[MUSIC PLAYING]
DAVID BODANIS: When I
was planning this book,
I thought if I wrote a book
titled something like "Why
Einstein is Smarter
Than Us And We're
a Bunch of Dumb
Schmucks," we're not
very interested in
buying a book like that.
But if there is a book
about poor Einstein
had these terrible
problems and we
can feel superior and console
him, that's really good.
You feel that's a
pretty good day.
I'm helping my poor
little friend Einstein.
Everyone's interested in him.
I'm assuming many most of us
here know some what he did.
Just a reminder, aside
from minor things,
put it this way-- the theory
of relativity, E equals MC
squared, was so
small there was just
the beginning of
his-- he was so good,
he had two theories
of relativity.
So one in 1995 when he was 26.
Those of you who are
approaching 26, feel anxious.
You have like a countdown
to getting there.
If it's any consolation, you
can feel even more anxious
if you're younger.
There was a fellow I studied
with at the University
of Chicago when I was young and
he was old, and at one point,
this fellow was on a boat
going from India to England,
and he said, oh,
it's been so many
years that I've been striving,
and I'm such a failure.
I've accomplished nothing.
This is awful.
His name was Chandrasekhar.
The Chandra x-ray satellite
is named after him.
And he was 19 years old.
And in the midst
of his despair, he
came up with basically the
idea of black holes, which is
pretty impressive in the 1930s.
Anyway.
So Einstein at 25 did great
stuff-- special relativity.
At 35, he did greater
stuff-- General relativity.
If he hadn't done
special relativity,
Poincare, Lorenz, lots of
people would have done it.
If he hadn't done
general relativity,
we would still be
waiting for it.
Think about that in your field.
How many things, if a particular
organization disappears,
would not get done
by anybody else?
That's really rare
and really special.
He was very good.
He wasn't just good in
science, as you might imagine.
He was incredibly good
in practical technology.
One of his great inventions
that he was really proud of
and spent a lot of time on in
the 1920s was the refrigerator.
New, improved refrigerators.
Refrigerators in Berlin
leaked all the time.
And he didn't want
leaky refrigerators,
so he produced a wonderful
non-leaky Refrigerator.
There was a letter to
his great friend Max B
who also a Nobel
laureate and you wonder
what Nobel laureates discuss.
My refrigerator barely
leaks the new prototype
is even better than last time
next I'm down to 3.6% leak.
Yes.
Einstein was very excited.
In 1969, he needed to
take a break one weekend,
and he was thinking-- not
about refrigerators and not
about general relativity--
and casually he
came up with the key idea
behind the laser, which
is pretty impressive.
The first practical ones--
I think masers first,
microwaves-- were only
built 40 years later.
This organization would
not work very well
if there weren't
lasers zipping around
through fiber optics and stuff.
He also came up with the
photoelectric effect.
If you think about it, there is
light, which is kind of energy,
and there's electrons, which
are a certain substance.
And we take for granted
oh yeah, you know,
light heating metals
makes things happen.
We use it in our phone
cameras all the time.
How does that possibly happen?
How does light, which is energy
How does it make stuff move?
It's really impressive.
So he came up with that in 1905.
That wasn't even
his greatest work.
Anyways he was terrific.
But then the secret--
his greatest mistake--
it turned out he made a mistake,
a psychological mistake,
and it was catastrophic.
Even though he was world
famous and his mind was still
good in his '40s
and stuff and people
exactly his age were
staying on with good work,
he became shunned.
He was a laughingstock
in the physics community.
When he was at
Princeton, he was at what
outsiders call the Princeton
Institute for Advanced Studies.
Insiders called it the
Princeton Institute
for Advanced Salaries.
They had a lot of money to bring
good refugee scientists over.
And for 30 years there,
people would say, oh,
don't go near him.
It's going to
destroy your career.
Don't go near him.
He's a has been.
He's an archaic nothing.
And it really hurt his
feelings, because when
he was young and trendy-- before
the hair thing and stuff--
he was on top of the world.
Everybody came to him.
Einstein once said that people
think in two different ways.
A quiet quiz.
You can see which one is you.
He said they're either
tennis players or golfers.
Tennis players, they just
need ideas back and forth.
You only clarify it when
you talk with other people.
Golfers are the ones who--
often the neighbors when they're
interviewed by the
police and he seems such
a quiet and nice young man.
The golfers are the ones who
need to sit quietly and think
and cogitate don't disturb me.
They go to find a little
corner in a cafe and with that,
they come up with great ideas.
Well, it turns out Einstein
was actually a tennis player.
He wasn't a golfer
in that respect.
And to be isolated
from other people,
to have nobody
come to his office,
not have bright
grad students want
to work with him,
that was awful.
Awful.
So it turns out,
how did this happen?
Why did this terrible
thing happen?
And there's a curious
parallel with high tech.
So I'll start
talking about how you
see this on a large scale--
like a large display--
and then we'll zoom back
in and take a microscope
inside Einstein's brain.
So zoom out now a little bit.
And I want to talk about an
organization which many of you
will have heard of, and some
of you may have studied at.
The Cavendish lab in Cambridge.
In the early 1900s,
the Cavendish Lab
was around the size of the
floor of this building.
A little bit smaller than
the floor of this building.
It produced in a 20-year
period more Nobel prize winners
than all of France, all
of Japan, all of Italy
have ever done
combined, and those
are countries with terrific
educational backgrounds.
Think how could a place
about half the size
of this floor maybe
with some spill out labs
of the size of the floor
do something like that?
That's above and
beyond anything else.
And it wasn't just patronage.
It wasn't that they were
rigged on the Nobel Committee.
This was stunning work, the
foundations of modern science.
And it turns out there were
several things they did.
One thing was kind of small.
At 6:00 PM, they turned
off the electricity.
