hit you remember redeemable for a fine chocolate every four seconds I'm going to hit this along or every four beats it won't be four seconds and if you're counting you'll receive it it won't take that long to travel but between your catches or when it hits the audience there should be the same beat let's see if this works 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 cool isn't it oh I get oh we still get a chocolate there luckily there's a close correlation between the number of ping-pong balls and the number of chocolates so that's what happens if we're in the Starship Enterprise now it doesn't matter if we're sitting still we haven't left Earth Station for example they haven't cast the appropriate actors for the sequel or it the same thing would happen if we're zooming at a hundred million miles an hour through the galaxy looking for an interesting plot development as we as we go along if we're just moving at a constant rate doesn't matter and we know right here on earth we're actually spinning around the equator sorry we're spinning around the the vertical line of the earth quite quickly it doesn't matter it's a steady rate my time here at the front of the spaceship is the same as your time there at the back of the station spaceship however suppose suddenly you get pushed back in your seat you know when you're in a sports car or you dream about being in a sports car somebody guns the engine ah you're thrown back in your seat it's like you feel it almost feels like something's pulling you back right you're being pushed forward really really hard now suppose that was happening that means that is I toss this up something different would happen so I toss it again but instead of it going through the air and I count four and then I do the next one and it lands you count four and does the next one you will intercept it more closely I mean acceleration means we're not keeping the same distance you're coming up to me faster than I was before acceleration you're constantly going faster as I hit the ball it won't be a count of four before you collected you'll be coming closer you might snap it out of the air edit oh just for fun you might snap it out of the air at a count of maybe two or something and this will seem really strange to you to you it'll seem David said he was hitting the ball Joe every four beats but because we're jerking forward it would be you guys are certainly four dimension a spate uh a sports car pushing you faster and faster it might be only two beats before you catch it imagine if somebody was in a sliding chair here and I was throwing them ball and the sliding chair just sped up suddenly faster it wouldn't take very long for the ball to cross his distance and reach them now that sounds a little bit boring unless you're excited by fine Italian chocolates to come but I'm fine once said he was not more intelligence than other people but he had the persistence of a mule when he was a little boy when he was making card castles if they collapsed and fell down he would take a deep breath and he would do it again his sister said he was remorseless in that respect and his mind was he was a good student like an a-minus B+ student but he wasn't super quick he wasn't like Oppenheimer or a von Neumann or people like that Giants of the 20th century but he was persistent he kept going he was kind of like gristle you chew and you chew okay so he kept on thinking about this and he said this effect that I was describing the equivalent of this effect he had all sorts of thought experiments does that happen because the audience if you and the audience are being pushed forward suddenly a large mover is developing what used to be the lovely RI and Albemarle Street and pushing you this way is it because of that or are you jerked back in your chair because there's a huge gravitational source behind you an enormous meteor has just landed and is there full of iron and heavy stuff and is tugging you back Einstein was a great believer in democracy the view that nobody the belief that nobody really has a favored view that if I can't if I honestly can't tell if I'm being pushed back by a push of something accelerating me or because I have the sensation of being pushed back because there's a heavy gravitational mass the way that something will pull us down to earth maybe they're the same if they feel the same maybe they actually are the same now this to most people sounds the technical word is insane it sounds insane in 1921 I think it was Einstein crossed the Atlantic with the great English chemist and Zionist crime fights men and when they arrived in New York City everybody came up to veidt's men and said what was it like on the trip with professor Einstein vice Minh said Einstein explained his theory of relativity to me for two weeks and by the end I was convinced he understood it I was convinced he understood it and fights 'men was a very intelligent man okay so this idea just sounds nuts so you have to find a way of testing it you have to say whether it's you know what I think somebody over there to get one of these yeah you have to find a way of testing it and there is an idea that maybe you could test it where there's a big gravitational object so a big gravitational object of egg heavy object might actually act similarly to something pushing maybe this little thought experiment that we had that if I must have less acceleration it's sort of like my being further away from a