Was Einstein ever wrong? How did he miss out on a major prediction for the universe? What was his major beef with quantum mechanics? How did he go from quantum believer to quantum hater? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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Sure, I guess Einstein was kind of sort of smart. I guess he figured out a thing or two about how the universe works, he launched a few fields of physics in a single year, and completely rewrote our understanding of gravity from ground up. And while I've gone on and on and on about what Einstein got right, trust me, I've barely even scratched the surface, feel free to ask about more of what he got right, there are a couple things that Einstein got wrong. And not just a little bit wrong, but totally completely refuse to accept reality as it is wrong. And I'm gonna tell you about two of them.
There's one big one and one small one. Not not one big thing and one small thing. They're both big things, but one is about big stuff and one is about small stuff. It'll make more sense as we go. And I know I'm spoiling it here, but Einstein was so dang smart that even in his wrongness, he was still able to make serious advances in the field.
It's I don't know. There's nothing like Albert, I guess. So let me just dive right in. The first wrong thing he got was about the expansion of the universe. In 1917, he finally released general relativity.
His theory of gravity, which is now our theory of gravity, which relates the amount of stuff, the stuff in energy and what it's doing in a little patch of volume to the bending and warping of space time in that same volume, and then the bending and warping of space time tells all that stuff what to do. That is the fundamental connection in general relativity. And in 1918, just a year later, Einstein applied general relativity to the whole entire universe. I mean, who does this? I guess Newton does and Einstein did, because because hey.
Like, the universe is made of gravitating things. At large scales, it is by far the dominant force. Like, at large scales, you don't really care about electromagnetism. This is way too big for a strong nuclear. Nobody cares about weak nuclear at all.
Like, really, at big stuff at big stuff, all you really care about is gravity. And so as soon as you have a theory of gravity, you want to apply it to the whole entire universe because why not? That's the total icing on the cake. If your theory of gravity is really that universal and that complete and that comprehensive, you should be able to describe the universe at the very largest scales. And when he did this, when he took general relativity and he plugged in what we knew about the universe, you know, bunch of stars and stuff, this was even before we knew about galaxies, But you just filled it up with matter, like make a pretend universe, fill it up with matter.
What does it do? He found that his universe tended to collapse from its own gravity. All the weight of all the stuff would just make it collapse in on itself. And this went against the current line of thinking. The current line of thinking at the time in 1918 was that the universe was static.
That, yeah, like stars move around and they might die, blow up, and new ones are born, and planets are dancing around in their orbits, but the universe as a whole is unchanging with time. If you took if you zoomed all the way out and took a snapshot of our universe today in 1918 and a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, a bajillion years ago, it looked pretty much the same. But Einstein, when he applied general relativity to the universe, found that the universe was in motion. It was collapsing. It was active, and that didn't feel so good.
Thankfully, Einstein had a way out because, oh my gosh, like if your theory of relativity, if your new theory of gravity predicts the wrong behavior for the universe, you might want to reconsider, but Einstein had a way out. The equations of general relativity allow a constant to be added. Just a number. Just a random flat number that doesn't really affect any results for any local problems like black holes or solar system orbits or gravitational waves or anything like that, but only affects the universe at large. That's because in local systems, whatever this constant is, whatever this number is that you are allowed to toss toss into the equations, like, here's all the connections between space time and matter and energy plus something else.
You have the freedom in general relativity to do that. That plus something else just isn't a player because what the rest of the equations care about are differences in gravity. If one thing is bigger than the other or farther away than the other, then gravity works on those differences to make things move. As long as there's this constant background, no one really cares. But once you get up to the whole scale of the entire universe, you have to care.
You can't ignore this number anymore. It's called the cosmological constant because it's a number that appears in the equations that only matters on cosmological scales. And Einstein tossed it in as a sort of anti gravity mechanism to counteract his collapsing universe and keep it static. Because this constant can be whatever sign you want. It can be positive, it can be negative, it can be zero.