You could sit there, but
you were in the dark.
It meas you had to focus.
Sometimes if you have
to give a presentation,
it clears your head.
If you have to give a
presentation with 20 minutes
prep, it's not so good.
But if you have half a day
rather than three weeks,
you'll really focus
on that half day.
6:00 PM electricity
was really good.
They also help with visas.
Very, very useful.
But there are two
things that did
they were even better
at the Cavendish Lab.
And these later feedback.
You'll see them taking
place in Einstein's mind.
One is that they
made their own tools.
A long time ago, Air
France used to have
microphones in the
first class seats
from San Francisco to Paris.
The French government
under Mr. Mitterand,
they would listen in on the
secrets of Silicon Valley
and copy it.
Immediately, that's depressing.
Here's the other guys
who are terrific.
Let's see if we can
catch up with them.
Much better is to make your
own tools and be first.
Se who catches up with you.
There was a young guy
working at this Cavendish lab
from Germany.
A grad student.
He thought, we need a
better way to detect
little bits of radiation.
His name was Hans Geiger.
Thus the Geiger counter
named in his honor.
They had lots of
tools like that.
It was this
wonderful confidence.
That was good.
So 6:00 PM stops was good.
Making our own tools was good.
But the best of
all is the guy who
ran it was in New Zealand
farmer named rather Rutherford,
and he had a concept of what I
call a mid-level abstraction.
If you tell somebody
coming to a research lab,
let's be the best, it
doesn't really help you.
I mean, it applies
to Nike shoes.
It doesn't give
you anything help.
If you say to somebody coming
to a great research lab,
give him some very
detailed thing--
Phillips needs help
calibrating this microscope,
and we're doing an interesting
piece of work there--
that's fine.
It's great to help
Phillips, and you
can be really good
at microscopes,
but that's one thing.
It's too detailed.
What Rutherford did
at the Cavendish Lab
in the 1910s and 1920s
come up with what
is a mid-level abstraction.
He had one guiding principle,
which wasn't too abstract
and wasn't too particular.
He said, everybody
who to the lab--
you know we're going to do?
We're going to find out
what's inside the atom.
Nothing more, nothing less.
It's a perfect idea.
With that, everybody
understands what's going on,
everybody can share, but you're
not telling them what to do.
You give them a
real lot of freedom,
but they're still
pulling together.
Saint Exupery, the
French poet, once said,
love isn't looking
into each other's eyes.
It's looking together
in the same direction.
If you've ever been in
a poisonous organization
where people are pulling
in different directions.
You don't quite understand
what's going on.
You don't people
don't understand
why they should
work with each other
you'll know how
important that was.
Mid-level abstraction
was wonderful.
Second question.
So that's how you create
a great organization.
In this case, the greatest
research lab the world
has ever seen.
Second question, how
do they stay that way?
And the answer is
they usually don't.
They almost always fade
within about 20 years.
The Cavendish lab under
Rutherford was magnificent,
then after about the
mid-1920s, it faded away.
That approach didn't work.
The outside world was changing.
How to find what's inside
the atom with tools
you can make yourself in
Cambridge-- it stopped.
It was really upsetting.
So now occasionally,
companies can
keep on doing the same
thing for a real long time.
I worked for a while
with Shell Scenarios.
Shell has a very
simple principle.
It's not abstractly the best.
It's not incredibly
detailed do this one
arrangement with a rock.
It's extract oil using
really good engineers
and make clever political
arrangements with the companies
that supply it.
It's worked well for 120 years.
So that's fine.
That's a simple,
unchanging field.
If they can get into clean
energy well, I'd be surprised.
Pleasantly surprised,
but surprised.
So that's their abstraction.
Usually that doesn't work.
So Einstein's life, if
we go back to him now,
he sort of solves the problem
about how you can do better
than these companies, and he
also reveals a possible answer.
So like I said, it's going to
give a little microscope going
inside his brain.
So I'll talk a bit
about his creativity.
And his creativity was very
much like those big companies.
So one thing they did was the
thing pulling the plug at PM
from the electricity.
Einstein didn't have a
limitation with electricity.
They often say you
can do mathematics
and theoretical physics
with just the pencil, paper,
and a dust bin.
A waste basket.
Cynics will say you
can do philosophy
in exactly the same
way, but you don't need
the dustbin, which is kind of
Cruel.
Einstein himself loved
good philosophers.
Kant, at one point, had an image
of space-time diagrams, which
is really good in the 1770s.
Hume's notions about
causality and just looking
at what you observe where
than trying to understand
what's going on inside.
These are great
powerful notions.
So Einstein, the
equivalent of the 6:00 PM
stop-- he had terrible
problems in relationships.
After his best friend died
when they were both old men,
Einstein wrote the best
friend's family, Michele Besso
and said, I admired
your dad for me
a nice guy and a
sounding board, but what
I admired best was that he made
a relationship with one woman
work for his entire life,
something which I, sadly,
have failed in twice.
So Einstein had
spent a lot of time
moving from apartment to
apartment, flats to flat,
escaping from one
person, having an affair
with the wrong person,
going off to another one.
It really restricted his time.
Sometimes he was
writing in trains
because he couldn't
stay in any city.
So he had constraints
on his time.
For his tools, developing
your own tools,
he developed what's
now kind of standard.
He really developed tensors.
Those of you who aren't with a
technical background, scalars
are numbers and
stuff, and vectors
are a number with a
direction like an arrow,
and tensors just generalize
that a little bit more.
It's in the appendix
to the book.
So he developed that,
and he specially
developed interesting
ways of understanding
surfaces and stuff.
It was his own fresh tools,
which meant nobody else had it.
Imagine if you have a tool
which nobody else has.
There was an athlete
40, 50 years ago
who was a mid-level jumper.