gravitational source so I have my time as speeding up compared to you it's like well maybe is hitting the boil more frequently than he did before and yet you don't feel that maybe it will take place by a big grab by a big physical object not just in something pushing you from behind is there a way of testing they thought they could test it by an eclipse and in 1914 a beautiful eclipse was coming up in the Crimea this much contested area in Eurasia and a German expedition went there with beautiful telescopes made from a Krupp manufacturers I should point out this was July of 1914 some of you know your history they were there in August of 1914 also they thought there'd be lovely restaurants because the Imperial a Russian battle fleet had its base there so what the police and military found was German nationals with machinery from the largest German armaments thing just as World War one was breaking out the Eclipse passed while this poor team led by urban Freund Lick were in the Imperial Russian jails Einstein had to pay some money to get them back home however but uh Britain to the rescue there was going to be another eclipse in 1919 and they could check if it was true they could check if this actually happened if there is a big gravitational object if there was a mass like the Sun could it actually distort time near it could it actually make time go slow or closer to the Sun and go quicker further away from the Sun I don't know why I went up in frequency we're talking about time rather than well it's related could they do that well I cannot possibly Einstein could but I cannot take us literally back to 1919 so we're going to have to make an eclipse a different way and I thought we can make an eclipse in this room why not or at least come close to eclipse to have an eclipse we need several things one is we need an earth can anybody catch this there your job is to hold the earth if it's you can hold it high you can hold it on your lap you can hold the earth right so we have the earth there we also need the Sun now the Sun this is not the Sun you ready this is the Sun cute isn't it so this is the Sun now and I've the earth goes around the Sun so here's the Sun and to really test it you would need something else you would need a star a star that's far away the Sun waves a lot the Sun has huge mass and you need some distance far and I thought well well I could be that star I mean it's like it's my talk after all um so now before there's an eclipse when the Sun is over here between between the Earth and this distant star i'm trillions of miles away it's sort of a straight line if you look directly behind me what you see is um like suppose you see one of these cubes right a design like that Q so if you around the earth looking at this star this is what you would see you would see where I am on a certain day of the year and - there's cubes behind me right and that's it now as the Sun gets closer and closer to getting between us and remember for an eclipse the moon would get in front and block it out so on the rare occasions when they line up you could you can actually look in this direction without everything being lost in the glare you would think that when the Sun was directly in front directly between the earth and the star you wouldn't be able to view and be able to see me right you wouldn't be able to see the star the glow the Sun would be right there this huge object and any light that came out for me wouldn't reach you but you remember what that experiment we were doing we're saying that if you accelerate forward if you feel push back that time will go slower for you and little faster for somebody a further away and we were have a hypothesis I guess it's an interesting guess with the same thing happen with actual masses with the same thing happen with real gravity okay so I think what we have to do it's getting hotter it turns out by an eclipse I sometimes get emotionally involved with the UH with the with what's taking place around me so I'm going to have to take off my jacket um and I think I think I feel the heat I feel a sensation coming indeed I feel burnt I'm actually going to go further I'm going to start taking my clothes off I don't know how many of my clothes I'm going to take off but I do feel a need to do this properly if we're going to have a real eclipse we need a proper eclipse we might have some Saturday Night Fever approach or some music Here I am the distance salsa starlight if I were to go if the Sun had no distortion of time around it I could walk by it and I would go in this direction I would never intercept the earth but because this part of me I'm a beam I'm a beam of light because this part of me is caught in the heavy gravitational field time for this arm goes slower this arm is not affected it's far away the Sun is actually sagging time around it time works differently there than here it's like people running around a turn in an Olympic Stadium this part of me is going through sludge I'm going through sludge so I turn and I aim straight for Earth how cool is that isn't that amazing so that's the idea behind the Eclipse I'm now going to put my clothes back on or at least some of my clothes back on that's the idea and they did that experiment in 1919 and the idea is well when I was over here remember if I was not distorted you would look here and you see behind this distant star are these cubes but if the distortion is true if this idea that time itself