The American Spectator

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Einstein's Revolution, and Counterrevolution

By Tom Bethell on 6.21.07 @ 12:06AM

(Page 3 of 3)

Einstein's position on the quantum was so mild that it surely has to be vindicated. The theory was "incomplete," he said. I believe also that in holding out, almost alone, against a powerful consensus Einstein was doing exactly what scientists are supposed to do but usually lack the courage to do.

Here's something else. Edwin T. Jaynes, one of the dissenters cited by Carver Mead, said that when he studied physics at Berkeley in 1947, his thesis director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, would never countenance any retreat from the Copenhagen position, and derived "some great emotional satisfaction from just those elements of mysticism that Schrodinger and Einstein had deplored." Enthusiasm for that blend of mysticism and science survives to this day.

AS FOR THE NEW ETHER, Robert B. Laughlin, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in physics, discusses it in his book A Different Universe (2005). He notes the irony that Einstein's most creative work, his general theory of relativity, "should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise was that no such medium existed." The modern conception of the vacuum of space, he writes, "is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it that because it is taboo."

How Einstein came to conclude that space was a medium "is a fascinating story," Laughlin continues, but he does not tell it. It has been told (in part) in Ludwik Kostro's Einstein and the Ether, issued by a dissident publisher in Montreal, and not listed in Isaacson's bibliography. The topic needs a fuller treatment.

As for general relativity, it seems to give the right results, but by an extraordinarily complicated method. It is like Ptolemaic astronomy. You could navigate by it, but there was a simpler way. As the late Edward Teller said to me in an interview, who can understand the curvature of four-dimensional spacetime? Petr Beckmann, who taught at the University of Colorado, proposed a great simplification of Einstein's relativity by replacing the old ether of Lorentz and Maxwell with one that is equivalent to the local gravitational field. And unless I am much mistaken, that is precisely Einstein's new ether. Yet I believe Beckmann did not know about Einstein's adoption of this same idea.

If relativity theory ever is replaced, Einstein himself will have pointed us in the most promising new direction. Meanwhile, we can all learn a great deal from Isaacson's excellent book.

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