He wasn't incredible, but he had
found a way-- I think was Dick.
Fosbury was his last name--
of jumping backwards.
This is the famous way
that high jumpers jump now.
When he had that
tool nobody else did,
he was great, even though he
wasn't a stunning athlete.
Once everybody else had
it, he had to fade away.
He wasn't that good.
Advantages to being first.
And then the other great
thing that Einstein
was good at his
mid-level abstraction.
That's a bit technical.
I get into it in the book.
It was a way how you
can view any physics
problem independent of
whoever's watching, whether I'm
jumping up and down, whether
I'm moving quickly or slowly.
How would things
seem if everybody
is able to view things,
and you can't tell
who has a special position.
It's kind of very
much a democracy.
I know it's kind of waffly
to say it like that,
so I have to go and leave
the details in the book.
But he had his unique tools,
he had pressures on time,
and he had a beautiful
mid-level abstraction.
He wasn't trying to solve a
particular physical problem
down here, nor was he saying
I'm going to be the best.
I'm going to achieve.
I'm going to create greatness.
And his abstractions were
very, very, very good.
Anyways, it turns
out at one point
he drew the mechanism
of how creativity
happens inside his own brain.
And those of you who read
German as well as I do,
which is not too well, will
not be following the German.
What I'm going to do
while this slide's up,
I'm going to draw something
like that roughly on the board.
So what Einstein said is down
here, things in the real world
events and stuff
that you look at,
and then we make
a creative jump,
a creative leap of the
imagination going up here.
And from this vantage
point, we see fresh things.
We're up here.
Remember, and this
is a mid-level thing.
It's not incredibly high.
It isn't I'm going to
survey the world like a god,
but it's not a detail
thing down here.
And from here, you
draw conclusions.
And if the
conclusions are right,
they match what's down there.
And then this jump up
has been correct, right?
Very simple form.
That was the sort of form.
And that's what he
said, how it works.
And from that perch,
you can see everything.
Anyways, it's a great idea,
and Einstein followed it
successfully for
quite a few years.
But then after about 20 years--
this happened so often--
he stopped following it.
I have time to tell you a little
bit of the story about how
he stopped following it.
The book is mostly about that.
It turns out in 1915, 1916,
100 years ago in the middle
of wartime Berlin he came
up with an equation that
describes the entire
shape of the universe.
As a rough example--
and again, apologies
to people who've done physics
at a high level-- as a very
rough image, imagine
that space is
like a flat trampoline
or a rubber sheet,
and if I take a little
ball bearing and flick it,
it will go in a straight line.
And if I flick in
some other way,
it will go in a straight line.
Those might be
something like planets.
You just flick him along.
You see the big
finger coming down
from south of King's Cross.
OK.
If you take a rock or a heavier
ball and put it in the middle
that sheet, it'll sag
down in that sheet.
And think of that as
the sun or something.
Then if I flick a ball
bearing, the ball bearing,
instead of going
straight-- it will
if it's far away-- if the
sheet's sagging down here,
the ball bearing
will veer around it
like in a billiards or
pool table and stuff.
Kind of makes sense.
Again, it's only a metaphor.
Here it's curving in space.
In fact, in reality it's
curving in space-time
it's a wonderful notion.
Force then becomes just
a distortion of space.
Geometry leads you along.
An example there is two people
walking to the North Pole.
You can start in different
points on the equator,
and you look at each other--
you're a few yards apart--
and you say, we're
going to stay parallel.
We're each going
to go due north.
But you realize that geometry
will force you together.
You'll see this person
coming closer and closer.
You'll say, you're
not going straight.
He'll say, the heck I am.
I'm going perfectly straight.
So what appears to be a force
come from the distortions
of geometry.
That's a two-dimensional surface
in our three-dimensional space.
Space-time is four-dimensional
so that's how it works.
Anyways, the details
are in the book.
That isn't what matters.
What matters is
Einstein came out
of it with a beautiful
equation g equals t.
Geometry creates
how things move,
and the structure
and shape of things,
which includes mass and
energy, will shape the geometry
around it.
The fact of a heavy
bowling ball will
sag the sheet of
space-time around it,
and the curvature of space-time
will show that there's
got to be something there.
You know, something
there behind it.
What a beautiful idea.
Among other things Einstein
worked out shortly afterwards,
in 1917, was that this
predicted that the universe was
expanding.
What an amazing idea.
And he went to his astronomer
of friends and said,
I've predicted the
universe is expanding.
These two simple
equations that seem
to reveal the truth
of the universe
explain the universe
is expanding.
And his astronomer friends,
in 1917, said, big mistake.
The data shows the opposite.
The universe is static.
The Milky Way galaxy is just
sitting here, kind of floating,
and beyond it is a void,
sort of like looking
to Donald Trump's mind.
There's just nothing there,
maybe some malicious entities
and a little bit of
sneering coming back at us.
That's it.
So Einstein had to
put in a modification
to his equation, the
famous lambda term.
And instead of this
beautiful symmetry,
where he thought not so much
that he detected the hand
of God-- he wasn't an atheist.
He wasn't a formal
religious believer.
He was anti-atheist.
He said, how could
you be so sure?
He was sort of in-between,
kind of like Spinoza,
if you interested in pantheism.
It's quite extraordinary.
There are subtle
structures there.
He didn't know why or
what they came from.
He once gave an image of humans
as being like a little boy
in a big library in the dark.
It's at night.
It's maybe foggy out.
And the walls of
the library, there's
all these bookshelves
around with books.
And in those books, are the
secrets of the universe.
They actually exist.
They've been specified
really clearly.
Very occasionally, the
brightest members of our species
can walk forward, go up to
one of the books, open it,
and you'll actually see it.
One line might say,
equals MC squared.
Wow.
Another might have the
tensor behind G equals T.