can sag down and doesn't flow evenly you would see behind me that exit sign right well Eddington the English astronomer aided by some other people but mostly it was most of the work was done with Eddington in Cambridge they actually I took photographs during the Eclipse and if there is no such distortion of time they would be able to see directly behind the star this in fact what they saw directly behind the star was that so somehow the light from the distant star really had wobbled around I'm exaggerating the effect I'm exaggerating it a lot the distance was a fraction of an inch but they were really really careful in what they did isn't that a credible time was actually warped and they they confirmed it they confirmed that time doesn't flow smoothly through the universe said how could you come up with an idea like that the people who thought that Einstein was not a missing student such as this professor of Greek when he was fifteen at his Munich high school professors a keen heart who said I'm Stein you'll never amount to anything well his sister Maha said Einstein sister Maggio said and indeed my brother never taught Greek in high school and Munich again that attitude I love it anyways after this happened in 1919 Oh do it you can keep the earth for a little while I will exchange it for two chocolates we have to keep two ping-pong balls if you think about the one-to-one correlations between clean pong balls and chocolates given that I keep my word Einstein got incredibly famous after that happened it was a magnificent thing just by thinking in your head you can curve down time also in 1919 vast numbers of people had died in the first world war there were there were wives and mothers and parents who had lost huge numbers of people the terrible influenza also the idea that time might not be absolute but there's some sort of distortion okay you can't necessarily go back in time and least in this work that Einstein was doing at least as it was understood then but that time doesn't flow evenly there was an incredible notion and he did it all in his head there's a distinction we often make at least in the West between a priest and a prophet a priest is the sort of person again metaphorically speaking who can sort of openness spigot to something on high powerful ideas come from above go through the priest and come down to earth a prophet is somebody different a prophet is somebody we think who's gone to a different place they've seen it and they've come back there's an expression on their face photographs of Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King have that some of the photographs of Einstein not when he was so desolate but in middle age they have that there's the feeling that's a member of our species has seen something incredible and has the decency to share it with us people it was wonderful that Einstein did that it was wonderful and he became he became an incredible hero he also uh well actually I suppose I could just give one more image before I go into the equations the Stephen Hawking once said that if you put an equation in a book the sales go down by by 50% what you have to remember is that you've already paid for your tickets it doesn't matter we're going to have a couple equations coming up but before we do the equations I just want to give an informal image of what I had come up with clearly I'm summarizing and going that and not going into the full detail it wasn't just time that curves down space also curves down around heavy objects and there's an image that can you might use to help keep it in your head imagine you have a flat sheet like a trampoline but it's made of some taut rubber or something okay and if I have a little ball bearings that can be a planet or a bit of distant starlight if I flick it along a flat sheet it just goes in straight lines and that kind of makes sense if I flick something here but suppose I put the bowling ball that remember that bounced off Majah I'm Stein's head suppose we collect it from the Einstein museums and put it in that trampoline it would bend down in the middle it would sort of Sag down in the middle and then if I shoot a little ball bearing it'll go near it'll curve around just the way that your distant starlight curved around here how cool is that so that's the sort of image and the notion is that the curved geometry is produced by things things in space will make G the geometry curved down and make a bend and in the same way the bends in space the curved geometry that you see whenever you find a curve in outer space that's going to be a suspicious sign that something real is there of something real possibly something massive so the notion there I'm just summarizing as symbolically that that geometry shapes things the curved geometry is shapes how things are going to move well we just found that the curved geometry about the Sun shapes how this distant light coming in moves and also the other part of it the T implying G that things are going to shape the geometry you take a bowling ball and you put it on trampoline it's going to curved out things will shape geometry that kind of makes sense because Einstein had studied at good universities even though he wasn't the best student keep put it together G equals T geometry equals things that at the geometry that of space is created by the things in it heavy rocks on a trampoline will sag it down a lot a big heavy Sun will actually curve time around it just as