Einstein thought, oh, okay. This number, I have no theoretical motivation for one number over the other. But, hey. The universe is telling me it's static, so I'm gonna add this little intrinsic anti gravitational force that wants to push the universe out to counteract its natural tendency to collapse, and I can match observations. And then two things happened a few years later.
One, Edwin Hubble discovered that we live in an expanding universe, and then physicist Alexander Friedmann did a better job at the whole cosmology thing than Einstein did. Friedmann realized that Einstein's universe of it's just filled with stuff and it's generally collapsing was only one possibility of many universes that were allowed in general relativity. In other words, general relativity was flexible. General relativity didn't predict a unique universe. Instead, the mathematics allowed for several different possible kinds of universes.
It could be geometrically open or closed or flat. It could have a cosmological constant. It could not have a cosmological constant. It turns out that Einstein just picked one or found one potential solution of several solutions that were allowed by the math. You know, Einstein's thinking was too narrow here.
He was too focused. Equations of relativity were actually much more powerful and much more flexible than he realized. And in order to match observations, we need an experiment to pick the universe for us. Says I relativity says, okay. Here you go.
You got six possible universes. Which one do you want? And then you go out and do an observation and say, that's the one that we want. That's the one that we got. And Einstein's universe that he found in the math was only one possible solution, and it didn't match up with the experimental data, so he added the cosmological constant.
But Friedan realized Einstein was too narrow. There are more solutions possible, and then Hubble came along and picked which universe we live in. We live in an expanding one. Freeman realized that, yes, we could be in a collapsing universe. We could also be in an expanding one.
And Hubble said, yeah. It's expanding. We live in that universe. Oh, no. No.
No. Not that one. It's behind up a little that one. That's the one that I want. That's the universe that we live in.
And with this new observation and the theoretical insight of Friedman that general relativity does allow for an expanding universe, there is no need for the cosmological constant because the universe is in motion anyway. There's nothing to stabilize. It's not sag. We were wrong. The universe was not static.
There's no need to counteract that, and so you don't need the cosmological constant because the universe is already in motion. And additionally, with Friedman's math, we were able to realize that Einstein's fix was wrong. He thought what he had was a collapsing universe, then he added the cosmological constant to counteract that and to stabilize everything, but we found later, years later, using the language of Alexander Freedman, that that fix was wrong, that that fix was artificial, that it still led to an unstable universe. It turns out that a static universe is impossible with general relativity, and Einstein didn't realize that. Einstein ended up calling it his biggest blunder because he could have predicted, if not an expanding universe, at least a dynamic universe, a universe that's in motion.
He could have bucked the trend. He missed the opportunity as one of the few times in his life where he let the prevailing worldview trump his own mathematical insight most of his life as we'll explore when we get to the next thing he was wrong about. He would hang on to the math against popular opinion because he just felt in his bones that he was right. But when it came to this, even though general relativity said straight out of the gate, hey. The universe is dynamic.
It's not static at all. Einstein said, on second thought, maybe I'll add a fix to this, and he ended up getting it wrong. But that's on the big end of the spectrum. For the other thing Einstein was wrong about, we need to go small, way small. And how do I put this?
Einstein had a complicated relationship with quantum mechanics. It's complicated because he was one of the founders of quantum mechanics. But as the years went on, he went from champion to skeptic, to critic, and he died thinking that everyone else was wrong about the fundamental nature of reality. And if Einstein went to his grave convinced that you were wrong, well, you might just turn a little bit skeptical of yourself too. Right?
And if Einstein's thinking on his deathbed saying, hey, you. I think you're wrong about this. You're like, oh my oh, oh, okay. Okay. I'll I'll give it a second thought.
Like, if Einstein said I was eating the wrong kind of cereal for breakfast, I don't know. I I I probably hear him out. What would you do? I don't know. But, anyway, quantum mechanics.
Yeah. I know. I still haven't done a big episode or an episode series, really, on what quantum mechanics is all about, and I've been saying I will for, I don't know, like, five years now. But don't worry. I will really dig into quantum mechanics from a fundamental level, just not right now.
