Free Einstein's Genius Club by Katherine Williams Burton Feldman Page B

1925. The physics of the nucleus began to catch up only in the 1930s.
    One scientist can be trumped very quickly by a new advance—consider Schrödinger, who thought his wave equation of 1926 had rid physics of the plague of quantum mechanics, only to find he had been co-opted within a year. Newton was dead two centuries before his theory was supplanted. Some discoveries are tied not to an individual, but to a team, or are a mosaic of findings, supplanted bit by bit. Older scientists begin to harvest the limitations science set on them when they entered the fray, as if a custodianship.
    Every advance costs an earlier achievement's demotion or displacement. Einstein revered Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Lorentz, and Planck even as his findings dislodged each of them. He turned Newtonian gravitation into a special case of general relativity; used the Maxwellian field concept to supplant Newtonian mechanics; used Maxwell to radically revise older views of space and time, including Maxwell's own; routed the ether principle, which Lorentz clung to; transformed Planck's quantum concept from a “black body” concept into the vast new subject of quantum theory. (The reader can choose other verbs.) If he had succeeded as hoped with unification, the list would be much longer, beginning with a fundamental revision of what electromagnetism and quantum theory mean.
    As the cutting edge advances, those once in the forefront of research are left behind. This can scarcely be lamented, since science would otherwise not keep advancing. Even a Newton or an Einstein will be dislodged. Homer, Bach, Botticelli—never. Sciencein this sense is one of the strangest human enterprises, imposing a limitation known nowhere else in thought or art.
    None of this was lost on Einstein. His sharp and humorous sense of how he came to be regarded as a “petrified object” was part of his realism about what would happen to his—and everyone else's—place in science. If physics cannot be based on the field concept, he wrote to his old friend Besso in 1954, then “
nothing
remains of my entire castle in the air, gravitation theory included, [and of] the rest of modern physics.” 1 Even if the field theory holds, it will be modified.
    There are countless studies of genius and creativity, but the decline of great scientists is a largely uncharted subject. Some preliminary sifting is needed. If one asks why Einstein ceased being the Einstein who revolutionized physics, a few explanations have become familiar. First and expectedly, his gifts are said to have faded as he grew older. As this happened, the young man's strengths became the older man's handicaps. In the Swiss patent office and in Berlin, he was a loner, unusually stubborn, fiercely independent, self-isolated—all this was an instinctual wisdom about how to protect and fulfill his great gifts. But later, the stubbornness hardened into an obstinate clinging to fixed ideas; the self-isolation ignored new findings that could challenge his preconceptions; he became inflexible as his younger self never was. In this view, too, he was the victim of his own early success. General relativity—that single-handed triumph against all odds and cautious advice—made him overconfident that the same method could handle the new problem. His triumphant experience “seared” him, said Abraham Pais, a colleague of Einstein at Princeton. It kept him persisting, decade after decade, despite setbacks that should have warned him off.
    Yet one may wonder. A quite different picture of the older Einstein also exists. Mathematical ability proverbially weakens early, but the aging Einstein kept his prowess. Peter G. Bergmann, one of his younger mathematical assistants in the 1930s, recalled:
    [What] impressed me—and remember that I was very young and Einstein in his fifties—was his tremendous creativeness… his sheer inventiveness of new approaches, of new