When he was 26, it was a very good year

By Sheilla Jones

The Globe and Mail
Saturday, January 15, 2005
Page D9

Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness

By John S. Rigden

Harvard University Press

161 pages, $30.95

Some scientists make their mark on the world through a single, remarkable discovery or theory. Very few do it the way Albert Einstein did: five remarkable papers in six months, four before he even had his doctoral degree.

Einstein's career in physics got off to a decidedly awkward start. He'd alienated his professors at university and was unable to get the recommendations necessary for a teaching job after graduating in 1900. His friend Marcel Grossmann helped arrange a job for him as a junior patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, in 1901. His work was not very demanding, and that gave him lots of time to think about the problems troubling the physics community.

Indeed, in a letter to Grossmann's widow, Einstein later credited his friend with saving his life -- not that he would have died without the job, but that his position at the patent office gave him time to think and freed him from the onerous demands that would have been placed on him had he obtained a university appointment. Einstein also said it was the happiest time of his life because "nobody expected me to lay golden eggs."

I suspect that there are many weary young physicists today who would gladly trade their stress-filled lives for the simple gift of having the time and space just to think. They're in physics departments everywhere, haggard and tired from the relentless juggling act of teaching, researching, writing streams of grant applications and cranking out academic papers to sate the beast known as "publish or perish." It's hard to lay the golden egg that is so crucial to making or breaking a scientific career when you're too exhausted to think straight.

In Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness, historian of science and physicist John Rigden credits Einstein's isolation from the mainstream physics community with giving him the time he needed to develop the epoch-making theories he set forward in those six prolific months in 1905. It was Einstein's personal annus mirabilis.

Einstein has been an engaging figure in the world of science, so much so that he has become the quintessential model for what a scientist looks like, and his name is interchangeable with the word "genius." He has also attracted many biographers, so there's no shortage of books that dwell on his life and times. What's different about Rigden's book is that it places Einstein's work in the context of what was going on in 1905, both in Einstein's mind (as well as can be determined from his memoirs and letters to friends) and in the world of physics. The most famous of Einstein's equations—E = mc²—has become so familiar to us that we take it for granted. But when it's set in the context of what was known in 1905 or, more important, what was not known, its originality and impact become apparent.

"His thinking," Rigden says, "had not been influenced by consensus views on the proper way to do physics, on what was possible or impossible in physics, or what was important or unimportant in physics. In 1905 he not only had a job he enjoyed, but also one that allowed his mind to range freely over ideas that interested him. In 1905 he was in love, but did not have family responsibilities that would have competed for his attention."

Given the time to think, Rigden notes, Einstein addressed four key conceptual questions: What is light? What is the nature of matter? Is classical thermodynamics valid? Are the physical laws valid for all observers? These areas embraced just about everything that was going on in physics 100 years ago and therefore influenced the entire discipline.

Rigden devotes a chapter to each of Einstein's 1905 papers, one of which was also his doctoral thesis. Each chapter examines Einstein's motivation for that particular paper, sets it in the context of the personalities, politics and dogmas of the time, gives a clear, non-mathematical description of what the paper was about, and wraps it up with a description of the response from the physics community. The five papers were written between mid-March and the end of September, and all were published in a leading German physics journal.

Rigden organizes the chapters chronologically: the March paper on the quantum nature of light, for which Einstein later won the Nobel Prize; the April paper and doctoral thesis on the dimensions of molecules, written at a time when there was still no evidence of the existence of atoms; the May paper on the long-standing problem of Brownian motion, which advanced the April paper by setting up the proof for the existence of atoms; the June paper on special relativity that turned the classical concepts of space, time and simultaneity on their heads; and the September paper on the equivalence of mass and energy as m = E/c², better known as E = mc².

And what was the physics community's response to this flow of remarkable papers? For the most part, an icy silence. Although his work established him as a scientist to be watched, the fame and job offers didn't come until much later. Indeed, his first job offer as a professor didn't come until 1909, and real fame didn't arrive until his 1915 theory of general relativity (a generalization of the June paper) was verified in 1919.

But that theory so enraged and upset some leading physicists that the Nobel Prize that was supposed to go to Einstein in 1921 wasn't awarded until a year later, and only when a compromise was reached that it would be for his work from the March paper on the photoelectric effect.

This is the 100th anniversary of Einstein's big year, so be prepared for an onslaught of publications featuring the famous, wild-haired physicist. The value of Rigden's contribution to the already extensive library of Einstein is his focus on the five remarkable papers written in 1905 and the context in which they occurred. These papers are the basis of Einstein's fame, and Einstein 1905 provides a very accessible, non-mathematical account of what the papers were about and why they had such an impact on the world.

Interestingly, Rigden also claims that if Einstein had never been born, other physicists would eventually have come up with the same theories, and that Einstein's genius stems from producing five remarkable papers in an equally remarkable short period of time. No physicist has accomplished such a feat since, which might bring some small measure of comfort to today's 26-year-old physicists, who are facing enormous career pressure to lay just one golden egg.

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