we saw and was proven by what they saw on the Eclipse or in the other direction things things will shape the geometry right that big rock will curve things the geometry is a sign that things are there how cool is that it's just an incredible notion now I'll do this briefly but it turns out this is only a summary of what he did in more detail it's this those two little uh subscripts the mew and the new they they go through 16 total different values and if you think about a spreadsheet you know you often have a spreadsheet you want to say the third column over and the fourth row you know that sort of thing so they go from 0 0 in one corner to 4 4 in another so each 5 that actually shows it's not actually just one equation it's actually 16 equations there's some symmetry so it's a bit less but ok you can kind of understand it turns out even that's a simplification this is a little bit closer you have certain constants of proportionality there's a whole bunch of other constants I left out and it turns out even this is an approximation it took Einstein eight years to work out the math this is a little bit closer this is expanding it a little bit more this is still a special case I've made some simplifications ok so let's just go back to this one isn't it nice he can't this idea these wonderful symbols and he quote about it he said we see the universe Marvis marvelously arranged and it obeys certain laws this is why I don't think I can be an atheist he wasn't a traditional religious believer but he was very much against atheism I suppose he would be pantheistic a bit like Spinoza he admired Spinoza above all else we see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws he for him that was magical he said that people who didn't feel that missed a sense of wonder they missed a childlike wonder without which he said why do you live why are you doing anything if you exist only just scorn what's there and not see how beautiful it is and this there's just beautiful things out there I love that anyways this was a wonderful notion the notion that G equals state that the universe can be summarized in two simple equation two simple symbols that all of this mass and energy floating around there will shape the geometry and all of the geometry you see will be shaped by the mass and energy that's it it's incredible that two symbols are enough for that unfortunately Einstein realized by looking at the expanded equation that this had many predictions and one of them aside from the sunlight curving was that the universe was expanding this was clear to him by the late nineteen teens however at that time astronomers assured him the universe was not expanding they set up trust us we know the latest observations the best telescopes we're the guys we're the go-to guys for astronomy everything static there's the Milky Way our galaxy with stars they are floating and then beyond it there's think of the inside of Donald Trump's brain some intergalactic gas and that's it with violent magnetic fields that's about it there was a view of the world in the late nineteen teens so Einstein had to change his equation he had to put in something just slow down the expansion and he loved that beauty and symmetry remember he thought it was the mark it's not quite of God of something close to God he wasn't quite sure what he never never specified he used to semi jokingly some I seriously use the term the old one or the ancient want to refer to this thing that was more than human but not necessarily like the Bible's God which was just involved in this incredibly complex and beautifully simply arranged things that we saw there was G equals T how wonderful to find it however if it predicted the universe was expanding you had to slow it down so he there was his equation which he was so proud of he thought it revealed the deep truth of the universe and he had to make it ugly you have a beautiful sports carpet it's going too fast so you have to dangle a bit of rocks in a bag from it you have to put some bicycles and people pumping backwards you have to do all sorts of terrible things so this is what he did that term is the Greek capital lambda so and again as you can imagine when you expand it it's a lot bigger but this is the essence instead of the beautiful G equals T what a symmetry defined is if you're finding a hidden truth he had to accept this he thought well okay I don't like it but there we are he said when I introduce this term I always had a bad conscience I was unable to believe that such an ugly thing could be realized in nature such an ugly thing but that's what everybody told them and he had to give in but you need to listen to experimental evidence that's what he believed in his 30s it turns out the astronomers were wrong the the universe Exia is expanding it was discovered by a bunch of people including one of my favorites Edwin Hubble in California when Hubble discovered and gave proof that the universe was expanding punch magazine in England got very excited about this and wrote when life is full of trouble and mostly froth and bubble I turn to dr. Hubble he is the man for me which is a very good PG woodhouse sort of thing Einstein loved that it means he didn't have to do he could go back to G equals T where are we yeah yeah and he didn't have to do that that terrible asymmetrical thing there for just 10 years he put that in he could go back to the truth he was really really happy with that now this was