But what I do wanna tell you is some little highlights from the story of the development of quantum mechanics and how Einstein played a role and where Einstein started to go off the rails a little bit, how he went from a lover to a hater of this new quantum universe. The quantum revolution, I've talked about this before. It all started with Max Planck in the late eighteen hundreds. There's this thing called black body radiation, which we don't need to care about the name. It's just a certain kind of radiation emitted in a certain kind of experimental apparatus.
Nobody could explain how the light was emitted. MaxBlank came along and gave an explanation that nobody liked, which was that the light wasn't emitted continuously. Like, it wasn't a flood. It wasn't a river of light coming out. Instead, there were tiny tiny little bullets coming out that this thing, this device could only emit radiation in little packets.
Everybody agreed once he released this concept in 1899. Everyone agreed that he was probably right, and everyone agreed that it was a big deal, but no one really felt comfortable with it, including Max Planck himself. He just thought it was an ugly hack that we were missing something bigger. And there he got a little bit of heat for it. It was just like, okay.
He Max Planck got it right. No one else can get it right, but we don't really like what he did to do it, and so we're gonna we're gonna prove him wrong. But over the years, Einstein became a fan of Max Planck's work. He became a fan of this early quantum theory because quantum means, like, little packets. And indeed, Einstein even one upped Max Planck in explaining something called the photoelectric effect.
Photoelectric effect is super simple. Take a hunk of metal, shine a light on it. Electrons will jump up out of the metal and out into the air. Ta da. Photoelectric effect.
You might naively think that if you've shown more light on it, you would get more electrons. And if you've shown brighter light on it, the electrons might move faster because, like, wow. You're, like, really dumping a lot of light on this, so the electrons are gonna get a lot of energy, and they're gonna just zoom out. And then if you had a weaker light, you would just slosh around the electrons a bit until they stored up enough energy to make the big jump out of the metal and and got away. None of this happens.
Instead, what experimenters found was that if you shined higher frequency light, not brighter light, but higher frequency light on the metal, then the electrons moved out faster. And if you had light below a certain frequency, the electrons wouldn't come out at all. This was weird. This is counterintuitive. This is one of the first big entry points into the weird, wonderful world of quantum mechanics.
Einstein was able to explain the photoelectric effect by saying that light itself was chunky, that light itself came in little packets. Now Max Planck this is different than Max Planck's. Max Planck just said that the emission of light was chunky. He didn't go on to say light itself was chunky. Then Einstein said, no.
I think light itself is chunky. Light itself comes in little packets. And the amount of energy in one of these packets is proportional to the frequency of the light. So if I have a high frequency chunk, I have a lot of energy and I can really kick those electrons off. And if I have a low frequency light, a low energy chunk, I just don't have enough energy to knock the electrons off and I never ever will no matter how much of me you dump onto the piece of metal.
It's just not gonna happen. Not everybody was impressed with Einstein's explanation. It was a radical idea. Even Max Planck was like, oh, that seems a little bit far, Albert. Eventually, Einstein would win the Nobel Prize for this, not for relativity.
Einstein won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect, but that wouldn't come for years after this. Also, can we rename quantum mechanics to chunky mechanics? Is there, like, a petition we can start to do that? Can we just call it chunky mechanics? Because I much prefer that.
Anyway, Einstein did the photoelectric effect. He really put quantum mechanics on the map because not only did he cement Max Planck's idea, but he extended and say, hey, guys. I think this light thing is actually made of photons. It's actually chunky. It actually comes in bits.
A bunch of other people went off to the races. Einstein took a break to solve, you know, universal gravity and general relativity and all that. But then in the nineteen tens and nineteen twenties, he was ready to ride the quantum train again. And this is where things start to get a little bit weird for Einstein. Prior to this prior to this to, like, the '19 like, late nineteen tens, early '19 twenties, Einstein said, hey.
I think light is a particle. But light very obviously behaves as a wave in a lot of cases. Like, radio waves don't look like particles. They act like waves. And so he was one of the first people to think that there might be some sort of relationship, that light might behave as both a wave and a particle sometimes.
