Читать книгу Einstein Wrote Back - John W. Moffat - Страница 9

PROLOGUE

THROUGH the large picture window in my office at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, I have a view of Silver Lake in a nearby park.While pondering the mysteries of the universe, I often watch the swans gliding back and forth across the lake, and the children in the playground on the other side.

The Institute—affectionately called “PI” —was founded by Mike Lazaridis, the inventor of the BlackBerry, whose company, Research in Motion (RIM), is headquartered in Waterloo. Lazaridis has contributed generous funds to creating PI, where over one hundred theoretical physicists from around the world spend their time following impractical dreams: searching for quantum gravity, understanding the beginnings of the universe and probing the quantum nature of matter. As the name of the Institute implies, we physicists who work there are out on the “perimeter” or the cutting edge of fundamental physics. PI is an ideal place for me to be, as since my unusual beginning in physics, I have been mostly involved in searching for new ways to come to a fundamental understanding of the universe. This kind of physics is often referred to as “outside the box.” Those of us who practise it think about physics in an unconventional way, attempting to view old problems in novel ways, or to ask unusual questions that may bear fruit in unexpected ways. Yet ultimately we always hope to relate our speculative theories to the reality of nature by comparing the predictions of our theories with experiments and observations.

Occasionally I stare out my window at Silver Lake and think about the bizarre way my life unfolded, eventually leading me to this place. In my peripatetic and traumatic childhood in Denmark, England and Scotland during and after the Second World War, I showed little aptitude for mathematics and science—so little, in fact, that I was not even allowed to enter university. Instead, I set my sights on becoming an abstract painter, an almost impossible career choice in the immediate postwar years. But then something peculiar happened to me to change drastically the course of my life. Within little more than a year, I vaulted from working at odd jobs in Copenhagen—window cleaner, delivery boy, mail sorter—to entering the Ph.D. program in physics at Trinity College, Cambridge.

How did this happen? What did it mean? Colleagues as well as my family have often encouraged me to write about my early life and the unusual way that I entered physics—and to put down on paper the many anecdotes with which I had regaled them, about the famous physicists of the twentieth century that I had the good fortune to meet. When I ask myself how I became a physicist in the first place, and how I managed to remain outside the box of conventional physics, working on truly fundamental questions of nature throughout so much of my career, my thoughts keep returning to the difficulties of my childhood, the love of beauty that inspired my first career as an artist and the influence of those giants of physics, whose kindness and help encouraged me on my way.

Physicists explore the nature of the universe, from its farthest edges to the smallest constituents of matter. In the twentieth century, with amazing improvements in telescopes and many space missions, we were able to expand our understanding of the evolution of the universe back almost to its beginning. This is a remarkable development in the history of science, because from the Greeks up until the beginning of the twentieth century, our astrophysical investigations were restricted to the much smaller universe of our solar system and our galaxy. We have also made great strides in penetrating the universe of the very small, and gradually the mysteries of the structure of matter are being revealed to us. Cracking the quantum code of matter is only possible through extraordinarily high-energy accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), near Geneva, which began operation in 2010. We are on the threshold of exciting new discoveries in the realm of particle physics, which will help unravel the mysteries of the nature of matter.

Theoretical physicists attempt to build models of nature based on mathematics, and experimental physicists provide the data that can test the ideas and models proposed by the theoretical physicists. In practice there is an interplay between theory and experiment. Often, successful research in theoretical physics starts with a well-grounded knowledge of experimental data, building up from this data into a theory. Another important area of physics is industrial physics, where developing new technologies eventually leads to advances in computers, televisions, cellphones, medical diagnostics and many other electronic applications. All of these devices grew out of abstract theoretical ideas and their subsequent verification by experimental physics.

From the beginning of my studies, I wanted to become a theoretical physicist. I was fascinated by the intellectual adventure of trying to figure out how the universe worked, using its language of mathematics. I was attracted to the double-edged approach that theoretical physicists must take, combining a dreamer’s awe of nature’s inner workings with the rigour of having to verify one’s ideas and models of nature with data, whether from telescopes or particle colliders. I also felt more comfortable working mainly on my own, as most theoretical physicists do, than working in the large teams that constitute so much of contemporary experimental physics.

To me, the only physics worth doing is outside-the-box, non-mainstream physics, for that is how our understanding of nature moves forward. Of course, I have, like most other physicists, spent time in my career working out the details of someone else’s theory, calculating the consequences of someone else’s ideas. But that, to me, is not exciting and groundbreaking work. Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac and others described in this memoir all worked on non-mainstream physics as a matter of course. They all broke through the boundaries of what constituted the conventional paradigm in physics in their day. Perhaps my interactions with them as a young student steered me in this direction of always aiming to do the kind of physics that challenges the conventional wisdom.

Albert Einstein, in particular—and the letters we exchanged over several months—opened the doors for me into the academic world. Einstein was always an iconoclastic physicist, and his revolutionary ideas were not immediately accepted by the physics community. Indeed, in some cases, such as his interpretation of light as photon particles, it took several years before his ideas were incorporated into mainstream physics, and became part of the early revolutionary development of quantum mechanics.

From the very beginning of my research career as a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the early 1950s, I attempted, like Einstein, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg and other well-known twentieth-century physicists, to get at the heart of the fundamental issues in physics. In my first three papers, published while I was a student, I devoted myself to modifying Einstein’s gravity theory. In this effort I was actually following in Einstein’s footsteps, for after developing his great theory of gravity, general relativity, in 1915, he sought a unified field theory of gravity and electromagnetism, which necessitated modifying general relativity.

I always say that to achieve success in fundamental, theoretical physics, one must be childishly optimistic, possess a thick skin and live a long life. This memoir is an attempt to trace the origins of the desire to work on non-mainstream, fundamental science in my own life. I hope that this narrative will entertain you, that you will enjoy this journey into the company of the giants of modern physics who were my mentors.