Einstein

Einstein soon acquired an image, which grew into a near legend but was nevertheless based on reality, of being a kindly and gentle professor, distracted at times but unfaingly sweet, who wandered about lost in thought, helped children with their homework, and rarely combed his hair or wore socks.

El viaje era esta vez por placer. Unas breves vacaciones en la playa, algo que cada vez aprecio más. En el aeropuerto, en una tienda de conveniencia repleta de viajeros aturdidos y estantes repletos de un poco de cada cosa, encontré una oferta de "2 x 1". De ahí salió esta biografía de Einstein.

Al poco de comenzar a leerlo me asalta una sensación: a esta biografía le falta algo; justamente éso que distingue a trabajos como la biografía de Hitler de Ian Kershaw o la del "Ché" Guevara de Jon Lee Anderson; no encuentro a la persona detrás del personaje. Isaacson conduce al lector desde un principio a lo largo de una serie de documentos personales -principalmente cartas- y juicios de otros historiadores de la ciencia que nos ofrecen una reconstrucción superficial de la persona y su época a cambio de explicar didácticamente cómo se desarrolló la labor científica de Einstein.

For both the sake of colorful history and the emotional resonance it would have, it would be fun if we could go even further than this. But instead, we must follow the less exciting course of being confined to the evidence.

Son destacables unos pocos capítulos en los que nos explica cómo se fraguaron las teorías de Einstein y la controversia que provocaron dentro y fuera del ámbito científico. Es precisamente en esos capítulos en los que Isaacson utiliza recortes de prensa donde más se parece el libro a una crónica periodística que prima más la exactitud de los datos que la especulación.

Como introducción a la historia de la teoría de la Relatividad el libro resulta muy adecuado. Si uno quiere entender al personaje, a la persona, a una época, entonces se queda corto. Se pueden espigar pasajes en los que se muestra claramente la manera en la que Einstein afrontaba los problemas científicos y filosóficos:

Einstein's discovery of special relativity involved an intuition based on a decade of intellectual as well as personal experiences. The most important and obvious, I think, was his deep understanding and knowledge of theoretical physics. He was also helped by his ability to visualize thought experiments, which had been encouraged by his education in Aarau. Also, there was his grounding in philosophy: from Hume and Mach he had developed a skepticism about things that could not be observed. And this skepticism was enhanced by his innate rebellious tendency to question authority.

[...] Einstein approach to general relativity again showed how his mind tended to work:

- He was disquieted when there were two seemingly unrelated theories for the same observable phenomenon. That had been the case with the moving coil or moving magnet producing the same observable electric current, which he resolved with the special theory of relativity. Now it was the case with the differing definitions of inertial mass and gravitational mass, which he began to resolve by building on the equivalence principle.

- He was likewise uncomfortable when a theory made distinctions that could not be observed in nature. That had ben the case with observers in uniform motion: there was no way of determining who was at rest and who was in motion. Now it was also, apparently, the case for observers in accelerated motion: there was no way of telling who was accelerating and who was in a gravitational field.

- He was eager to generalize theories rather than settling for having them restricted to a special case. There should not, he felt, be one set of principles for the special case of constant-velocity motion and a different set for all other types of motion. His life was a constant quest for unifying theories.

[...]

[The] belief in casual determinism, which was inherent in Einstein's scientific outlook, conflicted not only with the concept of a personal God. It was also, at least in Einstein's mind, incompatible with human free will. Although he was a deeply moral man, his belief in strict determinism made it difficult for him to accept the idea of moral choice and individual responsibility that is at the heart of most ethical systems. [...] This attitude appalled some friends, such as Max Born, who thought it completely undermined the foundations of human morality. [...] For Bon, quantum uncertainty provided an escape from this dilemma. Like some philosophers of the time, he latched on to the indeterminacy that was inherent in quantum mechanics to resolve "the discrepancy between ethical freedom and strict natural laws". Einstein conceded that quantum mechanics called into question strict dterminism, but he told Born he still believed in it, both in the realm of personal actions and physics.

[...]

Over the years, Einstein had increasingly come to embrace the concept of realism, the belief that there is, as he put it, "a real factual situation" that exists "independent of our observations". This belief was one aspect of his discomfort with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and other tenets of quantum mechanics that assert that observations determine realities.

De todos modos, si uno consulta el artículo de Wikipedia.org (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_einstein ó http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein en español) el lector puede encontrar casi la misma información que el libro proporciona sobre Einstein y su universo:

"He is best known for his theory of relativity and specifically mass-energy equivalence, E = mc2. Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.

"Einstein's many contributions to physics include his special theory of relativity, which reconciled mechanics with electromagnetism, and his general theory of relativity which extended the principle of relativity to non-uniform motion, creating a new theory of gravitation. His other contributions include relativistic cosmology, capillary action, critical opalescence, classical problems of statistical mechanics and their application to quantum theory, an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules, atomic transition probabilities, the quantum theory of a monatomic gas, thermal properties of light with low radiation density (which laid the foundation for the photon theory), a theory of radiation including stimulated emission, the conception of a unified field theory, and the geometrization of physics."

El libro de Isaacson va tomando intensidad a medida que avanza a ritmo de descubrimientos en física teórica, controversias y problemas privados, aunque los capítulos finales decepcionan en la medida en que nos narra el devenir vital del personaje como si se tratara de una crónica periodística. Tanto es así que las consideraciones personales tan sólo se muestran cuando hay una evidencia documental, lo cual carece también de sentido si no se realiza un análisis crítico.

Ahí van algunos ejemplos. En una carta Einstein indicaba claramente que:

"One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness [...] Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience".

The stubborn patience that Einstein displayed when dealing with scientific problems was equaled by his impatience when dealing with personal entanglements.

[citando al historiador Thomas Levenson] "He had no gift for empathy, no ability to imagine himself into the emotional life of anyone else". When confronted with the emotional needs of others, Einstein tended to retreat into the objetivity of his science.

Siguiendo una opinión de su hijo adoptivo:

"Socialism to him reflects the ethical desire to remove the appalling chasm between the classes and to produce a more just economica system. [...] And yet he cannot accept a socialist program. He appreciates the adventure of solitude and the happiness of freedom too much to welcome a system that threatens completely to eliminate the individual".

[...]

Einstein's response to adulation was as complex as that of the cosmos to gravity. He was attracted and repelled by the cameras, loved publicity and loved to complain about it. His love-hate relationship with fame and reporters might seem unusual until one reflects on how similar it was to the mix of enjoyment, amusemsent, aversion, and annoyance that so many other famous people have felt.

One reason that Einstein -unlike Planck or Lorentz or Bohr- became such an icon was because he lloked the part and because he could, and would, play the role. "Scientists who become icons must not only be geniuses but also performers, playing to the crowd and enjoying public acclaim" [según Freeman Dyson]. [...] Einstein performed. He gave interviews readily, peppered them with delightful aphorisms, and knew exactly what made for a good story.

El libro me ha aburrido (sobre todo al final) pero, éso sí, ha reverdecido el entusiasmo que experimento cada vez que me enfrento a cuestiones de física o de matemáticas.

Me quedo, éso sí, con una metáfora muy elegante. Cuando fue preguntado si creía en Dios lanza esta metáfora:

"[...] We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws."