Читать книгу Einstein Wrote Back - John W. Moffat - Страница 11
ОглавлениеAFTER my humiliating interview with the gymnasium teacher, and after graduating from high school, I considered seriously what I should do with my life. If my fate was not to earn a university degree, I mused, perhaps I should return to my early talents as an artist.
I had begun painting in earnest, outside the school environment, when I was fourteen, joining my father at his easel. While my father concentrated on abstract paintings, I painted abstracts and landscapes as well. Now, at sixteen, and unsure of how to proceed in my life without the advantages of a gymnasium education, I was again painting alongside my father in the evenings. This was satisfying to us both, and I believe it helped my father improve his outlook on life, as he was struggling to recover from tuberculosis.
After leaving the military at the end of the war, my father had started an import-export business in Copenhagen with a businessman who had been a prisoner in a concentration camp in Germany during the war. The business failed, and my father found a job in a larger import-export business in Copenhagen. It was while he was working there that he contracted tuberculosis. One of the female employees, a German national who had moved to Denmark, had a severe case of TB as a result of the deprivations she’d suffered during the war. Unfortunately, the employees all shared the same coffee cups during breaks, and my father contracted TB, becoming an invalid for a year or more. This created serious financial problems for my parents. My mother was forced to work as a waitress in restaurants in Copenhagen, and I contributed to the household income by working days on any odd jobs I could find, such as being a messenger boy and washing windows in the apartment blocks in our neighbourhood in Valby, a suburb of Copenhagen. I also worked for several months as delivery boy for a florist in Copenhagen. My job was to go to churches prior to funerals and place a bouquet of flowers on the corpse lying in an open coffin. This evoked in me a dread of death as powerful as any of myexperiences and fears during the wartime bombing raids, as I stood in the quiet church contemplating someone’s dead relative and the fleeting years of life.
When I was fifteen, I saw an exhibition of paintings by the Russian-French abstract painter Serge Poliakoff in a small gallery in Copenhagen, and was very impressed with his work. I was struck by the marvellous juxtaposition of brown, red and blue in his paintings, as well as the unique combination of abstract forms. I began to daydream of going to Paris to become an artist, taking lessons from Poliakoff if he would have me. Working at my odd jobs since leaving school, I managed to save enough money to journey by train to Paris. In contrast to my father’s experience, in which his father forbade him to go to Rome on an art scholarship, my father strongly encouraged me to pursue this dream.
In my youthful ambition, I imagined my work being exhibited in major galleries in Europe and America. I was excited by the idea of living in Paris and becoming part of the bohemian artistic life there. I had developed a deep passion for my art, and could imagine no other life than the pursuit of beauty through painting.
I had just turned seventeen when I boarded the Northern Express from Copenhagen to Paris in 1949. We stopped in Hamburg for two hours, and I walked around the Bahnhof, the railway station. It was only four years since the war had ended, and I was astonished to be able to look from the Bahnhof out to the horizon of the city, because so many of the major buildings in Hamburg had been flattened by the unremitting Allied bombing. I also saw several German veterans in grey uniforms, missing arms or legs, walking around with the help of crutches and begging for money.
When I arrived at Gare du Nord in Paris early the next morning, I collected my bicycle from the luggage car and hoisted my satchel containing all my belongings onto my back. I decided to do a little sightseeing on my first day in Paris, and took a detour through the expansive Place de la Concorde on my way to the Seine. It was a bright, sunny spring morning and due to the shortage of gas, there were few cars on the roads. Travelling on Parisian streets by bicycle then was a safe venture, in contrast to today.
All my expectations of what Paris would be like were met on that morning. The tall, grey buildings with their iron-grille balconies, colourful potted plants and dark grey slate roofs with innumerable chimney pots formed a backdrop for the intense activity of the city. I bicycled past the many cafés where waiters in white aprons were moving chairs and tables out onto the pavement. Street cleaners were flushing water down the gutters, and there was a distinct smell of Paris that I can still recall: a clean smell sharpened by the musty odours of an ancient city.
I crossed Pont Saint-Michel and stopped halfway across the bridge to watch the grey-green, muddy water of the Seine passing below, and the barges docked at the stone mooring walls. Looking up to my left, I was overwhelmed by the soaring towers and huge rose window of Notre Dame, and the gargoyles springing out of the stone walls that shimmered in the early-morning light. Turning the other way, I saw in the far distance the massive edifice of the Louvre.
I bicycled on up Boulevard Saint-Michel and arrived at the Place Denfert-Rochereau with its massive stone lion gazing mournfully over the Parisian scene. I was on my way to Porte d’Orléans on the outskirts of Paris where I had arranged by letter to rent a room.
