I was watching some NOVA reruns on PBS the other day, and I finally saw “The Elegant Universe”. That was a very nicely done series. Brian Greene really whets your appetite for superstring theory – he’s a very entertaining physicist. Of course, this is another popular presentation of what really is way beyond intuitive sense and everyday thinking. The only way you can really understand what superstrings are all about is to invest around 10 years of your life studying complex mathematics. Forget about tangible and emotional things, just totally soak your mind in Kahler manifolds and holomorphic functions and antisymmetric tensor fields and deRahm cohomology. And at some point, “M-theory” and 11 dimensional topology and 6-branes will make perfect sense to you.
And hey, if I were still 20 years old, I’d be awfully tempted to do just that. But it’s way too late for me; I can’t even hack vector multiplication or partial differentials anymore. So, I’m content to sit with the masses on the sidelines and listen to the high-brainpower people (like Dr. Greene) condescend by telling us something about what they’ve learned regarding the universe. But hey, I had a brief taste of the mathematical side of quantum mechanics and general relativity when I was in college, so I know just a little about what it feels to live within those huge mathematical abstractions. Actually, it’s kind of neat. Now I look back on those days and wonder why I didn’t become a physicist.
The Elegant Universe made a really interesting point about Albert Einstein and modern physics, a point that I’ve never heard anywhere else. Greene and some of the other physicists on the show said that during the last 10 or even 20 years of Einsteins life, his work was becoming increasingly outdated and irrelevant to physics. In the 1910s and 1920s, he rocked the world with general and special relativity. But by 1945, his approach to theoretical physics, of one man with a pad and pencil, just wasn’t hacking it anymore.
Einstein could never get himself straight with quantum theory, which stole the show from him by the 30’s. And quantum theory really has no “Einstein”. When you read the history of quantum mechanics, you read about Bohr and Pauli and Schrodinger and Heisenburg and other various people. There was no one guy who figured it all out. The quantum viewpoint accumulated over time based upon cross-pollination from a group of smart cookies. And that’s arguably what’s happening today with string theory. Sure, there’s Edward Witten, but he didn’t get the ball rolling, and despite his many breakthroughs, he doesn’t own the superstring picture like Einstein did with gravity and relativity.
It looks like the days of great physics revolutions caused by one person are over. Some people wonder who is “the next Einstein” and argue whether Hawking or someone else deserves the title. But the bottom line is that physics has changed drastically. There will still be extremely bright physicists, but the pictures that physics paint these days are way too big and complex for any one mind to own, even with the caliber of a Newton or an Einstein. From now on, it’s all going to be group effort.
It sort of makes me feel sorry for Albert Einstein. The poor guy just kept pushing the same buttons that shot him to the top of the heap in his youth, but the machine had stopped working. I guess that when you reach your 50s (like me!), that sort of thing becomes rather common. Or, should I dare to say that perhaps Einstein wasn’t so smart after all? Perhaps the truly smart old dogs are the ones that can still learn a few new tricks?