also this made him happy it also made him even more famous he had been right after all from ideas in his head from abstract principles about acceleration remember people in the chair suddenly jerking forward he predicted he'd come up with G equals T and he predicted that the universe was expanding in more time Berlin in 1915 in his head this one highly intelligent primate had been able to manipulate mathematical symbols and predict the universe is expanding and it was found to be true this was wonderful this made him even more famous and there were many perks Einstein was happy and he began to have a lot of affairs this seems to be one of the few famous German Austrian actresses he did not sleep with at that period of time so her husband was convinced and from there look hmm maybe her husband was convinced that she too was having an affair with the great with a great scientist unfortunately Einstein was proven right that he shouldn't he felt he'd given into experimental evidence maybe he shouldn't have maybe he had given in too much he'd given in too easily everybody said one thing that the universe is not expanding what if he had held to his guns what if he had just been more insistent and he began to say quote when I'm judging a theory I ask myself if I were God would I have arranged the world in such a way there was an English essayist Macaulay who lived around overlapped in time with Michael Faraday from the famous from this Institute and the calling once said Macaulay was not a modest man by the way Macaulay said I have an excellent writing style but it's a very dangerous writing style to copy because if you get it a little bit wrong it's terrible and there's some people who are like that in boxing for example somebody like Muhammad Ali could box with his hands down I've been informed by experts this is the not a good thing to copy in your first boxing match it's a really dangerous skill what had I nine learned from this whole experience of discovering that time curves that space curves that gravity that physical objects can actually shape time physical objects can shape time but he proved it the Eclipse and other things proved it what he had learned is that his intuition that the universe is clear that the universe is exact that the universe is simple that that was true that you had to stick to that above all that was a very very dangerous conclusion because just around this time in the mid and late 1920s a wholly different field was coming into a study the study of the micro small of the microscopic and sub microscopic of a quantum mechanics I go into it in some detail in the book so I won't summarize at all we're looking at just the thing is what led to Einstein's collapse and what it was is this new theory came in which suggested that on the level of the micro small the sort of clarity that Einstein had found in outer space didn't exist anymore a famous example suppose I have a car with its tires and I want to measure what's the air pressure in my tires well I get a gauge and I stick it on the tire and when they do I start saying didn't you say newspaper you have come while I'm talking the air Assisting out of the tire and then I look at it and say oh 18 pounds per square inch and you say no no that's not right what if the air was hissing out you've actually lowered the amount of air in it while we were talking I'm so sorry so I go to another tire and this time I'm pretty quick but and the amount of air pressure that I measure it's be more accurate but think about it I took the air pressure I had the gauge in a little bit of the air came out right this is not exactly but relates to the ideas behind Heisenberg's famous principle of uncertainty the uncertainty principle so if the mere fact of measuring something however careful you are will always disturb it and even more fundamentally that was linked with a different notion that on the deepest level things are not extremely clear and always exact that there's going to have to be inevitably probability Einstein had used probability a great deal in his work for lasers and many other things but he thought a probability is just a limit of our measuring abilities for example the probability that um a new recruit in the British Army is five foot seven is a certain probability I don't know what it is say thirty five or forty percent we could actually go and measure every recruit in the British Army and average it out and find the percentages it's just this shorthand probability means we don't have time to go into the details that's what everybody has thought before the quantum-mechanical of revolution of the 1920s but Einstein said no no if you talk about probabilities and uncertainties it's just a limitation of our techniques now the world can't be like that all the way inside well it turned out and he would repeat his line he would say God does not play dice with the universe he has um some quotes about it yes he said to his a friend of mocs born trivial question who is max borns who got the the German physicist who got the Nobel Prize for quantum mechanics who was his famous granddaughter Olivia newton-john right he became a Austrian German Jewish emigrate England moved to Scotland his son uh one of his children got married went to Australia had a grandchild who became a really good singer anyways Einstein said about quantum mechanics in a letter to a Max Born quantum mechanics is very worthy of regard this is the