After settling into my accommodations, I soon discovered rue de Seine, the part of town where most of the famous art galleries were located, and luckily, one was showing Poliakoff paintings. I asked the gallery owner how I might contact Poliakoff, and he gave me an address on rue Madame, on the Left Bank, where Poliakoff had a small studio and also lived with his wife and child.
One afternoon I plucked up my courage, located the artist’s street address, entered an inner courtyard and knocked on the door of a little room that was behind a toy shop facing rue Madame. I was feeling apprehensive as I waited for someone to answer my knock. Would today be a new beginning in my life, or was I to be disappointed again?
A striking-looking man with black hair and lively brown eyes opened the door. He was friendly to me, an unexpected visitor, and introduced me to his wife, an Irish woman whom he had married while studying at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Poliakoff spoke fluent English as well as French, so we conversed in English. After I explained to him how I had admired his paintings in Copenhagen and had come to Paris recently to pursue an art career, he invited me to spend time with him in his studio, where I became his student.
Serge Poliakoff was very kind to me, accepting me as his only student even though I had no money to pay him, and spending a year teaching me the techniques of abstract painting. He taught me, in his unique way, how to make oil paints from the original powder sold at a special shop in Paris. This technique of producing oil paint was one of the secrets of the vibrant colours in his paintings. He also told me to visit the Louvre once a week in order to appreciate and learn from the works of the great masters. At this time, Poliakoff was living in quite poor circumstances. As painting was not providing a living, he also played the guitar in cafés at night, specializing in Russian folk music.
My small rented room in Porte d’Orléans was in a turn-of-the-century greystone apartment building in rue des Plantes. I would paint my abstract canvases by propping them up against an ancient wooden wardrobe opposite the large oak bed, making sure that I didn’t drip too much paint on the Turkish rug, which would upset my landlady, who took a motherly interest in my welfare. My paintings were in the style of abstract expressionism developed by the Parisian school in the 1940s and ’50s. I used bold colours and developed planes of colour with expressive brushstrokes.
One day, Poliakoff told me to bring five of my paintings to his studio. We would each hang five of our paintings in a spring art show—the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles—an annual event held at the Musée d’Art Moderne on avenue du Président Wilson. Our paintings hung among those of artists such as Victor Vasarely, Pierre Soulages, Jean Dewasne, Hans Hartung, Jean Deyrolle and other abstract expressionists. Poliakoff himself became famous as an abstract painter before he died in 1966, lifting himself and his family far out of the impoverished circumstances I had observed when working with him in rue Madame. Today his paintings are auctioned at high prices and exhibited in major art museums worldwide.
During my year in Paris, my father came to visit for several days. He took the train from Copenhagen and stayed in a small hotel near my rented room. I had the uncomfortable feeling that he was living vicariously through me. My father was still painting at that time and was eager to meet Serge Poliakoff. Perhaps he envied me being able to enter the world of art in Paris as a young man, for his chances of doing so in Rome had been thwarted by his father.
Although in reviews of the spring Salon show in Le Monde and Figaro I was flatteringly described as a young, upcoming art talent, after a year in Paris I ran into severe financial difficulties, as my meagre savings were running out. During the immediate postwar years, employment opportunities were scarce in Paris, particularly for foreigners. To help my financial position, I sought out American tourists, offering to be their guide. After showing them around places of interest, I would meet them at their hotel or in a café, a painting or two in hand, and attempt to make a sale. Inevitably these guided tours were financially unsuccessful, although I generally managed to obtain a free lunch or dinner.
Reluctantly, after my year as an aspiring painter, I returned home to Copenhagen. I was discouraged by my failure to begin a successful art career in Paris, and I knew that I would not have such a year of opportunity again. I did manage, however, to mount a show of Serge Poliakoff ’s work and mine at Illums Bolighus gallery that year in Copenhagen. Poliakoff did not come in person, but sent ten canvases to me by train. We did not sell a single painting, and I felt even more disappointed about my lack of progress in the art world. Copenhagen, after all, was not a centre for art like Paris, and I knew that I would be inviting continuous financial difficulties if I devoted myself to painting.
Again I found myself living with my parents, my father still not fully recovered from tuberculosis and my mother working long hours in downtown restaurants. Just as before my year in Paris, I again worked every day at boring or distasteful odd jobs to bring in money to help support us.
And again, I was forced to ponder what to do with my life.
Not long after returning from Paris, out of curiosity I picked up two popular-science books, The Nature of the Physical World and Spacetime and Gravitation, both written by Sir Arthur Eddington. They were about Einstein’s theory of relativity, cosmology and the evolution of stars. These books greatly affected me. It’s as if they turned a switch on in my brain that I had no idea was even there. Eddington, a fine writer, was able to create a sense of almost spiritual wonder in me at the mysteries of the universe and an emotional desire to know the truth of how the universe began. His books triggered an astonishing turning point in my life.
