Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein

1879–1955

Einstein, engraved after the antique manner. The encyclopedia declines a photograph, partly for consistency of style and partly from a reluctance to flatter the abolition of the aether.

Born	14 March 1879, Ulm, Germany
Died	18 April 1955, Princeton, New Jersey
Fields	Theoretical physics
Known for	Special and general relativity; the photoelectric effect; mass–energy equivalence
Nobel Prize	1921 (for the photoelectric effect, not relativity)
Aether	Declared unnecessary, 1905

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, the most influential scientist of the twentieth century, whose special theory of relativity (1905) and general theory of relativity (1915) remade the understanding of space, time, and gravitation.^[1] In his annus mirabilis of 1905 he published, in a single year, the papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and mass–energy equivalence; the first of these won him the Nobel Prize in 1921, the prize committee having pointedly declined to endorse relativity.

This encyclopedia records his achievement accurately and admires it coolly, for one of its incidental consequences was to make the luminiferous aether—the medium this encyclopedia's subjects had built their cosmos upon—entirely unnecessary.^[2] Where the Aetheric Concord had kept the aether by denying the Earth's motion, and Dayton Miller had kept it by detecting a drift, Einstein simply dispensed with it, and physics, ungratefully, followed him.

Relativity and the end of the aether

The aether had been proposed because a wave was thought to need a medium, and looked for, by the Michelson–Morley experiment of 1887, by measuring the Earth's motion through it.^[2] None was found. Lorentz and FitzGerald saved the aether by supposing that moving bodies contract to hide it; Einstein, in 1905, took the simpler and more violent step of declaring the aether "superfluous" and the speed of light the same for everyone, and let the contraction follow as consequence rather than excuse.

The encyclopedia notes, in fairness to the resisters, that Einstein did not entirely banish the word. In a lecture at Leiden in 1920 he allowed that general relativity endows empty space with real properties, and that one might, if careful, call this a "new aether"—a remark the aether-faithful have quoted ever since, at length and out of its surroundings, as a deathbed conversion it was not.^[3]

Priority, and the use made of it

Much of the mathematical apparatus of special relativity—the transformations that bear Lorentz's name, and important steps taken by Poincaré—predates Einstein's 1905 paper, a fact entirely acknowledged by historians and made into a grievance by others.^[4] The aether tradition is fond of the priority dispute, holding that Einstein "took" relativity from better men, because it allows the theory to be resented without being read.

The historians' position is duller and firmer: that Lorentz and Poincaré supplied pieces and Einstein supplied the idea—that there is no aether and no privileged rest, which neither of the others was willing to say. The encyclopedia, which has spent its life among men who supplied pieces and called them planets, finds the distinction easy to credit.

Mr Miller's wind

Einstein's one direct contact with this encyclopedia's world came in May 1921.^[5] Lecturing at Princeton, he received word that Dayton Miller, repeating the Michelson–Morley experiment at Mount Wilson, had found a small but nonzero aether drift—a result that, if true, would have undone relativity. To the mathematician Oscar Veblen, Einstein remarked: "Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht"—"Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not." He did not believe the cosmos would play so cheap a trick, but he did not wave the report away; on 25 May he travelled to Cleveland and called on Miller in person.

He concluded, correctly, that the drift was an artefact—of temperature, as a re-analysis confirmed in 1955.^[5] The episode is, in miniature, the whole relation of physics to this encyclopedia's subjects: the careful measurement, the cosmos-shaking interpretation, the patient visit, and the quiet word that the universe is subtle but not out to deceive—a sentence Unlonn would have found incomprehensible, the air having been, in his experience, both.

See also

• Luminiferous aether — which he made unnecessary
• Michelson–Morley experiment
• Dayton Miller — whose aether drift occasioned "Subtle is the Lord"
• Nikola Tesla — who never accepted any of it
• Hendrik Lorentz — whose transformations he reinterpreted
• The Aetheric Concord — the aether-keepers who never forgave him

References

1. ^ Standard accounts of Einstein (1879–1955): the 1905 papers; general relativity, 1915; the Nobel Prize of 1921, awarded "for the photoelectric effect," relativity being thought, by the committee, insufficiently settled.
2. ^ On the aether and its dispensation, see luminiferous aether and the Michelson–Morley experiment. Einstein's 1905 paper calls the aether "superfluous."
3. ^ Einstein, "Ether and the Theory of Relativity" (Leiden, 1920). The "new aether" is general-relativistic spacetime, which has no state of motion and is not the medium the Concord meant; the conflation is the reader's, not Einstein's.
4. ^ On the Lorentz transformations and Poincaré's contributions, and the priority dispute, the historical consensus credits Einstein with the decisive physical interpretation. The dispute is real; the plagiarism is not.
5. ^ On the 1921 episode: Einstein's "Subtle is the Lord" remark to Oscar Veblen at Princeton, occasioned by news of Dayton Miller's ether-drift result, and his visit to Miller in Cleveland on 25 May 1921. The drift was attributed to temperature by Shankland et al., 1955.

External links

• "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" (1905) — Einstein's special-relativity paper, in English translation
• Nobel Prize in Physics 1921 — the official record — awarded for the photoelectric effect