But then we usually have to
close it, go back, and retreat.
But we know it's there waiting.
Einstein loved that.
Newton had seen some things.
Einstein was lucky enough
to see some things.
Future generations could also.
It's a wonderful platonic dream.
Anyway, he felt bad that he had
to modify that simple G equals
T, but he said, OK, if the data
doesn't show that it's correct,
I'll have to modify.
So he made his equation
ugly for 10 years.
10 years later, Hubble in
California and other people
said, oy, did we get it wrong.
Oy, did we get it wrong.
I'm adding the "oy" they
probably didn't say "oy."
And they said the
universe is expanding.
They found this wonderful
evidence that it's expanding
and each part is expanding
from the other parts
at a terrific rate.
And Einstein was
so happy at that.
He said "I knew it.
I knew it all along."
Have any of you, here seen
"Galaxy Quest," the film?
Remember there's
this teenage boy
on Earth, who
believes that aliens
are speaking to him and stuff.
And nobody believes
him and stuff.
He says, oh, yeah.
I know.
It's just made up.
And then he actually sees them.
That's right.
He said, I knew it.
I knew all along.
It was actually true.
So that was Einstein
after 10 years.
He realized he should have
stuck to his original thing.
The experimental
evidence was agreed
on by all the astronomers in
the world, but they were wrong.
If he had just held
his nerve a bit longer,
he would have been proven right.
How cool is that?
Two simple forms.
Two simple tensors,
G equals T. Again,
I'm summarizing,
but basically, that.
That somebody came up with
in their head in Berlin
during World War I, predicted
that our local cluster
is expanding away from
other parts of the galaxy.
How utterly extraordinary
that advanced
primates can do
something like that.
It was wonderful.
So what Einstein did
here-- so he came up here.
So one of his
principles, there would
be say G equals T, and
the things he found there,
it showed that the
universe was expanding.
So I'll do like that.
It shows the universe
was expanding.
It also explained
how Mercury wobbled
as it went around the Sun.
Mercury's orbit wasn't
quite what you would think.
The curve down there by the Sun,
the decay of that trampoline
or rubber sheet was greater than
Newton would have predicted.
Mercury I believe is that.
So that was under there.
And he had all sorts
of predictions,
and they really held up.
And that was the
simple G equals T.
Anyway, so all that's good.
You think, OK, that's
a technical mistake.
He gave in.
He shouldn't have given in.
It's sort of like they
often say in business,
a reinforced victory,
a starved defeat.
But of course, when is victory?
You release a new product that's
not doing that well, maybe
market penetration is likely.
Give it a little bit
longer, it's really good.
A bit more ads, a bit
more improvements,
and tweaks, we have it.
At what point do you stop?
Einstein thought that
he'd stopped too soon.
Anyways, from this, he drew
a catastrophic conclusion.
He decided that whenever
you had to listen
to experimental
evidence, if you believe
that something clear and
simple had been found.
Right?
That those instructions that the
divinity or the divine forces,
or just the facts of
the universe had made,
he was kind of ambiguous on it.
That would have
to be super clear.
Those things you found in
the books in the library,
they had to be
really, really simple.
Quantum mechanics started
coming in around this time.
And Einstein had helped create
quantum mechanics in 1905,
but in the late 1920s, it
was getting even better.
The famous Heisenberg's
uncertainty principle,
things like that.
Einstein thought, well, this
is all very interesting.
The mathematics is
really good, and it's
a temporary epiphenomena.
Our equipment can't tell
exactly what's going on,
and of course, probability
is very useful.
His early work on the lasers
was exactly what probabilities
of electron transitions.
He said, that's fine.
Heisenberg at one point
was so excited by Einstein,
he went up, he
visited him in Berlin
and said, Professor
Einstein, I loved
the way you just used
observational evidence
without trying to wonder what
was happening backstage when
you came up with relativity.
That's what I did in
quantum mechanics.
Thank you.
Einstein looked at him.
That's not what I
meant at all, he said.
I didn't mean
anything like that.
He thought that it
was just provisional
if you didn't know the
details, eventually the details
would be clear and exact.
So Einstein couldn't
accept quantum mechanics.
And as evidence
came in, and there
became more and more evidence,
he wouldn't accept it.
Now, it turns out,
he couldn't do it.
So he was stuck up here.
This had worked
really, really well.
Applying for this.
Applying for that.
Why should you ever change it?
This is wonderful.
There is something here
that it didn't apply to.
Well, that was a temporary.
Remember, he had
been burned once
with the expense
of the universe.
Again, imagine you're
pushing a product,
and you pull back
on it too soon.
A competitor does it,
and it works perfectly.
Well, I knew it.
I should have just waited.
I have to ignore everybody's
comments against it and stuff.
There's times to really
stick to your guns.
Same thing in math.
Same thing in physics.
You're working on
a certain approach,
you don't get the right
answer, right away.
Oh, I'm nervous.
I have to jump back.
No, sometimes you have to stick.
The question is, how long.
How long?
Some people think
that, well, Einstein
faded in his 40's,
because in your 40s
your brain isn't as nimble
as it was at other times.
Those of you who are
anxious about not being
up to the Chandra level
at 19 or Einstein at 26,
remember, if you're really
quick at mental arithmetic,
that tends to peak
just before age 11.
And if you're good at
picking up languages
to get a perfect
accent, it is almost
impossible after the
late teens or early '20s.
Something changes in the brain.
You can become fluent,
very fluent in language
but the perfect accent
just gets harder.
So the question is,
is physics like that?
And the answer,
curiously, is no.
Chandrasekhar, that person
that I mentioned, one day,
and I think in the
early 1980s, his wife
elbowed him in the
ribs in Chicago.
She told me this later.
And she said
Chandrasekhar, wake up.
