Why is Einstein important?

The fruits of one man's thought shaped our civilization above and beyond what seemed possible * Einstein's first major achievements were published in 1905 in four groundbreaking papers, including the completion of special relativity. By Brian Greene

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Ten years later he expanded the theory to include gravity, creating the theory of general relativity. The idea overturned Isaac Newton's physics and redefined our concepts of time and space. It launched new lines of research that are still being explored and made its creator a star.

During the last century, Einstein's ideas mixed with culture and art and shaped our world in endless ways and irreversibly.

Albert Einstein once said that there are only two things that can be infinite: the universe and human stupidity and admitted

We may be grinning at the words. Or at least smiling. But don't be offended. The reason for this is that the name "Einstein" conjures up in our minds an image of a good-hearted and wise uncle from ancient times. We envision the good-natured, wild-haired scientific genius whose iconic images are etched in our collective cultural memory: riding a bicycle, clucking his tongue, or peering at us. Einstein symbolizes the purity and power of intellectual curiosity.

Einstein rose to fame within the scientific community in 1905, the year that was crowned as his "year of miracles" - annus mirabilis. While working eight hours a day, six days a week, at the Swiss patent office in the city of Bern, he wrote four articles in his spare time that changed the face of physics. In March of that year, he claimed that light, which until then had been described as a wave, actually consisted of particles, called photons, an insight that launched quantum mechanics. Two months later, in May, Einstein's calculations provided confirmable predictions about the atomic hypothesis. Later, when these predictions were indeed confirmed in experiments, they firmly confirmed that matter is composed of atoms. In June he completed the special theory of relativity, which revealed that space and time behave in amazing ways that no one had anticipated, and in short: that distances, speeds and durations are all relative and dependent on the observer. And finally, in September 1905, Einstein deduced from the special theory of relativity an equation that would become the famous equation in the world: E=mc2.

Science often progresses in small steps. Only very rarely do scientific contributions emerge that set off the alarm bells heralding an imminent revolution. And here, one man in one year rang the bells four times, an amazing burst of creative insight. The scientific establishment felt almost immediately that Einstein's work would resonate and shake the establishment of understanding reality. But for the general public, Einstein has not yet become Einstein.

This changed on November 6, 1919.

In the special theory of relativity, Einstein stated that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. This assertion set the stage for a confrontation with Newton's theory of gravity, in which gravity has an immediate effect in space. This threatening contradiction prompted Einstein to rewrite, with a great deal of audacity, the centuries-old laws of Newtonian gravitation, a daunting task that even his most ardent supporters considered like a war on windmills. Max Planck, one of the leaders of German science, said, "As an older friend, I must advise you to avoid it ... You will not succeed, and even if you succeed, no one will believe you." Einstein, never one to submit to authority, continued. and continued. for almost ten years.

Finally, in 1915, Einstein announced his general theory of relativity, which profoundly rewrote gravity and presented it in terms of a new and shattering idea: distortions and curvatures of space and time. Instead of the idea according to which the Earth grabs the cup of tea that has fallen from our hand and pulls it to its bitter end on the floor, general relativity claims that our planet warps the space around it, causing the cup to slide along a slope of space-time that directs it to the floor. Gravity, Einstein declared, is inherent in the geometry of the universe.

Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2, in his handwriting from a late paper published in 1946. Credit: Albert Einstein Archive, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2, in his handwriting from a late paper published in 1946. Credit: Albert Einstein Archive, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
During the 100 years since Einstein developed this theory, physicists and historians have pieced together a consistent, if complex, story about its formation [see "How Einstein Reinvented Reality" by Walter Isaacson, Scientific American Israel]. In some of my writings, intended for the general public, I had the pleasure of following Einstein's climb up, starting with elegant maneuvers, through a crooked walk and finally reaching the top. However, instead of demystifying Einstein's creative leaps of thought, following his thought process only adds glamor to the astonishing innovation and paralyzing beauty of his proposal.

On November 6, 1919, four years after Einstein completed the theory of general relativity, the world's newspapers reported in their headlines new astronomical measurements that proved that certain stars in the sky were located in a slightly different place than expected according to Newton's laws, just as Einstein had predicted. The results triumphantly confirmed Einstein's theory and catapulted him overnight to icon status. He became the man who overthrew Newton and at the same time also brought the human race one giant step closer to the eternal truths of nature.

And as if that wasn't enough, Einstein was a media hit. While blinking in the spotlight and paying lip service to his strong desire to be alone, he knew how to interest the world in his mysterious but very important kingdom. He used to spout clever phrases ("I am a militant pacifist") and cheerfully play the public role of the confused genius of geniuses. At the premiere of the movie "Lights of the Volume", while the cameras were flashing towards the red carpet, Charlie Chaplin whispered to Einstein something like this: "People are cheering for me because everyone understands me, and cheering for you because no one understands you." It was a role that shocked Einstein. And the general public, exhausted by the First World War, warmly embraced it.

While Einstein fit gracefully into social circles, his ideas about relativity, at least as reported to the general public, coincided with other cultural revolutions. James Joyce and T. S. Eliot crushed the structure of the sentence. Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp drove the canvas. Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky shattered the musical scale. And Einstein freed space and time from the outdated models of reality to which they were bound.

Some went so far as to present Einstein as the main source of inspiration for the avant-garde movement of the 20th century, as the scientific well that produced renewed cultural thinking. It is romantic to think that it was the truths of nature that created the surge that washed away the dusty remains of a culture that had dug in its attitudes. But I have never come across convincing evidence linking these revolutions to Einstein's science. A common misunderstanding of relativity, that it seemingly nullifies objective truth, is responsible for many unwarranted citations of Einstein's teachings in the fields of culture. Interestingly, Einstein himself had conventional taste: he preferred Bach and Mozart to modern composers and refused to accept as a gift new Bauhaus furniture that was supposed to replace the traditional and faded furniture he had in his home.

