 |
||||||||||||||
By Walter Isaacson
Sometimes when I tell people I've written a biography of Albert Einstein, they snap their heads as if to say they've never understood science. They may feel that the Founding Fathers are easily comprehensible, and even so is Shakespeare (which he isn't), but that Einstein is completely intimidating.
Einstein has come to personify the perception that modern physics is something ordinary folks can't try to appreciate. Indeed, scientific illiteracy is sometimes worn as a badge of pride. Most educated people would be ashamed to admit they didn't know the difference between Hamlet and King Lear, but they might jovially brag that they don't know a gene from a chromosome or relativity theory from the uncertainty principle. We are now engaged in one of our periodic spasms of trying to make sure that our kids learn science and math. Congress this year is expected to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind law, and fear that we will lose our ability to compete globally has prompted Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader in the Senate, to join with his Republican counterpart, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, to co-sponsor something called the "America COMPETES Act," which would fund proposals including a science policy summit, new research projects, summer internships and prize programs for high school students, and teacher training programs. 'Intimidating' fields None of these education endeavors, however, will truly change things unless we revise the way we view science. Many non-scientists, and I dare say most of our politicians, are complacent about understanding and celebrating science themselves. To the extent that we portray math and science as intimidating, we are less likely to view it as a creative and imaginative pursuit, no less so than poetry and music. Einstein was actually a wonderfully visual, creative and imaginative thinker. He used vivid mental pictures that make his theories come alive. Time varies depending on your motion? The fabric of space is warped by massive objects? Gravity can bend light? Light is both a wave and a stream of particles? His theories contain a wondrous mix of Huh? and Wow! that can capture the public imagination. He devised most of them by using thought experiments — what we call daydreaming in folks who aren't an Einstein — and the pictures he visualized can be used, with no math necessary, to give a glimpse of the creativity at the heart of true genius. As a 16-year-old, for example, Einstein looked at James Maxwell's equations describing electromagnetic waves and tried to imagine what they'd look like to a boy riding alongside a light beam. If he caught up, the waves should appear stationary relative to him, but Maxwell's equations didn't allow for that. Einstein wandered around with sweating palms, anxious about this for months, he recalled, not the sort of thing that was causing most of us sweaty palms at 16. Ten years later, he solved the problem with another thought experiment, which can be described by imagining lightning striking both ends of a fast moving train. To a person watching from an embankment nearby, the strikes might seem simultaneous. But to a person in the train at the midpoint, the strike in front would seem to come first because he had moved in that direction a bit by the time the light from the strikes reached him. So people in different states of motion will have different views of simultaneity, and thus of time. For a boy trying to catch up with a light beam, Maxwell's equations would still hold true, but time would slow down. OK, it's not obvious, which is why he was Einstein and we aren't, but at least it's something we can visualize. Likewise, when he was trying to turn this special theory of relativity into a general theory that included accelerated motion, he used a thought experiment about being in an enclosed elevator. If it was in free fall, you'd feel weightless. If it was accelerating upward in deep space where there was no gravity, your feet would be pressed to the floor and a coin pulled from your pocket would drop in a way that was indistinguishable from the effects of gravity. From this he came up with a description of gravity that applied the theory of relativity to accelerated motion. What science teaches us A popular feel for science should, if possible, be restored given the needs of the 21st century. We should teach it as a creative endeavor, involving visual and imaginative thinking, rather than as the crunching of numbers and the memorization of laws. More broadly, we should embrace as a society an appreciation for the beauty and creativity of science. What science teaches us, very importantly, is the correlation between factual evidence and general theories, something well-illustrated in Einstein's life. Science also helps us remain in touch with that childlike capacity for wonder, about such ordinary things as falling apples and elevators, which characterizes Einstein and other great theorists. Walter Isaacson, the president of the Aspen Institute, is the author of Einstein: His Life and Universe. 
Conversation guidelines: USA TODAY welcomes your thoughts, stories and information related to this article.
Please stay on topic and be respectful of others. Keep the conversation appropriate for interested readers across the map.
|
||||||||||||||
|
| | |||||||||||||
