“Conflicted Genius: A New Perspective on Einstein’s Science,” a free physics lecture given by A. Douglas Stone, Yale University, at 6:30 PM Thursday, August 7th in Paepcke Auditorium, behind the music tent. Albert Einstein achieved scientific fame and worldwide celebrity for his Theory of Relativity, which altered our concepts of time and space and founded the field of cosmology. However as radical as these ideas seemed at the time, they actually fit well into the Newtonian clockwork world-view in which all effects arise from prior causes in a deterministic manner. Just as Einstein was bringing “classical physics” to its culmination, he was engaged in the greatest scientific challenge of his era, the quest to understand the atom and the unseen forces that govern most physical phenomena on earth. Ultimately the success of this quest would demolish the elegant edifice of classical physics and the exquisitely sharp Newtonian photograph of nature would become blurred and uncertain. A new, quantum physics emerged in which the smooth flow of natural processes gave way to a world of sudden jumps and discontinuities. Einstein was at the very center of this profound revolution in physics, discovering many of its key concepts, such as wave-particle duality and uncaused atomic events. His key role is greatly underappreciated even by physicists, because when the modern form of the theory emerged in 1926, built on the foundation he had laid, he dismissed it as “only part of the truth” and refused to use it in his subsequent research. I will explore some of the revolutionary ideas in quantum physics that he first elucidated, and then ask the question: Why did the creator reject his own masterpiece?
Posted on: Wed, 06 Aug 2014 20:42:25 +0000
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