All this shows that the centenary of general relativity is very far from being a look into the past from a historical point of view. Einstein's theory of general relativity is tightly woven into the fabric of today's leading scientific research.

It can be said that many revolutionary ideas were carried in the air at the beginning of the 20th century, and there is no doubt that they mixed with each other. And there is no doubt that Einstein was a prominent example of how breaking old conventions can reveal breathtaking new vistas.

Today, a hundred years later, the landscapes that Einstein revealed are still incredibly vibrant and fertile. General relativity gave birth in the 20s to modern cosmology, which studies the origin and development of the entire universe. The Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman, and independently the Belgian physicist and priest Georges Lemaître, used Einstein's equations to show that space should be expanding. Einstein opposed this conclusion, and even changed his equations and incorporated the infamous "cosmological constant" to ensure a static universe. But later observations made by Edwin Hubble, which showed that all distant galaxies continue to move away, convinced Einstein to go back, and accept his original equations and the fact that the universe is expanding. The fact that the universe is expanding today means that it was smaller and smaller in the past, a conclusion that suggests that the origin of the universe is in the expansion of a primordial grain, an "primordial atom" as he called it. The Big Bang Theory was born.

In the decades that have passed since then, the big bang theory has developed significantly (today the most accepted version is the swelling theory, or inflation), and with the help of several refinements, it has stood up to many observations and tests. One such observation, which won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011, suggested that in the past seven billion years, not only has the universe been expanding, but the rate of expansion has also increased. The best explanation? The big bang theory is bolstered by a version of Einstein's neglected cosmological constant. If you wait long enough, even some of Einstein's mistaken ideas will turn out to be correct [see: "Einstein's Mistakes", by Lawrence M. Kraus, Scientific American Israel].

An even earlier insight, originating from the theory of general relativity, derives from an analysis made by the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild, during his stay on the Russian front in the midst of the First World War. In a break from calculating the trajectory of the shells, Schwarzschild arrived at the first exact solution of Einstein's equations, providing an accurate description of the curvature of space-time by spherical bodies such as the Sun. As a side effect, Schwarzschild's calculations revealed something strange. If you compress any object to a small enough size, the sun, for example, into a sphere five kilometers in diameter, the space-time curvature will be so severe that anything that gets too close to the object, including light itself, will be trapped. In modern terms, Schwarzschild discovered the possibility of black holes.

At the time, black holes were considered improbable, a mathematical oddity unlikely to be meaningful in reality. But observations, not expectations, are what determine what is true, and astronomical data today shows that blacks do exist and that they are numerous. Even if today they are too far away to study them directly, they are irreplaceable as theoretical laboratories. Starting with Stephen Hawking's influential calculations in the 70s, physicists have become increasingly convinced that due to their extreme nature, black holes are the ideal proving ground in attempts to push forward the limits of general relativity, and above all to unify it with quantum mechanics. Indeed, one of the main controversial issues today is how quantum processes may affect the way we understand the outer limit of a black hole, called the event horizon, as well as the nature of the black hole's interior.

All this shows that the centenary of general relativity is very far from being a look into the past from a historical point of view. Einstein's theory of general relativity is tightly woven into the fabric of today's leading scientific research.

So how did Einstein do it? How did he manage to influence so much and for so long? While it is permissible to ignore Einstein as a source of cubism or atonal music, he is certainly the reason why it is permissible to imagine that someone or someone can delve deeper into thoughts and reveal cosmic truths. Einstein was a social scientist, but his great breakthroughs were private "Aha!" moments. Were these insights due to a unique organization of his brain? Due to a world view that is not subject to conventions? Because of a stubborn and uncompromising ability to focus? It's possible. Yes. It is likely. The truth is, of course, that you never know. We can tell stories about how ideas emerge, but ultimately, the influences that shape thought and insight are too numerous to analyze.

To avoid exaggeration, at most we can say that Einstein had the right mind at the right time to crack a set of fundamental problems in physics. And it was a unique time like no other! Einstein's many but relatively modest contributions in the decades after the discovery of general relativity indicate that the series of particular ideas he instilled in physics is over.

For all his achievements, and the lasting legacy he left, there is an urge to ask another speculative question: Could there be another Einstein? If you mean a super genius who will powerfully push science forward, then the answer is surely yes. In the half century since Einstein's death, there were certainly such scientists. But if you mean a super genius that the world will look up to, not because of achievements in sports or the world of entertainment, but as a fascinating example of what the human mind is capable of achieving, well, that question is actually directed at us, at what our culture considers valuable.

About the writers

Brian Greene
Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Columbia University, who studies superstring theory. He is the author of many books and one of the founders and chairman of the World Science Festival.
for further reading

Even=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation. David Bodanis. Penguin, 2000
The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality. Brian Greene. Knopf, 2004
The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Princeton University Press
E=mc2 - the story of the greatest discovery in history. David Bodanis. From English by Yaniv Farkash, Keter Publishing, 2002
The fabric of the universe: space, time and the fabric of reality. Brian Greene. From the English of Emmanuel Lotem. Matar Publishing House, 2006
Einstein Archive, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

More about Einstein on the science website:

The man who changed the universe

Einstein - the man who got us out of the Matrix

A planet outside the solar system was discovered using a method that uses Einstein's theory of relativity