The Ascent of Man
In the evenings at the Café Bollwerk he would talk a little physics with his colleagues. He would smoke cigars and drink coffee. But he was a man who thought for himself. He went to the heart of the question, which is ‘How in fact do, not physicists but human beings, communicate with one another? What signals do we send from one to another? How do we reach knowledge?’
And that is the crux of all his papers, this unfolding of the heart of knowledge, almost petal by petal.
So the great paper of 1905 is not just about light or, as its title says, The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. It goes on in the same year to a postscript saying energy and mass are equivalent, E=mc2. To us, it is remarkable that the first account of relativity should instantly entail a practical and devastating prediction for atomic physics. To Einstein, it is simply a part of drawing the world together; like Newton and all scientific thinkers, he was in a deep sense a unitarian. That comes from a profound insight into the processes of nature herself, but particularly into the relations between man, knowledge, nature. Physics is not events but observations. Relativity is the understanding of the world not as events but as relations.
Einstein looked back to those years with pleasure. He said to my friend Leo Szilard many years after, ‘They were the happiest years of my life. Nobody expected me to lay golden eggs’. Of course, he did go on laying golden eggs: quantum effects, general relativity, field theory. With them came the confirmation of Einstein’s early work, and the harvest of his predictions. In 1915 he predicted, in the General Theory of Relativity, that the gravitational field near the sun would cause a glancing ray of light to bend inwards – like a distortion of space. Two expeditions sent by the Royal Society to Brazil and the west coast of Africa tested the prediction during the eclipse on 29 May 1919. To Arthur Eddington, who was in charge of the African expedition, his first measurement of the photographs taken there always stayed in his memory as the greatest moment in his life. Fellows of the Royal Society rushed the news to one another; Eddington by telegram to the mathematician Littlewood, and Littlewood in a hasty note to Bertrand Russell,
Dear Russell:
Einstein’s theory is completely confirmed. The predicted
displacement was 1"·72 and the observed 1"·75 ± ·o6.
Yours, J.E.L.
Relativity was a fact, in the special theory and the general. E=mc2 was confirmed in time, of course. Even the point about clocks running slow was singled out at last by an inexorable fate. In 1905 Einstein had written a slightly comic prescription for an ideal experiment to test it.
If there are two synchronised clocks at A and if one of these is moved along a closed curve with constant velocity v until it returns to A, which we suppose to take t seconds, then the latter clock on arriving at A will have lost ½t (v/c)2 seconds by comparison with the clock which has remained stationary. We conclude from this that a clock fixed at the Earth’s equator will run slower by a very small amount than an identical clock fixed at one of the Earth’s poles.
Einstein died in 1955, fifty years after the great 1905 paper. But by then one could measure time to a thousand millionth of a second. And therefore it was possible to look at that odd proposal to ‘think of two men on earth, one at the North Pole and one at the Equator. The one at the Equator is going round faster than the one at the North Pole; therefore his watch will lose’. And that is just how it turned out.
The experiment was done by a young man called H. J. Hay at Harwell. He imagined the earth squashed flat into a plate, so that the North Pole is at the centre and the equator runs round the rim. He put a radio-active clock on the rim and another at the centre of the plate and let it turn. The clocks measure time statistically by counting the number of radio-active atoms that decay. And sure enough, the clock at the rim of Hay’s plate keeps time more slowly than the clock at the centre. That goes on in every spinning plate, on every turntable. At this moment, in every revolving gramophone disc, the centre is ageing faster than the rim with every turn.
Einstein was the creator of a philosophical more than a mathematical system. He had a genius for finding philosophical ideas that gave a new view of practical experience. He did not look at nature like a God but like a pathfinder, that is, a man inside the chaos of her phenomena who believed that there is a common pattern visible in them all if we look with fresh eyes. He wrote in The World as I See It:
We have forgotten what features in the world of experience caused us to frame (pre-scientific) concepts, and we have great difficulty in representing the world of experience to ourselves without the spectacles of the old-established conceptual interpretation. There is the further difficulty that our language is compelled to work with words which are inseparably connected with those primitive concepts. These are the obstacles which confront us when we try to describe the essential nature of the pre-scientific concept of space.
So in a lifetime Einstein joined light to time, and time to space; energy to matter, matter to space, and space to gravitation. At the end of his life, he was still working to seek a unity between gravitation and the forces of electricity and magnetism. That is how I remember him, lecturing in the Senate House at Cambridge in an old sweater and carpet slippers with no socks, to tell us what kind of a link he was trying to find there, and what difficulties he was running his head against.
The sweater, the carpet slippers, the dislike of braces and socks, were not affectations. Einstein seemed to express, when one saw him, an article of faith from William Blake: ‘Damn braces: Bless relaxes’. He was quite unconcerned about worldly success, or respectability, or conformity; most of the time he had no notion of what was expected of a man of his eminence. He hated war, and cruelty, and hypocrisy, and above all he hated dogma – except that hate is not the right word for the sense of sad revulsion that he felt; he thought hate itself a kind of dogma. He refused to become president of the state of Israel because (he explained) he had no head for human problems. It was a modest criterion, which other presidents might adopt; there would not be many survivors.