After reading the books, I began having strange visions of the structure of the universe and the fabric of spacetime as revealed by Albert Einstein. In these daydreams, I tried to comprehend how the universe was structured. These daydreams were intuitive forms rising from my subconscious rather than conscious attempts to understand the universe. The visions seemed to indicate some primal urge developing in me to connect with the stars and galaxies of the universe.
Initially my visions were colourless, and then they turned into vast, colourful canvases. I began to realize that there was an unconscious merging of myvisual experiences when painting and the visualization of the heavens all around us. When I painted, I didn’t contemplate the “meaning” of art or feel any phenomenological need to “prove” my paintings. But as I continued to read and daydream, I began to realize that physicists who attempt to understand nature initially have a visual experience which then has to be transformed into a theory by means of mathematical formulations. However, in contrast to creating a painting, this initial imaginative process in physics has to be verified eventually by experiment. Later in life I expressed this idea as: Physics is imagination in a straitjacket.
I decided, against the incredible odds, that I would try to pursue science seriously, particularly physics and mathematics. Obviously, I could not contemplate becoming an experimentalist, for this required special academic training and access to laboratories and experimental apparatus. However, I could pursue theoretical physics with just my brain, pencil and paper, and access to a good library. I tried to push aside my knowledge gaps and failures as a student. At none of the many schools I attended had I thrived intellectually. One principal had counselled my parents to put me in trade school. I tried to push aside the memory of the mathematics teacher whose judgment had killed my chances for admission to university. Since that normal route for acquiring knowledge was closed to me, I would have to pursue this new dream on my own. I was at a stage in my life when one’s ardent desires and passions can overcome what to others would be impossible odds. I had a self-confidence then that is perhaps only possible when one is nineteen.
In counterpoint to the memories of myfailures, another strange memory rose in my consciousness. I recalled that when I was six or seven, my father took me to see a psychiatrist in London because I insisted on reading the time in counter-clockwise fashion, and I also reversed whole sentences when learning to read. The psychiatrist peered at me with curiosity, and asked me questions in staccato sentences. When he was finished with me, I sat in the waiting room and overheard him telling my father that his boy was a “genius.” At the time, I turned the word “genius” over and over in my mind, and decided that it could not mean anything favourable for my future.
But now I thought about it again. I discovered during that year in Copenhagen, and contrary to all my experiences in school, that I had a surprising, indeed remarkable, ability to learn mathematics and physics rapidly. This was partly due to my photographic memory, which I also first discovered during that year. Now I wondered whether my talent for learning science and mathematics rapidly had been there all along, untapped by any of myteachers, or whether it might actually have developed suddenly, perhaps even as a consequence of the post-traumatic stress disorder I had suffered after the war. Despite all my previous failures, I was now highly motivated to excel in mathematics and physics; perhaps it was my strong motivation itself that released my aptitude for science and math, which had been dormant all those years. And my motivation sprang from my intense reaction to the Eddington books. Could there be a more compelling testimonial for good popular-science writing than this?
It was fortunate for me that the University of Copenhagen library allowed people to borrow science books and periodicals without their having to be enrolled as students. In this way I was able to read physics and mathematics materials and move quickly towards an understanding of modern physics and cosmology. I taught myself stealthily, sneaking time to go to the library while on my messenger jobs, and poring over my books and papers every night. My parents didn’t know what to make of this latest development. Our financial situation was worsening, and they feared that this new turn in my life would distract me from contributing to the support of the family. Yet I did manage to continue working at my menial jobs, while at the same time completing the equivalent of four years of undergraduate training in physics and mathematics within the year. I learned the basics of calculus in less than two weeks and became proficient in solving differential equations.
Because I had progressed rapidly in my private studies, I began feeling that surely, with my newly discovered aptitude, I could do something more interesting than the odd jobs that provided me with a meagre wage. I decided to push things further. I made an appointment with the director of the astronomical observatory in Copenhagen. I explained to him that I was interested in becoming a physicist, and was studying physics, astronomy and cosmology by myself. He sent me to the Copenhagen University Geophysics Institute, where the kindly director took an interest in me, and gave me a job solving least squares calculations of gravitational measurements. These calculations went into large published tables of gravitational measurement data and were used in geological surveys as well as in searches for minerals and other resources in Greenland, which was part of Denmark.
Now at least I had an occupation in a scientific field! I couldn’t help thinking about Einstein’s somewhat similar position as a Swiss civil servant in the patent office in Bern, where in the miraculous year of 1905 he published five papers in his “spare time,” including one on the special theory of relativity, which revolutionized physics.