And he said in a paper here's a quote. I won't bother trying to do Einstein's voice. I'll just do it in mine. It is therefore my opinion that the next stage in the development of theoretical physics will bring us a theory of light that can be understood as a kind of fusion of the wave and particle theories. So he knew he knew with his work on the photoelectric effect, he's like, look, this is very obviously a case where light is acting as a particle, but we can point to a dozen other situations where light acts like a wave.
This was a big mystery. People were trying to figure it out, and Einstein said, I think what's gonna resolve this is a picture of reality where light is both a wave and a particle. Einstein did a bunch of work in this direction. He solved the problem of light interacting with a random gas of matter, which is kind of a common phenomenon, like, say, I don't know, the atmosphere. He was able to use this new techniques of quantum mechanics were which were just getting going using these ideas of both wave and particle concepts, and he was able to describe in a new way the concepts of, say, absorption and emission and also stimulated emission where the gas could absorb light of one frequency and then emit it at another.
But as he was working through the math of what happens when these weird quantum photons start interacting with matter, he found that there were so many uncertain things involved. Like, he couldn't predict where light might leave in an atom, in what direction it might go, when the photon packet might leave or hit an atom. Like, there are there's a lot of uncertainties in these calculations. Einstein saw that. Einstein saw that uncertainty, but he just shrugged, and he glossed it all over with probabilities.
He said, sure. I can't see for sure which atom will do what at any given moment if I'm shining a light on a box of gas, I don't know at, like, an atom by atom level exactly what's going on, but I can describe what the whole box might do in a statistical sense. This is totally normal operating procedure. The physicists do this all the time. Like, oh, man.
I don't have the sophistication or the knowledge to describe this on an atomistic level. But if I zoom out a bit, I can just do some averages, and I can get build a good picture of what's going on. Good enough. Einstein was a master at this. He did this all the time.
He was very good at statistical thinking, and he just figured, like, he he wrote out the probabilities, etcetera, etcetera. He said, okay. Oh, let's say any one atom has, I don't know, like, a 5% chance of encountering a photon and doing something with it. You know, blah blah blah blah. I crunched through the statistical math.
He figured that the finer details would come later once we had a better understanding of how photons interact with matter. He didn't have that at his disposal, so he couldn't zoom down to that level. So instead, he zoomed out, did a bunch of averages and probabilities, and he's like, no biggie, guys. I'm just making some working assumptions to get the ball rolling. You know, just just take it from here.
Like, it's a first shot at solving this problem of how does light interact with matter. And while he was doing this, he was largely alone. Not a lot of people were really interested in this whole quantum mechanics game. It was a weird theory. It involved weird math and weird assumptions about the nature of reality.
So there was only a few oddballs in the world working on it at the time, and Einstein was one of them. But then, especially with this work, once there started to be some more practical applications that match with theory, that were agreeing with, experiment, that were ex that were explaining all sorts of weird experiments that were coming out, more and more people started to jump on the quantum bandwagon. And so far, Einstein was leading the way, and he was cool with the idea of light being made of chunks, like the very basis of quantum theory. He was cool with wave particle duality, that light can be described by both wave and particles, And he was cool with using probabilities and random chance to describe interactions between light and matter. You know, I mean, he wrote papers on it, but things started to go off the rails.
Why? Because he didn't contribute to Patreon. That's patreon.com/pmsudder. It is your way to keep this podcast and all of my education and outreach activities going in. I sincerely appreciate all the support.
I don't appreciate the support from Einstein because he didn't contribute, probably because he didn't exist, and I wasn't doing a podcast a hundred years ago. Anyway, it went off the rails with Erwin Schrodinger. Erwin Schrodinger was puzzling about this wave particle duality concept and how to encapsulate that in mathematics. Like, yes, like can sometimes act like a wave, sometimes like a particle. And by this time in the nineteen twenties, they were start showing experiments that sometimes matter can act like waves and act like particles.
Schrodinger was the first person to really give this a good mathematical foundation. And by the way, once I do do this series on quantum mechanics, it's gonna be all math all the time. Quantum mechanics is a deeply mathematical approach to reality. It is. Oh, it's fun.