It's the Swedish Academy.
You have the Nobel Prize.
And he said, without
any arrogance,
he said, oh, for
which discovery?
He had about six or seven
that were worthy of the Nobel.
So he was doing great work
into his 60s, even into a 70s.
[? Raleigh ?] in
the 1800's did that.
So there's a number
of people who do that.
And in particular, Einstein's
best friend for a while
was Niels Bohr.
And Neils Bohr, the
great Danish Physicist
who apparently had
won a language which
was called bad English.
He could speak bad
English with every accent.
He could speak it
with a Danish accent.
He could speak with
a French accent.
Wherever he went, people
found that "I can't quite
get what you say."
Like that.
He would mumble.
He was a wonderful man.
And in his 60s, even in the 70s,
at his institute in Copenhagen,
bright, young, grad students
from around the world
wanted to work with him.
Einstein is famous for
saying "God does not
play dice with the universe."
Niels Bohr said to him,
once Niels Bohr had accepted
the evidence from
quantum mechanics,
once Niels Bohr had looked
down at these new things,
these quantum results, Niels
Bohr said to him, Einstein,
stop telling God what to do.
Looking at the universe.
Stop telling him.
So Niels Bohr had
actually moved over here.
This is G equals T, but
more importantly, it's
the notion that everything
should be exact.
I'll call that a
little right angle.
Everything should be exact.
Nils Bohr went over here and
he had a slightly different
abstract principle, which
accepted the principles
behind quantum mechanics.
That there's going to be a
certain fundamental probability
and as far as you go down in
the universe it isn't exact.
There's going to be
probability and uncertainty.
It isn't terrible.
Things are cusped and limited.
So things as they come to
the macro level are fine.
We can make transistors
work very, very well.
But within transistors,
these quantum effects
are taking place.
That's what happens.
So Niels Bohr had actually
managed to move over here.
And from here, he
comes very close.
So imagine this is something
that doesn't apply there,
but Niels Bohr thinks it
applies very, very well.
So he was able to move there.
Einstein couldn't.
The Cavendish lab,
remember I told you
the Cavendish Lab fell apart.
For 20 years, find out
what's inside the atom.
What's a perfect guiding light?
It's the sort of
thing if you've ever
been watching a video at home,
and somebody comes in and says,
oh, what's going on?
You give them a little
or you whisper something.
Or if it's "24" you're
saying, Jack Bauer
is almost about to get the
person and the rugs going
to be pulled out from
under him and he'll
have to get the person
a different way.
That can apply to any
"24" episode ever.
But often, you go into
a movie, and people
will whisper what's going on.
The great thing about these
mid-level abstractions
is you can whisper
to somebody and they
get all the knowledge
of the people
have already done the hard work.
How cool is that?
I can whisper to you
the rules of calculus.
You're smarter than Newton.
I can whisper, even in
a simple book like this,
a bit of general
relativity, you're
passed what Albert Einstein,
himself, did in his 30s.
It's really awesome.
The Cavendish lab,
they whispered
to people who were
really bright in physics,
let's look what's
inside the atom.
And immediately they have
a good research proposal.
Yes, so that's what they did,
but that faded after a while.
And then about 15 years
later, somebody else
took over the
Cavendish and said,
you know what would be a really
good mid-level abstraction?
Let's use x-rays
to study crystals.
How about crystals or proteins?
Yeah, let's use x-rays to
study protein crystals.
That was fabulous.
That's how DNA was
discovered, right?
It crystallized this beautifully
in the x-ray diffraction.
You can work backwards to find
the double helix structure.
Hemoglobin, it was magnificent
and they started out
with another burst
of Nobel Prizes
one after another
for about 20 years.
What happened next you'll
have to read elsewhere.
So one can do it.
Anyway, so I said we would
give the examples of science
and then go back to business,
about which I'm profoundly not
an expert, thus we can
have a discussion on that
or later, we can have a
discussion about the curios
about Einstein.
You can ask me about
his blue parakeet,
but I won't tell
you about that now.
So this diagram, which
Einstein was so proud of
and I showed you the picture of.
Supposed you change
it a little bit.
So down here, instead of
the expanding universe,
which is noticed or
Mercury which is noticed.
You have things like
something like there's
a big internet, right?
And then you go up
to there and say,
what's going to be
a really good way
to deal with a big internet?
There were companies
like Yahoo and stuff
that dealt with, I don't know,
they dealt with it in one way.
What if you have the notion
up here, not G equals T.
You're not doing tensors
and general relativity,
but you say, I know a
really good search system
plus maybe ads to monetize it.
That's going to be a
good way to deal with it.
So these things down
here are big internet.
Wow.
It applies to it really
well, and there's
all sorts of other
things that applies
to it really, really well.
Certain companies come to
mind that were very, very
good at that.
So isn't that neat?
So that same logical form.
There's data down there.
There's stuff in the real world.
You make a jump of
abstraction, which
isn't going to come from
anybody telling you.
You have to be exceptional,
like Rutherford at the Cavendish
lab, like Einstein in
1916 to come up to it.
And once you're up into it, also
ordinary people, ordinary skill
people, you put them in that
chair, they can do good stuff.
Captain Kirk is sitting
inside a wonderful Chair.
He could not create the
Starship Enterprise.
Any of us sitting in
that chair, including
Justin Long from
Galaxy Quest, will
be able to press buttons,
and shoot, and just do
all sorts of cool
stuff, if you're
in the right perch
and position, you
have magnificent power, right?
People can come into
a company like this
and when this matches
that, they don't
have to be the terrific
entrepreneurs or geniuses who
come up with this.
They just walk right in there.
Now, Neils Bohr was able to
walk across from this to that.
He was a very flexible man.
The thing is, not
everybody does.
So this worked really well.