mid-1920s but an inner voice tells me that the theory it hardly brings us close to the secrets of the old one I still am convinced that he does not play dice Einsteins good friend Nils Bohr said Einstein stop telling God what to do right how do you know how can you be so sure but Einstein was sure he had found it with general relativity with G equals T that is actually true if you stick to your guns and use your mind you'll find if you use your mind you'll find things are extremely clear and crisp and exact and if you stick to your guns if you really hold to it yes experimentalist could not work hard and they don't try to lie but at times they're confused or the evidence is ambiguous and uncertain so he said yes we're noticing curious but same to you random effects in the realm of the mind were small but it's not fundamental just wait I had away ten years if I had held my nerve I would have been proven right about astronomy let's hold our nerve about quantum mechanics let's not jump to the latest fashion and at the beginning this is kind of plausible but his years went on through the late 1920s and stuff more and more evidence came in but it wasn't that kit wasn't like that and one by one people began to leave Einstein there was an expiry sis he resisted a little bit what I said he was burned once he wasn't gonna be burned again he was just sit for another reason his sort of religious pantheistic views but there's a third reason which I think which I think can apply to anybody here who's ever sort of stuck to their view when you're not quite sure about it even if it has nothing to do with science in the 1950s at Harvard there was a famous experiment with playing cards some two experiments experimentalists took a deck of playing cards and reverse the colors so then instead of the ace of spades being black it was a red and a set of hearts being a red they were black he's got fun little thing magicians could have fun with it they took an audience like this of Harvard grad students and they flipped the cards really quickly and it turned out nobody notice anything it was a blur they said oh it's a deck of playing cards and then they took the cards with another group and went through him really slowly people instantly said you reverse the colors that's what you did you reverse the colors again it wasn't confusing it was a simple thing but then they did something really interesting the sort of thing that gets you tenure at Harvard University they flicked the cards at an intermediate speed not quite a blur but not very slow and if they add then they ask the graduate students what they saw and the graduate students uniformly said things like I feel a little bit dizzy or I'm tired I have to take a nap or I feel a bit queasy in my stomach they didn't know why but something made them really uncomfortable because it didn't fit in their intellectual system but they hadn't solved it yet okay so it's sort of like a little barrier here's what I believe now over there is a different belief to get from here to there there's a terrible barrier to go through if Einstein were to accept quantum mechanics he would have to build first through the zone of getting rid of everything he had done before it's like a rite of passage from that from Arnold on gana you have to get rid of get rid and be isolated he could no longer believe in that God or that deity who made sense of everything could you have to go into this different root world this different realm and fully accept that mmm probability at the micro level really really does hold up couldn't do that so because he was Einstein and really really smart and remember really really persistent and sometimes your greatest strength can become your greatest weaknesses he decided to come up with a thought experiment a thought experiment that would disprove relative that would disprove the mechanics and the thing might just gave about being on the Starship Enterprise with your Chicago Scotty and by the way the real Scotty sexy from Western Canada wasn't Scottish at all though as as you can perhaps tell from his accent in some of the the earlier episodes Einstein was very good with his hands he liked building things when he was young and did all his clock experiments they were so poor he said we only had one clock at the time and he used to make his take up match boxes and make them little like cars that you go up in the ski ski lifts with for his sons and he would put a little strings threads between them and they'd be like little cable cars just play with that he was ingenious he worked in a patent office for many years his father had been an electrical contractor and at a big conference in 1930 in Brussels he found a way to disprove quantum mechanics and he'd go right to the top he went to Nels Bohr his good buddy and said I have disprove in quantum mechanics the uncertainty principle has many ways of describing it and one way is to say that they're all mathematically equivalent and one way to say that the amount of energy that in a system and the amount of time in which you measure it cannot be made infinitely small if you're really really certain about the energy in a system you can't tell exactly when you're measuring it and if you're really really sure about when you're measuring exactly when you're measuring something you can't tell exactly how much energy there is and so Einstein came up with something like this a clock imagine this clock was hollow and