Anyway, in 1926, he finally figured out a way to describe all this quantum random chance nonsense with an equation. Like, when Einstein said, hey, I'm dealing with a lot of probabilities that I'm just kinda sticking in here, I could really use an explanation for all this. Schrodinger was able to provide an explanation with the equation of a wave. And at first, everyone was like, yay. We have a solution.
And everyone was like, wait. A wave of what? Like, Schrodinger was able to say, oh, yeah. I can see how an electron will evolve when it's orbiting an atom. I can describe its evolution using a wave, and everyone's like, okay.
Yeah. But a wave of what? And it took a couple years for people to realize that this was a wave of probabilities. That if you look at an electron or when you're trying to understand an electron, you wanna ask, where is an electron gonna be the next time I look? You know, that's a pretty standard physics equation problem.
Schrodinger said you're not exactly sure. What I can give you, I can't tell you where the electron will be. I can tell you where the electron might be, and it might be more likely to be over here and less likely over here and really likely over here, like, like, 95% sure it's getting up here, but there's a tiny chance it'll be over here. And the mathematical equation that described where the electron might be the next time you go looking for it looks a lot like the mathematical equation for a wave, hence the Schrodinger wave equation. It was a wave of probabilities.
It was saying fundamentally that we really don't know where the electron will be. We just have, get some guesses of where it might be the next time we go looking for it. Basically, it was saying, hey, Einstein. You know all those statistics and probabilities that you worked into your math and assume we just figure out the finer details later? Yeah.
It turns out that the finer details are also based on statistics and probability that we're actually not exactly sure where an electron will be or in what direction a photon will get emitted from an atom or how quickly or when an atom might absorb a photon. We actually fundamentally don't know, and this was the breaking point for Einstein. Up until now, he had been totally cool with quantum mechanics and be and he had been using all these statistics and fuzziness and uncertainty because that was the only way to make progress. He had assumed that people would figure out something better. But now people who had finally jumped on the quantum train were beginning to say that the fuzziness and uncertainty and probabilities and statistics were actually built into nature itself.
It wasn't just our limited imaginations or toolkits or abilities. It was an aspect of reality, and Einstein didn't like this. As quantum mechanics continued to get fleshed out, we realized that the universe was non deterministic. We couldn't make firm predictions about what an electron or an atom might do and when. We could only assign probabilities, and Einstein firmly believed that this was wrong, that we were off base, that we were missing something deeper.
But right now, Einstein was just, like, skeptical. He was like, hey, guys. I think we're moving in the right direction, and then came the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle locked in this uncertainty in a big way. It said, not only do we lack the ability to make predictions for where a particle, a subatomic particle might be the next time we go looking for it.
Einstein was already not happy with this. The Heinz Heisenberg uncertainty principle said, not only do we not know where it'll be next, we don't know where it is or what it's doing right now. That the more you know about a particle's position, the less you know about its momentum and vice versa. You can't firmly pin down both. So not only do we lack the ability to make firm predictions, we don't even know what's going on right under our noses at this very instant.
And this is when Einstein's split with quantum mechanics became permanent because he could not handle this. Einstein launched attack after attack after attack on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. He would try to think of thought experiments, which he was kind of good at, to prove it wrong, and so he would show up at a conference say, hey, guys. Here's a thought experiment that proves the Heisenberg uncertainty principle wrong. I told you so.
You're thinking of quantum mechanics the wrong way. You're missing something deeper. Now will you get back on track? But every time he'd come up with one of these arguments, someone would counter argue it, and that person was the same person every time it was Niels Bohr. At conference after conference throughout the nineteen twenties and into the thirties, Einstein would present something to dismantle the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and Bohr would spend a sleepless night, just, oh my gosh, he finally got us.
Because Bohr was, like, pretty convinced that that quantum mechanics was on the right track and that Einstein was wrong. But here's Einstein showing up telling you you're wrong. You're like, oh gosh. What do I do now? But then Bohr would come up with a way of showing how Einstein's thinking was flawed, or incomplete, or didn't reach the conclusions they thought it did.