So well, a company like
this, and again, this
is purely speculative, will a
company like this last forever?
Well, there's lots of new
stuff coming on down here.
So apps can be sometimes
hard to search.
That can be like
a walled garden.
There's concerns with privacy.
There's all sorts of
stuff like that going on.
There's notions of how do you
discover things that haven't
already been categorized.
Just lots of new stuff.
And then there's even
stranger things happening.
When this company,
here, was formed,
hipsters and [INAUDIBLE]
didn't exist. [INAUDIBLE]
was a terrible slum.
Brooklyn was a
place where people
went if they got divorced
and didn't have any money.
So there's people with a
slightly different culture,
maybe people who don't
like to own cars.
It's no longer cool to own cars.
It isn't part of
your definition.
A better definition
could be, I don't
know, having real life
experiences, live music
or genuine fitness,
or triathlons.
Something like that.
So new categories are coming up.
Very occasionally people from
here can change themselves,
but it usually doesn't work.
Remember, the Cavendish
lab had to jump over
to a different view.
They couldn't modify looking
what's inside the atom.
To go in there, they had
to have new people come in.
Rutherford died.
Max Planck, the
great physicist, once
said, "You never out argue your
opponents, you out live them."
And that's something.
So went over there.
Occasionally, a person
can make that move across
and move sideways.
So think of, again to
the extent, if search
is going to have
limits with some
of these other things over
here, new data bits on here,
suppose you have something else.
Alphabet.
Lots of things over here.
Quite different.
So there's a big structure.
Like that.
And then from there, you can
maybe apply to these things
better, you can apply to
those, and maybe, who knows
fresh things will come up.
We don't know.
Now the question is,
who fills those slots?
Who fills those slots?
Einstein went to
one slot up here
and he could not move across.
Neils Bohr said, come.
Come on.
It's different from
what you've learned.
Come on.
Yes, you were really great
at university doing this.
Yes, you were terrific
coming up with these tools
and these tensors, come over
here and use this new stuff.
You'll come up
with great things.
And the sadness, the pathos,
is that Einstein's mind
was up to it.
As an older man, he
said, one implication
of this quantum mechanics,
if it were to be true,
is quantum entanglement.
That's almost impossible.
His mathematics
was exactly right.
This in 1935.
A century after that, I think
we'll have quite nice quantum
computers.
A bit specialized,
but doing well.
He came up with
gravitational lensing.
All of this is as an old man.
His brain was terrific, but he
just ventured there briefly,
and would go right back.
Oh, I've got to do
it this old way.
So very rarely, can
one move across.
Sometimes you have to
acquire brand new people.
That's why many
companies do well.
They have entire new groups,
either spun off or brought in
or something.
Occasionally, however,
magnificent people like,
Bork can go up and work
across themselves and step,
step by step into these
different things, which will
have those fresh implications.
So I leave you with a
question, are we Niels Bohr,
or are we Albert Einstein?
And after reading this
book you'll think,
gosh, I used to think
Einstein was terrific,
but now I don't want
to be like him at all.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER: Thank you very much
we have time for questions
so please wait for a microphone.
AUDIENCE: So Einstein created
Schrodinger's cat, didn't he?
DAVID BODANIS: Yes.
AUDIENCE: So that was basically
saying quantum physics is
ridiculous, right?
DAVID BODANIS: I don't
want to ask hands up
of people who don't know
about Schrodinger's cat
so I'll give a background.
One conclusion, I would
say, is that if a man named
Schrodinger, if you were
transformed into a cat,
like you stepped
out of the internet,
and, oh, I'm a cat
and stuff, and there's
these strange people
around, and a man
named Schrodinger comes
up to you smiling says,
would you like to
go home with me?
The answer is, no,
under no circumstances.
It's not a good idea.
Schrodinger was a man
that Einstein really loved
because of his personal life.
Schrodinger's wife
used to reward him
when he had great results.
She would introduce him
to really nice twins
to go off to the
mountain with and stuff.
They said about Schrodinger when
he came to Oxford in the 1930s,
"To arrive at Oxford with
one wife is bad enough,
to arrive with two,
really excessive."
So Schrodinger
had this wild sort
of bohemian life,
which Einstein liked.
That's one reason Einstein
grew his hair like that.
When he was young, he was
actually kind of dishy.
He was a good looking guy.
When he was rowing, people said,
whoa, really muscly and stuff.
And he would sail
and row and stuff.
But later in bourgeois
Berlin in the 1920s,
he wanted to fight
that to say, you
don't have to line up
and be exactly like that.
His second wife was
incredibly particular.
Albert, I don't think
that's quite the right way
to hold our forks.
That sort of thing.
So we did the hair as
some sort of resistance.
So he liked Schrodinger,
and the two men
were really good friends.
And they collaborated in
the mid-1930s by letter.
Schrodinger had gotten a job
in Dublin, of all places.
It turns out, the guy who ran
Ireland at the time, de Valera,
had studied mathematics.
So he respected Schrodinger.
And in their correspondence,
they came up with this notion.
It turns out very
often, people come up
with a notion to
disprove a theory,
and that notion is really good.
And the reason is, we
don't like humiliation.
We don't like fear.
A friend of mine was a very
successful TV and film writer
and producer.
And he was really good.
Then when he got a lot of money,
he sort of lost his creativity.
And he tried all sorts of ways
to get his creativity back.
He tried working with bright
young people, going to museums,
working in different fields.
None of it worked.
And then his business
partner ripped him off.
And boy, was he motivated.
He started writing
terrific stuff.
So Einstein still
disliked the fact
he'd been pushed to the side.
So that brought
up his creativity
to a real high level.
If you're fired from a
company, you want to show them.
You're full of energy.
You have to show them.
So he came up with,
in correspondence,
with Schrodinger.
