Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: An Interview with Peter Galison, Part II

Abstract

January 2004 · Historically Speaking Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps:An Interview with Peter Galison, Part Il Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa /N A RECENT New York Review of Books essay Freeman Dyson, one ofthe mostprominent physicists ofourtime, notes that "{a}monghistorians ofscience during the last half-century, there have been twopredominant schools ofthought. The leaders ofthe two schools have been Thomas Kuhn and Peter Galison. " For Kuhn science is typified byperiods ofrelativestability wherein a dominant orthodox theory reigns because ofits ability to explain observedphenomena. But at rare moments "normalscience" undergoes transformation as new discoveries andespecially new ideas overthrowprevailing notions in a scientific revolution. In contrast to Kuhn's idea-driven view of scientific progress, Galison has emphasized the importance oftools. Dyson claims that "{h}istorians trained in theoretical science tend to be Kuhnians, while those trainedin experimentalscience tendto be GaIisonians . " Moreover, hesuggests that in Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps Galison "is telling us that hestillbelieves in theprimacy oftools, but not to the exclusion ofeverything else. " In this second installment ofa two-part interview, Peter Galison , the Mallinckrodt Professor ofthe History of Science and ofPhysics at Harvard University, explores the utility ofthe notion ofscientificrevolution andthe question ofheroicstanding in the history ofscience with Donald Yerxa. Theirconversation took place in Galison's Harvard office on September 29, 2003. Yerxa: Why is it that the names of Newton, Darwin, and Einstein have achieved such heroic standing, whereas Hooke, Owen, and Poincaré have not? Or perhaps to get at this another way, what sets Einstein apart from all other physicists and mathematicians of his time and context, including Poincaré? Galison: Let me start with the limited question and then move to the more general one. And the limited question is why has Einstein become the most famous human being of the century, the man of the century for Time magazine? His picture is on advertisements , and the last time I checked there were about 3 million Einstein sites on the Web. There is no limit to his fame. Yet outside of France (where he still carries a cultural legacy) and mathematics departments (where his works are still venerated) Poincaré is not a household name. There are many reasons for this. Einstein is a generation younger than Poincaré (in 1905 he was twenty-six whereas Poincaré was fifty-one). From the time Einstein came ofage, he saw himselfas an outsider . He fought with his teachers, argued fiercely with his family, friends, and parents, and rebelled against Prussian militarism. During World War I he was one of the few people in Germany who signed pacifist-oriented petitions. He was a dissenting voice in the run up to Nazism; and in the U.S. after World War II he made no bones about his unhappiness with McCarthyism, nuclear stockpiling, and many other pillars ofestablished politics. Einstein clearly loved to identify himself with dissenting stances inside physics and outside. I think that there is something in this triumphant dissent that appeals widely to people in many walks of life. Add to this appeal the enormous attraction many people have to the particular kinds ofproblems with which Einstein grappled— the nature ofspace, the meaning oftime, the origin ofthe universe, its fate, its structure. These were questions that make easy contact with broadly cultural, religious, and philosophical issues that have troubled people for centuries. The confluence of these various public personas is irresistible, creating a figure ofEinstein that carries a limitless iconic draw. Poincaré was a very different figure. In many ways he was a symbol of a progressive , late 19th-century French establishment. He was somebody, I argue in the book, who should not be seen, as he so often is, as a reactionary , as someone who merely joined the backward-leaning, anti-relativity crowd. True, Poincaré objected to certain commitments ofEinstein, but it wasn't because Poincar é was trying to restore a Newtonian classical order. He was a progressivist in many respects, politically, technologically, scientifically , as well as philosophically. He was for altering things, but it was by repair, by a kind of intervention to fix things that were wrong—an engineer's progressivism rather than a rebel's sense ofneeding to upend. But Poincaré's meliorism...