After my first intense learning period, I began concentrating on relativity theory and advanced through Einstein’s special relativity and general relativity theories to his most recent work on unified field theory, which was his attempt to unify gravity and electromagnetism within a geometrical spacetime structure. Einstein had the brilliant idea that the force of gravity, as first envisioned by Isaac Newton, was not actually a force of attraction between two massive bodies. Rather, it was the effect of one massive body distorting or curving the spacetime geometry around it, which in turn affects another body nearby. Einstein’s idea that spacetime geometry is curved in the presence of matter was the basic tenet of his general theory of relativity.
In Einstein’s special theory of relativity, he envisioned velocity as “relative.” That is, an observer moving in a non-accelerating frame of reference cannot tell whether he is at rest or moving, or how fast he is moving, in relation to an object in another non-accelerating frame. This concept was easy for me to grasp, thinking of the momentary confusion of sitting in one moving train and watching another that is also moving.
In his general theory of relativity, Einstein envisioned acceleration— or changing velocity—as also “relative.” In fact, he proposed the startling idea that gravity and acceleration are equivalent. Picture a skydiver falling before she opens her parachute. With her eyes closed, she would not be able to tell whether she was falling due to the pull of the earth’s gravity or to a force exerting an acceleration upon her.
Relativity was an idea that was in the air at the beginning of the twentieth century. Others besides Einstein, such as the mathematical physicists Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincaré, had formulated theories of relativity beyond those already envisioned by Galileo in the sixteenth century. However, they could not free themselves from the concept of the “ether,” the supposed substance that permeated all of space and allowed electromagnetic waves to travel through it, which virtually all scientists believed in at the time. It took the genius of Einstein to ignore the concept of the undetected ether, to make special relativity a universal property of space and time, and to develop a classical mechanics that was compatible with special relativity.
Relativity, however, constituted only half of Einstein’s effort to create a unified theory. There is also the concept of “fields.” In the nineteenth century, James Clerk Maxwell’s equations unified the electric and magnetic fields. These fields were first conceived by Michael Faraday, who pictured them as lines of force originating from electrically charged particles or magnets. These fields can be observed in the regular lines formed by pieces of metal filings on a sheet of paper when it is held above a magnet. In Maxwell’s theory, the electromagnetic fields exist in four-dimensional spacetime, which acts like an arena in which the fields themselves and electrically charged particles move like hockey players in an ice rink. Einstein wanted to unify his geometrical theory of gravity with Maxwell’s equations for the electromagnetic fields into one unified theory. In 1918, the famous German mathematical physicist Hermann Weyl had proposed a way of unifying Maxwell’s theory and Einstein’s gravity theory that was not successful. In his later years, Einstein continued, also unsuccessfully, to try to find better ways of unifying gravity and electromagnetism.
I quickly became caught up in this quest for a unified field theory, and studied Einstein’s papers closely. I had been checking through the basic calculations underlying Einstein’s latest unified field theory, and I discovered that one of its basic assumptions had what I considered a flaw. I composed my first physics paper on this subject.*
After composing this paper, feeling intense excitement as I wrote it and calm satisfaction when I reviewed it, I began to dare to think that yes, possibly I could have a career as a physicist, and began considering steps that I could take to achieve this. At age nineteen, I should have been in my second year at university, but I hoped to somehow find another route to this new goal.
My father had made the acquaintance of an American chemist who was conducting research in the laboratory of the Carlsberg brewery in Valby, not far from my parents’ apartment. This gentleman expressed an interest in meeting me, as he thought he might be able to help me achieve my goal. He was acquainted with John Page, an assistant to the British consulate in Copenhagen.
My father agreed with his friend that I should go through the British consulate for help because I was still a British citizen. Although I had been born in Copenhagen, I was not considered a Danish citizen because my father was British. With my father’s help, I composed a letter to Mr. Page, and explained that I was a nineteen-year-old student who had, through private studies at the university library, achieved enough knowledge of mathematics and physics to study Einstein’s work on unified field theory, and had written a manuscript on his theory. I was now hoping to somehow enter the academic world and pursue physics studies, possibly in England. My father added a note explaining that he had been a major in the British army and had been stationed in Flensburg, Germany, at the end of the war as the district station commander. He thought that perhaps this would help establish our family’s credibility.
About a week later we received a letter from Mr. Page showing much interest in my situation. He said that he had contacted the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and had spoken with Niels Bohr himself. Bohr, he wrote, wished to speak with me. The following week, I received a letter from Bohr’s secretary setting up an appointment.
Within one extraordinary year in my young life, I had left the path of Serge Poliakoff and my aspirations to become an abstract painter, and was now starting down a completely different road, towards a door being opened to me by the greatest living Danish physicist, Niels Bohr.
*In technical terms, I was questioning the need for Einstein’s action principle based on a nonsymmetric metric field to satisfy a real Hermitian symmetry. He had been hunting for the most satisfactory action principle that was the basis for the derivation of his unified field theory equations.