Schrodinger was
involved a little bit
with this notion of
Heisenberg's cat,
that if there's no
way, whatsoever,
to predict if a
certain particles
going to decay this
way or decay that way,
then the following
curious effect happens.
And sorry, suppose you
can't predict which way it's
going to go, and will you
only know or will it only
happen once you look at it?
Suppose that particles
inside a box.
Suppose the poor cat
is inside the box.
Suppose a large gun.
You see the viciousness of quiet
often vegetarian physicist.
They're like, should the
gun have impaling hooks?
Should there be a little
trapdoor underneath?
And suppose, if the particle
decays and goes this way,
nothing happens.
The cat walks around.
If the particle decays
and goes that way,
a big gun blasts it
to smithereens, right?
In a standard interpretation
of quantum mechanics,
not only do you not
only know until you
open the box which way
the particles decayed,
it hasn't happened.
It's ambiguous until
you open it and look,
that the actual observation
helps create it.
Einstein thought
that was insane.
But yet, a lot of
evidence, again, I'm
being metaphorical about it, a
lot of evidence backed it up.
The question, of
course, is Einstein
said, well, in that case,
is the cat alive or dead
before you open the box, right?
We don't know which
way the particle went
and if the trigger
was pulled or not.
So is the cat alive or dead?
And clearly it can't be in a
superposition of two states,
half dead and half alive.
On the other hand, if
any of you have ever
taken the northern line in
London at about 8:00 AM,
you understand,
many people can be
in that superposition
of two states,
half dead and half alive.
And they came up
with that notion
to sort of disprove
quantum mechanics.
And people like Niels Bohr
and other bright young people
working with him
thought, good point.
Good point.
Yep, there's a
superposition of states
until the observation
takes place
and that has certain
consequences.
And low and behold,
those consequences
were used by John
Bardeen, who was
working at Princeton at the
time, to develop transistor.
It's actually true.
How curious is that?
Einstein wouldn't step
sideways to accept it
because he had
been so comfortable
in that previous position.
I have a little
addendum to the answer,
but I'm going to stop
giving really long answers.
If there's time, Just remind me
about the playing card problem.
But I'd like to have some
more questions first.
SPEAKER: Who has questions?
Any questions?
DAVID BODANIS: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
DAVID BODANIS: So the
question is, how much of it
was maybe not necessarily
religious but, just
came from simple aesthetics?
Beauty rather than
ugliness and crudest.
The answer is a real lot.
The possibilities are related.
Einstein believed in the need
for architectural simplicity
a little bit because
of his religious views.
Einstein was once interviewed
what he felt about music.
And he was like the boss,
you can never please.
People said, Mendelssohn, what
do you think about Mendelssohn?
He'd say, oh, Mendelssohn is
wonderful with beautiful lyric
tunes, but he lacks a
certain architectural whole.
What about Schumann?
Oh, Schumann.
I really feel for
Schumann, but it's not
incredibly pure and right.
What about Beethoven?
Beethoven is terrific.
It's emotional it's powerful,
but it's a little bit
arbitrary.
Aren't those emotions harbored?
The one he loved
wasn't even Bach.
He loved Mozart, because Mozart
is not just the surprise.
That the thing with
Mozart is what comes next
is unexpected, but plausible.
How cool is that?
Unexpected but plausible.
It's like a really,
really good thriller,
but often it felt true.
It wasn't just a little game.
You feel that a little
barrier has been removed
and you're seeing the
truth of the universe
and bits of Mozart, at least for
Einstein and sometimes for me.
Can I just say as a footnote,
Mozart's "Clarinet Concerto,"
which I once listened to when
I was in the south of France
and had two recordings
for about a week,
I can never hear that
again in my life.
People tell me it's
beautiful, but please
don't play it in my presence.
But as for the aesthetics,
that would be it.
And when Einstein was
dissatisfied and unhappy,
when he was young he
played the violin.
He played really well,
but when he was older
his fingers got a little bit
arthritic, and what he loved
was just noodling
away on the piano.
He would noodle for hours and
hours on hours, and Berlin,
and Princeton, a
little bit of jazz,
a little bit of classical,
all sorts of stuff.
Aesthetics meant
everything to him
because he felt they were signs
of something very, very true.
And it drove him into isolation.
How sad is that?
Next
SPEAKER: Questions.
DAVID BODANIS: Great question.
So out of all the mistakes,
what was the worst,
the most fundamental mistake.
And many people think the
mistake was modifying the G
equals T equation.
Again, that's just a
metaphor, modifying and adding
extra terms, but
that was a mistake,
but it's a mistake that anybody
can make and then fix it.
Oh, I see.
I was wrong.
And you go back with
the same attitude
that he had when he was young.
That you would climb up
here, which is beautiful,
but then you would check things
against the consequences.
And if ugly facts
really got in the way,
you would have to change
this, however beautiful
it was going up.
So I think his mistake
wasn't the scientific mistake
about the lambda,
the extra term,
anybody could have done that.
The mistake was
diving in and saying
it was a psychological mistake.
I've been burned once.
I'm never going to be
burned again, right?
Tony Blair had a
possibility early
in his a tenure
as prime minister
to help NATO forces go into
Kosovo, and a lot of people
said, don't do that.
It's imperialism.
It's not going to work.
It's really messy on the ground.
He ignored them.
He went into Kosovo, and on
the whole it worked quite well.
A few years later he
wanted to go into Iraq.
People said, don't go into Iraq.
You're going to mess things up.
It's a hornet's nest,
everything will get worse.
And he said, they said that
before, and I was right.
I stuck to my guns I'm going
to stick my guns again.
And in fact, he was
wrong the second time.
So that was Einstein's
problem, that second mistake.
Now it happens a lot to people
who are at the top level,
because they were so
successful before.