Imagine having that job being on the receiving end of Einstein's criticisms. But he didn't. Einstein was never able to unseat the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Every thought experiment that Einstein developed to, quote, unquote, disprove the uncertainty principle and say, no. You guys really are missing something about reality, Niels Bohr would come in and say, no.
No. No. No, Einstein. You're the one that's missing something. He did it time after time after time.
And eventually, Einstein just gave up trying to fight. Mainstream physics began to accept the reality of quantum mechanics, including giving Einstein a Nobel Prize for his development of it. He may have been internally rolling his eyes. But as the mainstream physics community went on the quantum mechanics train, Einstein went off on his own. And he was always convinced that there was an underlying fundamental theory that would explain quantum mechanics, that really we were still having this too high a level that we are missing something fundamental, that really the universe didn't play by these kinds of rules.
He even said, a quote, a famous quote from him. He said, quantum mechanics is very impressive, but an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory produces a good deal, but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the old one. I am, at all events, convinced that he does not play dice. He was cool with quantum.
He was cool with wave particle duality. He was cool with using statistics at large scales, but he didn't like the idea of fuzziness and probabilities operating at a fundamental level. In the end, he was convinced that quantum mechanics was incomplete. He accepted that our measurements may never be perfectly precise, but that didn't mean that that it was a fundamental aspect of reality, just a shortcoming of our methods. That he believed that Heisenberg uncertainty principle was more a reflection of our inability to measure something just because we have to perform experiments to get at reality rather than a limitation of reality itself.
He believed that the universe was, at its heart, deterministic and didn't involve probabilities or fuzziness or uncertainty or any of that other junk. And as far as we can tell, Einstein was wrong. We've tested for fuzziness. We've tested for uncertainty. We've tested every one of Einstein's paradoxes.
He says, oh, yeah. If if quantum mechanics is right, it's gonna lead to this paradox. And we've tested that, and we found quantum mechanics to be right again and again and again. After decades of trying, a century of trying, it seems that indeterminism really does rule the subatomic world and Einstein went to his grave thinking the wrong thing. Where do we go from there?
Well, like I said at the beginning, Einstein was kind of a smart cookie. He was wrong about the cosmological constant and about quantum mechanics, but in his wrongness, he still advanced our understanding in major ways. For example, the photoelectric effect, which he was able to explain, if you've ever used a digital camera or seen an LED, that is the photoelectric effect in action. Einstein was able the first one to explain it. When he was looking at how light can interact with atoms in a gas and absorption and emission, he discovered something called stimulated emission, and if you've ever used a laser, you can thank Einstein.
Einstein's attempts to disprove quantum mechanics using various paradoxes led to us actually understanding something called quantum entanglement. Like, Einstein accidentally discovered quantum entanglement because he was trying to prove quantum mechanics wrong, and instead, he discovered a very cool piece of quantum mechanics. And then going back to the big scale, remember that cosmological constant thing that he called his biggest blunder? Well, in 1998, we discovered that our universe isn't just expanding, it's accelerating in its expansion. There is what appears to be, with our simplest explanation, we don't understand.
We call it dark energy, but we don't understand it. The simplest explanation is that there is a anti gravity effect built into our universe that is causing it to accelerate in its expansion. In other words, the simplest explanation for our observations in 1998, nearly a century after Einstein developed general relativity and created his greatest blunder, is the cosmological constant. Thanks to Ken l on Patreon and Ben y on email for the questions that led to today's episode. And, of course, thanks to my all my Patreon contributors, especially the top ones.
That's patreon.com/pmsutter to keep this show going. I need to give a shout out, though, to Matthew k, Justin z, Justin g, Kevin o, Duncan m, Corey d, Barbara k, Nuder Dude, Chris c, Robert m, Nate h, Andrew f, Chris l, Cameron l, Nalia, Aaron s, Kurt t, and James h. Really, seriously, thank you. I really appreciate it. It's it's keeping me going, and it's keeping the show going, and it it would be impossible without you.
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