Einstein Defiant: Genius Versus Genius in the Quantum Revolution

32 EINSTEIN DEFIANT

much above a mumble, and unlikely even to get through a calculation

at the blackboard without making serious errors. Einstein was differ-
ent. He liked talking to nonspecialists about physics, and nonspecialists
liked listening. He kept his points clear and Einstein kneaded humor
in with his numbers and theory.
Einstein’s secret was that for him physics was not just a collection
of facts, but something transformative that got behind a familiar expe-
rience and gave people a way to see the reality behind the show. Many
important scientists disagreed with Einstein.They held that the facts of
appearance are all there are to truth, and facts-only science did exist.
The biological classification system credited to Linnaeus had provided
facts without any deeper truth. With the Linnean system naturalists
could organize their discoveries according to an efficient, easy-to-
remember method based on anatomical similarities.The system served
as an excellent device for organizing an ever-expanding body of in-
formation, but the categories and relations within them were mean-
ingless and expressed nothing real. Under the Linnean system lobsters
and grasshoppers shared a common blueprint while caterpillars and
spiders did not. Why? The question was empty and should not be
asked.That meaninglessness is why ordinary people find that scientific
names inspire the very essence of tedium: Carcharhinus plumbeus,
Galeocerdo cuvier, Carcharias taurus, Squalus acanthias, Lamna nasus. Such
technical blather can make people want to scream, and not in the I’m-
having-fun sort of scream that comes while watching a scary shark
movie, but an I-can’t-take-it-any-more sort of scream. Einstein omit-
ted all that pointless information from his lectures. Facts were nothing
to him until they were meaningful.
As passionately as Monet believed in color, Einstein believed in
the power of theories to tell us something about the reality behind the
surface. He loved taking his audiences that extra step where technical
systems become meaningful realities. Einstein preached that the uni-
verse is lawful; it works the same way everywhere so that any intelli-
gent creature, no matter where or when in the universe, can find the
same laws. For him, abstractions like matter and energy were not just
words; they were as real as turnips. Acting on that conviction he had
shown that ultimately even matter and energy are forms of one real
thing. Did he leap from his bath when he saw the single equation that

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