If I have like a plausible
hypothesis, and then
its proven wrong, and then
it's later proven right,
that's nice but it's just
a plausible hypothesis,
but if I come up with
general relativity, wow,
and that's finally proven right
again, I'm really not cocky,
but I'm very confident
in my beliefs.
I'm speaking for myself.
I feel I've been able
to find something
true about the universe.
The people who hustle really,
really hard to get to the top
usually have one stick
one special approach
that really, really
works, and they
have to push hard to get it.
And it's often a
magical approach
it almost never happens twice.
Lester Thurow, the guy at MIT,
who cruelly has been described
as less than thorough,
which is mean,
pointed out that hardly
anybody who creates a company,
creates two different
companies, ever.
Occasionally there's
people who do it.
That idea, unfortunately,
came to me as a teenager.
I read his book,
and it bothered me
so much that the first time I
had a bestseller, I thought,
yeah, well.
But I had a second
one, 10 years later.
I said, yes, Lester.
Yes, we can do it.
We can do a separate thing.
First time could be luck.
Second time OK, one knows
how to do this stuff.
AUDIENCE: SoI have a question.
DAVID BODANIS: I'm amazed at
what human beings could do,
and also ordinary human beings.
I grew up in an ordinary
Jewish family in Chicago
after World War II, and many
people in the neighborhood
would have a picture of
Einstein up on refrigerator
or an encyclopedia about
this thing of Einstein,
and I thought this is
a noble and good man.
I feel some connection with him,
but I had no idea what he did.
I had no idea.
Some people, I don't know
if they invent a computer,
or they invent a car,
or a particular device,
or an airplane, it's beautiful.
But when I was a
little child, I didn't
know what Einstein had done.
At university I learned
about it and I was amazed.
It was sort of like listening
to Mozart for the first time
or in my case Mozart especially
the "Clarinet Concerto,"
but like a good
blues or something.
You listen to it and feels
this is really true, sort of
like on a really good date.
On a mediocre date, you
tell your cute stories.
They tell their cute stories,
but on a really good day
you're just connected.
You're just directly connected.
There's no artifice from
top to bottom stuff.
So when I was learning
about Einstein,
I thought, wow, he cuts
through in the universe.
He saw what's really there.
This notion of geometry
inducing the sensation of force
as with people going
to the North Pole
and feeling it pull together
or the gravity coming
that way, that's incredible.
So I really wanted to
share it, and then I
wanted to find out
how did he do it.
I mean what, sort of man was he?
What was his background?
One thing that helps in
a background like that,
is to be not a total outsider,
if you're a total outsider,
you don't have enough
education, but not
to be a total insider either.
It helps to be sort
of on the edge.
Moderate discrimination works
really, really well in science
and in business very much.
Total discrimination, they
don't give you a chance.
Moderate discrimination,
you know two things.
A You have to work
a little bit harder
and B what you learned
before about the system
isn't necessarily true.
Suppose somebody grows up
say an extremely religious,
fundamentalist, religious view.
As a kid, they're taught
to say that the world is
based on turtles and it's
turtles all the way down.
They go to university,
and the people there
who teach astronomy
say, that's nonsense.
It's not like that at all.
Here, I'm going to teach
you the latest results.
This is what we know
is totally true.
The person might think,
maybe, but maybe not.
What my mother
taught me was wrong.
Maybe what I learned
from you, may be that,
not necessarily as wrong
as that previous thing,
but I'll be a
little bit cynical.
Compare that to somebody who
was, say a professor's kid,
they grew up learning
the latest results,
in a simplified version.
These nice books you buy for
your kids when you feel guilty
and you're watching Jack
Bauer save the day again.
And then when they
go to university
and it's more of the same.
They have no reason to be
really, really critical.
So Einstein was
enough of an outsider
to be critical, but not so
much that he had no training.
SPEAKER: Time for
more questions.
DAVID BODANIS: Yeah, so how did
he hold onto his skepticism?
I suppose he held up to it,
well a couple of reasons.
One, he had seen that large
groups of people can be wrong.
All the astronomers in
the world, everybody
whether they were very
theoretical or very practical.
they all were persuaded
that the universe
was static for 10 years
or eight years and stuff.
And it's like,
they've been wrong.
They've been wrong once.
What if they've been
wrong for 20 or 30 years?
There were certain results.
The ability to measure
things in the universe
was very difficult. To measure
absolute distances is hard.
We know that if we know the
absolute brightness of a car
headlight at a certain distance
what we perceive of it,
it is going to be high or
low, and then the intensity,
and then we can work out
from an absolute magnitude
how far away it is.
So it took a long time
until astronomers,
a woman named Henrietta
Leavitt in Boston,
who managed to find
a way of measuring
the distance to nearest
galaxies and that
allowed us to get a proper
yardstick for the universe.
So suppose Henrietta
Leavitt hadn't done
that, 50 years may have passed.
Einstein knew he was lucky.
It only was 10 years.
So it could have been past his
death, past his whole lifetime
that people thought the
universe was static and low
and behold it was not static.
You know the greatest authority.
So that was one.
The other thing is,
in the 1920s and '30s
he saw entire countries go mad.
As countries go mad and nuts.
In 1933, many books were
burned in Germany in public,
including in the greatest
university town everywhere,
in the world, then
it was [INAUDIBLE].
It'd be like, could you imagine
if at Cambridge and, MIT and,
all those places, they start
burning books with enthusiasm
from the students,
and Einstein's books
for some of those that
was there were burnt.
It was non-Aryan physics.
It was terrible.
So he knew, hey, entire
organizations can go nuts.
I just have to be
quiet and wait it out.
But he was wrong.
SPEAKER: There's no
more questions, then
I think we can finish here.
Thanks again, David Bodanis.
DAVID BODANIS: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