inside there's a lot of photons floating around okay little U particles or waves of life depending on how you look at it okay at an exact time which clocks are good at measuring a particulate on comes out or a few photons come out if you measure the clock you'll see it'll it'll be a little bit lighter right it'll it'll weigh a little bit less because mass and energy are equivalent equals MC squared you can work out how much how much energy there was how much mass was lost and you know at exactly what time it happens at exactly the time that the clock let's the left a little um photon out right and they're quite separate it isn't like the gauge with them with the tire it isn't like oh I'm measuring the air coming out of a tire and I'm disturbing it photon flies out particular time the weight changes the mass changes there we are we know exactly how much energy there is we know exactly the time Einstein presented this thought experiment to Nels Bohr and his buddies Heisenberg and a few others in 1930 in Brussels there's a guy named Rosenfeld a great physicist himself who is there and recounted what happened that night for the entire evening after Bohr was extremely agitated he passed from one scientist to another seeking to persuade them that it couldn't be the case that it would have been the end of physics of Einstein was right but he couldn't find a single refutation I will never forget the sight of the two antagonists as they left the University Club in Brussels I'm signed a majestic figure walking calmly with a faint ironic smile upon his face more trotting along by his side extremely upset turns out there is a Dutch Russian Jewish all in one person physicists named ehrenfest who was good with the camera and quick and he took the following picture that night there they are I will never forget the sight of the two antagonists as they left the University Club Einstein a majestic figure walking calmly with a faint ironic smile upon his face nor try to go long by his side extremely upset turns out I think that was probably the last night that Einstein was genuinely happy in his life he was back to where he had been somebody once said there's two sorts of physicists I generalize that two sorts of thinkers there's tennis players there's golfers golfers are people who sit by themselves golfers are people who sit by themselves and do that sort o good curve good catch and do that sort of thing and it's kind of fun but it's kind of lonely Table Tennis tends to be - where's Matthew Fayette when I need him Table Tennis tends to be two people tennis players for Table Tennis a real tennis those are people who need conversation to clarify their ideas oh I have an idea let's talk it over at some friends it'll become clear Einstein was a Ted was a tennis player yes he needed a little bit of quiet time but not too much the reason he was so happy in that picture is because he was and all those pictures from the book the reason he was so happy is he was back in the game he was in the community they were about to say we were wrong you know we've been wrong about astronomy for 10 years maybe you've been wrong about quantum mechanics for six years and you Einstein as a prophet led us to the promised land again so this experiment it seems perfect turned out the next morning Nels Bohr who was really smart beside of being really smart your son gets the Nobel Prize Nels Bohr was such a person he was also smart in many other ways he found a reputation and the reputation was one that Einstein could quite understand Nels Bohr said sorry I yet knows where it said to him this is good this is good but if a photon has come out right and it weighs less than it goes slightly up you have to measure how high up it goes when it goes up is it a different point in the Earth's gravitational field doesn't tie didn't somebody tell me that time will flow at different rates depending on how intense the gravitation is Einstein the theory of relativity cancelled your thought experiment and and they did the calculations and the exact amount of uncertainty in the time from the change gravitational field is exactly the amount predicted by Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty Einstein had the good grace to say you're right you're right and he spent that morning humorously fixing it up with with Bohr and that was it he never did it again he he sort of gave up and he he left a Germany after that he had to leave because he was Jewish when a country tends to burn your books and send mobs to tear down your house may be a sign they don't like you that much he had offers from around the world Caltech wanted him the security 'extra did not want him they they didn't long footnote I'll tell you about that later but he had many offers in America and he decided to go to Princeton there's a famous Institute there which has an official title the Princeton Institute for vamp studies people in the know at that time called it the Princeton Institute for Advanced salaries they pay twice as much as anybody else and Einstein didn't mind a good salary when it was coming so he went there and things weren't right he lives in ever-increasing isolation and people were horrible to him Wolfgang Pauli was a great Austrian physicist Austrian German physicist and he said at one point when Einstein was there and working on the stuff Einstein has once again come out with a public comment on quantum mechanics as is well known each time it's