It is almost impertinent to talk of the ascent of man in the presence of two men, Newton and Einstein, who stride like gods. Of the two, Newton is the Old Testament god; it is Einstein who is the New Testament figure. He was full of humanity, pity, a sense of enormous sympathy. His vision of nature herself was that of a human being in the presence of something god-like, and that is what he always said about nature. He was fond of talking about God: ‘God does not play at dice’, ‘God is not malicious’. Finally Niels Bohr one day said to him, ‘Stop telling God what to do’. But that is not quite fair. Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions. And what his life showed, and his work, is that when the answers are simple too, then you hear God thinking.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE DRIVE FOR POWER
Revolutions are not made by fate but by men. Sometimes they are solitary men of genius. But the great revolutions in the eighteenth century were made by many lesser men banded together. What drove them was the conviction that every man is master of his own salvation.
We take it for granted now that science has a social responsibility. That idea would not have occurred to Newton or to Galileo. They thought of science as an account of the world as it is, and the only responsibility that they acknowledged was to tell the truth. The idea that science is a social enterprise is modern, and it begins at the Industrial Revolution. We are surprised that we cannot trace a social sense further back, because we nurse the illusion that the Industrial Revolution ended a golden age.
The Industrial Revolution is a long train of changes starting about 1760. It is not alone: it forms one of a triad of revolutions, of which the other two were the American Revolution that started in 1775, and the French Revolution that started in 1789. It may seem strange to put into the same packet an industrial revolution and two political revolutions. But the fact is that they were all social revolutions. The Industrial Revolution is simply the English way of making those social changes. I think
of it as the English Revolution.
What makes it especially English? Obviously, it began in England. England was already the leading manufacturing nation. But the manufacture was cottage industry, and the Industrial Revolution begins in the villages. The men who make it are craftsmen: the millwright, the watchmaker, the canal builder, the blacksmith. What makes the Industrial Revolution so peculiarly English is that it is rooted in the countryside.
During the first half of the eighteenth century, in the old age of Newton and the decline of the Royal Society, England basked in a last Indian summer of village industry and the overseas trade of merchant adventurers. The summer faded. Trade grew more competitive. By the end of the century the needs of industry were harsher and more pressing. The organisation of work in the cottage was no longer productive enough. Within two generations, roughly between 1760 and 1820, the customary way of running industry changed. Before 1760, it was standard to take work to villagers in their own homes. By 1820, it was standard to bring workers into a factory and have them overseen.
We dream that the country was idyllic in the eighteenth century, a lost paradise like The Deserted Village that Oliver Goldsmith described in 1770.
Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheated the labouring swain.
How blest is he who crowns in shades like these,
A youth of labour with an age of ease.
That is a fable, and George Crabbe, who was a country parson and knew the villager’s life at first hand, was so enraged by it that he wrote an acid, realistic poem in reply.
Yes, thus the Muses sing of happy Swains,
Because the Muses never knew their pains.
O’ercome by labour and bow’d down by time,
Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme?
The country was a place where men worked from dawn to dark, and the labourer lived not in the sun, but in poverty and darkness. What aids there were to lighten labour were immemorial, like the mill, which was already ancient in Chaucer’s time. The Industrial Revolution began with such machines; the millwrights were the engineers of the coming age. James Brindley of Staffordshire started his self-made career in 1733 by working at mill wheels, at the age of seventeen, having been born poor in a village.
Brindley’s improvements were practical: to sharpen and step up the performance of the water wheel as a machine. It was the first multi-purpose machine for the new industries. Brindley worked, for example, to improve the grinding of flints, which were used in the rising pottery industry.
Yet there was a bigger movement in the air by 1750. Water had become the engineers’ element, and men like Brindley were possessed by it. Water was gushing and fanning out all over the countryside. It was not simply a source of power, it was a new wave of movement. James Brindley was a pioneer in the art of building canals or, as it was then called, ‘navigation’. (It was because Brindley could not spell the word ‘navigator’ that workmen who dig trenches or canals are still called ‘navvies’.)
Brindley had begun on his own account, out of interest, to survey the waterways that he travelled as he went about his engineering projects for mills and mines. The Duke of Bridgewater then got him to build a canal to carry coal from the Duke’s pits at Worsley to the rising town of Manchester. It was a prodigious design, as a letter to the Manchester Mercury recorded in 1763.
I have lately been viewing the artificial wonders of London and natural wonders of the Peak, but none of them gave me so much pleasure as the Duke of Bridgewater’s navigation in this country. His projector, the ingenious Mr Brindley, has indeed made such improvements in this way as are truly astonishing. At Barton Bridge, he has erected a navigable canal in the air; for it is as high as the tree-tops. Whilst I was surveying it with a mixture of wonder and delight, four barges passed me in the space of about three minutes, two of them being chained together, and dragged by two horses, who went on the terrace of the canal, whereon I durst hardly venture … to walk, as I almost trembled to behold the large River Irwell underneath me. Where Cornebrooke comes athwart the Duke’s navigation … about a mile from Manchester, the Duke’s agents have made a wharf and are selling coals at three pence halfpenny per basket … Next summer they intend to land them in (Manchester).
