ALSO BY JOHN W. MOFFAT
Reinventing Gravity
Einstein Wrote Back
John W. Moffat
EINSTEIN WROTE BACK
My Life
in Physics
THOMAS ALLEN PUBLISHERS
TORONTO
Copyright © 2010 John W. Moffat
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems—without the prior written permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Moffat, John W., 1932–
Einstein wrote back / John W. Moffat.
ISBN 978-0-88762-615-9
1. Moffat, John W., 1932– . 2. Moffat, John W., 1932– —Friends and associates.
3. Physicists—Canada—Biography. 4. Physics—History—20th century. I. Title.
QC16.M64A3 2010 530.092 C2010-903799-5
Editor: Janice Zawerbny
Jacket design: Michel Vrána
Jacket photo of Einstein letter: Copyright Albert Einstein Archives,
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
Published by Thomas Allen Publishers,
a division of Thomas Allen & Son Limited,
145 Front Street East, Suite 209,
Toronto, Ontario M5A 1E3 Canada
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of The Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.
1 2 3 4 5 14 13 12 11 10
Printed and bound in Canada
Again to Patricia, whose dedication made this book possible,
and to Sandra, Tina, Derek and Tessa
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 5 Erwin Schrödinger
CHAPTER 6 Fred Hoyle
CHAPTER 7 The Einstein Fest
CHAPTER 8 Wolfgang Pauli
CHAPTER 9 Paul Dirac
CHAPTER 10 Abdus Salam
CHAPTER 11 Imperial College London
CHAPTER 12 Baltimore
CHAPTER 13 CERN and Particle Physics
CHAPTER 14 Princeton and Oppenheimer
CHAPTER 15 Toronto
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
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