a disaster and then they were scurrilous comments around the Institute one of Einstein's assistants recorded somebody saying whispering to a new student it would be better not to work with Einstein you'll be locked in the past the reason it's such a shame is that Einsteins mind was still fabulous like I said it wasn't that he was old and retired and gave up at one point along the way he came up with a detailed analysis of what's called gravitational lensing the effect I mentioned about this distant sunlight starlight going around the Sun entire galaxies can curve around others the all the light from them can curve over incredible distances and you can measure it in certain ways he got that right he also at one point came up with the notion of quantum entanglement again when he was isolated from anybody else he gave it an example of how crazy quantum mechanics is he worked out these magnificent conclusions indeed it's true and the Quarantine computers that are being developed now come from that work Einstein didn't entirely give up he sort of gave up well did he people ask me was he depressed sometimes he said well Spinoza was his favorite philosopher and Einstein said quote Spinoza also was convinced of the causal dependence of all phenomena at a time 17th century when the success of such efforts was still was still quite modest but then he thought well maybe they're right could he count that the future would redeem him or with the future not redeem him it was really really not to tell he said at one point almost in frustration I still don't believe that the God that God throws dice because if he had wanted to he would have done it throughout and not kept any pattern at all he would have gone the whole hog in such a case we wouldn't have to look for laws at all so Einstein said that he was right a flailing nobody listened the world was famous movie stars wanted to visit him equivalent of photo ops and selfies interviewers were always there but scientists ignore him and he knew that other people's of his same age we're still connected sad anyway I thought what conclusions do we draw from this one is that it was a terrible shame for Einstein because I mentioned about who's a tennis player he knew it was like to go without respect he put on a good face I said I am like a bear hibernating in a cave I am happy as can be you know happy it was when I was a teenager I'd go to parties I didn't know how to talk to anybody I would hold the drink and try to look nobly out the window I wanted somebody to talk to me I wanted to be a tennis player so Einstein I think he was isolated it was also a shame for science as I mentioned on his own he came up with quantum entanglement well with two other people came up with the notion of gravitational lensing there were huge breakthroughs his good friend SROI dinger thought that he once discussed a cat in a box with was coming up with some of the fundamental ideas behind DNA he and Einstein again sort of similar age Roy Beecher was a little bit younger but not that much they were great collaborators they could have worked together if Einstein had been more connected with the wider world and hadn't felt so hurt by what happened who knows what could have been there's also an insight I think for all of us into how isolated we can get especially when our successes have been good because it's true to get any good achievement you need to be confident you need to be a little bit cocky you have to feel that you could be number one and you need a guiding belief maybe that there's a clear almost divine pattern behind the universe it's a wonderful belief but then you need to make sure that it doesn't isolate you you need to accept that maybe what worked before it's not going to work in the exact same way again the thing is because everything around you it's probably changing your earlier successes if they were really really great can make you think that you're magnificent they will work is terrific but things change I'm going to leave you leave us before questions and book signing all that with two final pictures one we began was that's what I begin the book with how did he get to that point how did he get to that point this old man this man who had been right at the center anyways he lived on in Princeton until 1955 he was very brave at the end and is also very friendly to neighborhood children and people are people around Marion Anderson the great of black American singer when she went to visit Princeton wasn't allowed to stay at the hotels so he said so it's ridiculous come stay at his house they would noodle on the piano sing and struggle not saying he would play would play he was a good friendly man but in his professional life he was isolated after he died the day after he died Herbert block the American cartoonist drew a cartoon for The Washington Post that was picked up around the world and that's the image I want to leave you with can you read it Albert Einstein lived here and with that I thank you all thank you very much would you prefer to meet him when he was young or when he was old and what would he tell him or ask him

Channel: The Royal Institution

Views: 112,196

Rating: 3.8777969 out of 5

Keywords: Ri, Royal Institution, albert einstein, einstein, what did einstein do, smart, genius, wrong, mistake, science, lecture, physics, history

Id: zpTUjb-iKf4

Length: 52min 12sec (3132 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 23 2016