One of his motivations in studying the thermodynamics of electromagnetic radiation was to rebut the statistical theories of Boltzmann. In fact, he was looking for the opposite. In his research, he was responding to a theoretical challenge issued by Kirchhoff many years ago in 1860 to find the function of temperature and wavelength that described and explained the observed spectrum of radiating bodies. He was an establishment man, in the stolid German tradition, who was already embedded in his career, in his forties, holding a coveted faculty position at the University of Berlin. In histories of the development of quantum theory, the German physicist Max Planck (1858-1947) is characterized as an unlikely revolutionary. In this single statement, we have the father of the quantum being criticized by the father of the quantum discontinuity. That he may sometimes have missed the target of his speculations, as for example, in his hypothesis of light quanta, cannot really be held against him. It even came up when Planck was nominating Einstein for membership in the German Academy of Science. For ten years after this proposal, it was considered by almost everyone to be his greatest blunder. This was the case when he proposed the real existence of the photon-the quantum particle of light. Yet there is a third thread in Einstein’s work that relies on pure intuition-neither simple nor complicated-but almost impossible to grasp how he made his leap. On the other hand, parts of his work-like gravitation-are so embroiled in mathematics and the religion of general covariance that it remains opaque to physics neophytes 100 years later and is usually reserved for graduate study. Einstein did, and his special relativity was simple and beautiful, and the math is just high-school algebra. Lorentz and Poincaré spring to mind-they had been circling the ideas of spacetime for decades-but never stepped back to see what the simplest explanation could be. Some of his work was so simple that it is hard to understand why no-one else did it first, even when they were right in the middle of it. He was complex, multifaceted, contradictory, revolutionary as well as conservative. Albert Einstein defies condensation-it is impossible to condense his approach, his insight, his motivation-into a single word like “genius”.
0 kommentar(er)