Brindley went on to connect Manchester with Liverpool in an even bolder manner, and in all laid out almost four hundred miles of canals in a network all over England.
Two things are outstanding in the creation of the English system of canals, and they characterise all the Industrial Revolution. One is that the men who made the revolution were practical men. Like Brindley, they often had little education, and in fact school education as it then was could only dull an inventive mind. The grammar schools legally could only teach the classical subjects for which they had been founded. The universities also (there were only two, at Oxford and Cambridge) took little interest in modern or scientific studies; and they were closed to those who did not conform to the Church of England.
The other outstanding feature is that the new inventions were for everyday use. The canals were arteries of communication: they were not made to carry pleasure boats, but barges. And the barges were not made to carry luxuries, but pots and pans and bales of cloth, boxes of ribbon, and all the common things that people buy by the pennyworth. These things had been manufactured in villages which were growing into towns now, away from London; it was a country-wide trade.
Technology in England was for use, up and down the country, far from the capital. And that is exactly what technology was not in the dark confines of the courts of Europe. For example, the French and the Swiss were quite as clever as the English (and much more ingenious) in making scientific playthings. But they lavished that clockwork brilliance on making toys for rich or royal patrons. The automata on which they spent years are to this day the most exquisite in the flow of movement that have ever been made. The French were the inventors of automation: that is, of the idea of making each step in a sequence of movements control the next. Even the modern control of machines by punched cards had already been devised by Joseph Marie Jacquard about 1800, for the silk-weaving looms of Lyons, and languished in such luxury employment.
Fine skill of this kind could advance a man in France before the revolution. A watchmaker, Pierre Caron, who invented a new watch escapement and pleased Queen Marie Antoinette, prospered at court and became Count Beaumarchais. He had musical and literary talent, too, and he later wrote a play on which Mozart based his opera The Marriage of Figaro. Although a comedy seems an unlikely source book of social history, the intrigues in and about the play reveal how talent fared at the courts of Europe.
At first sight The Marriage of Figaro looks like a French puppet play, humming with secret machinations. But the fact is that it is an early storm signal of the revolution. Beaumarchais had a fine political nose for what was cooking, and supped with a long spoon. He was employed by the royal ministers in several double-edged deals, and on their behalf in fact was involved in a secret arms deal with the American revolutionaries to help them fight the English. The King might believe that he was playing at Machiavelli, and that he could keep such contrivances of policy for export only. But Beaumarchais was more sensitive and more astute, and could smell the revolution coming home. And the message he put into the character of Figaro, the servant, is revolutionary.
Bravo, Signor Padrone –
Now I’m beginning to understand all this mystery, and to appreciate your most generous intentions. The King appoints you Ambassador in London, I go as courier and my Susanna as confidential attachée. No, I’m hanged if she does – Figaro knows better.
Mozart’s famous aria, ‘Count, little Count, you may go dancing, but I’ll play the tune’ (Se vuol ballare, Signor Contino…) is a challenge. In Beaumarchais’s words it runs:
No, my lord Count, you shan’t have her, you shan’t. Because you are a great lord, you think you’re a great genius. Nobility, wealth, honours, emoluments!
They all make a man so proud! What have you done to earn so many advantages? You took the trouble to be born, nothing more. Apart from that, you’re rather a common type.
A public debate started on the nature of wealth, and since one needn’t own something in order to argue about it, being in fact penniless, I wrote on the value of money and interest. Immediately, I found myself looking at… the drawbridge of a prison … Printed nonsense is dangerous only in countries where its free circulation is hampered; without the right to criticise, praise and approval are worthless.
That was what was going on under the courtly pattern of French society, as formal as the garden of the Château at Villandry.
It seems inconceivable now that the garden scene in The Marriage of Figaro, the aria in which Figaro dubs his master ‘Signor Contino’, little Count, should in their time have been thought revolutionary. But consider when they were written. Beaumarchais finished the play of The Marriage of Figaro about 1780. It took him four years of struggle against a host of censors, above all Louis XVI himself, to get a performance. When it was performed, it was a scandal over Europe. Mozart was able to show it in Vienna by turning it into an opera. Mozart was thirty then; that was in 1786. And three years later, in 1789 – the French Revolution.
Was Louis XVI toppled from his throne and beheaded because of The Marriage of Figaro? Of course not. Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door. What made Napoleon call the last act of the play ‘the revolution in action’? It was Beaumarchais himself, in the person of Figaro, pointing to the Count and saying, ‘Because you are a great nobleman, you think you are a great genius. You have taken trouble with nothing, except to be born’.