Yannick Grannec - The Goddess of Small Victories

“Go off and leave me face-to-face with Wolfgang … and it will seem an eternity. But with you beside me, Adele, this meal will appear to last only a minute. That is relativity!”

This time, the younger physicist expelled his breath audibly. Einstein rewarded him with a punch in the arm.

“To be entirely frank, little madam, I could explain relativity to you in simple terms, but it would take years for you to understand and master the ideas that underlie it.”

Pauli massaged his bruised shoulder.

“Everyone thinks they understand relativity nowadays. Too much vulgarization is bad for science.”

“Relax, dear Zweistein.* You’ll get your turn. One day you, too, will be besieged by throngs of ecstatic college students. Are you ready for glory? How will you sell your exclusion principle to a schoolchild?” 12

“I’ll refuse, plain and simple.”

“If you can’t explain an idea to a child of six, it’s because you don’t fully understand it.”

“You should go back to being a vegetarian, Herr Einstein. Eating meat has warped your mind.”

“I’m not asking you to go into every detail, Pauli. I am simply noting your inability as a young Turk of quantum physics to place your concepts in the realm of sensory experience, to provide an objective representation of reality.”

“You’re arguing in bad faith, Herr Einstein! The ability to reduce a theory to simple terms is no proof of its robustness.”

“Your elementary particles behave as chaotically as a crowd of women in Filene’s Basement. Although the women are more predictable. I see no coherence in this hodgepodge of complexity and randomness. For me, God is subtle, but he is not malicious.”

“You still have to prove his existence.”

“Talk to Gödel! That’s his hobbyhorse.”

Kurt clenched his jaw and pushed his meager portion away.

“I make no claims. People would take me for a crank.”

Pauli finished cleaning his plate and noiselessly set his knife and fork on it. We all waited for his counterstroke.

“My dear Einstein, our hostess must not be made to suffer through our quarrels. She will forgive me if I refrain from answering her question or crossing swords with you. I am not up to the task.”

“Come, Pauli, you’re not good enough to play modest!”

A leaden silence settled over the table, which Einstein dispersed with his booming laugh.

“I love provoking you, Wolfgang. It is always an enriching experience. But don’t worry, you are the future and I am the past, no one doubts it. Help yourself to a little more of this superb coleslaw. It is wonderful for loosening the bowels.”

My husband’s face was pale. The rivalry between the two physicists, masked as it was by jokes, was stressful to him. I cast about for another avenue of discussion.

“How did your meeting with Mr. Russell go? And why didn’t you invite him to dinner, Kurt?” 13

I would have liked to meet this English lord with the exciting reputation. According to rumor, Bertrand Russell’s wife had had two children by her lover during their marriage. Russell divorced her to marry the governess. In the puritanical United States, he had been judged morally unfit for teaching. His libertarian principles made him persona non grata. Kurt, whose calling as a logician had been influenced by Russell’s Principia Mathematica , deeply respected this man who had been ostracized for his pacifist opinions. He had been dismissed from Cambridge and jailed for publicly opposing British participation in the First World War.

“Believe me, Adele, Bertrand Russell would not have appreciated your Austrian cooking properly. And you’d have had one more relic at your table. It seems to me that Bertie has been surpassed by modern logic, just as I feel my backside being booted by your young colleagues. Pauli, pour me something to drink!”

“He returns the compliment, Professor Einstein. He thinks you and Gödel are Platonist dinosaurs. In his words, you have a ‘German,’ a ‘Jewish’ weakness for metaphysics.”

“Pauli, physics without philosophy is nothing more than engineering. Russell’s feeble quips will never persuade me of the contrary!”

“Isn’t your own son an engineer?”

“Yes, and if intelligence were hereditary, he would agree with me. My daughter-in-law is happy just to sculpt, it’s restful. Don’t try to change the subject, Pauli. I’m holding fast to it! When science moves away from philosophy, it loses its soul. The founders of physics were humanists. They didn’t abide by the modern dichotomy. They were physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers.”

“Please don’t restart the quarrel over epistemology. Adele is going to ask me to explain it to her, and I haven’t got the energy!”

“What is and what can be defined are closely related, of course, but it is my belief that what is far exceeds what we can at present define.”

“In that case, don’t call quantum physics into question on the grounds that we can’t define the whole of it.”

“I was talking about philosophy. Stop pulling all of the atomic covers to your side, Pauli! What’s your opinion, Gödel?”

“Nothing keeps us from moving in Russell’s direction. I plan to work in that vein both as a logician and a philosopher. I believe in the axiomatization of philosophy. The discipline has, at best, reached the level of Babylonian mathematics.”

“I recognize your love of Leibniz in that. 14But isn’t it too ambitious, even for you?”

“My life will be too short to complete the program. I expect to die young.”

Herr Einstein threw a wad of bread at him.

“Stop pretending. Your life will be long, and you will have a prolific career, especially if you follow the advice of your charming wife. Eat!”

Staring into space, Pauli picked his teeth.

“So, Gödel, you have your white whale just as our illustrious Einstein does. A unified field theory and an axiomatized philosophy? That will keep the two of you busy until retirement, dear colleagues! Don’t forget to send me a telegram when you succeed. I’ll bring flowers.”

“You think I’m a relic. But just wait! Albert still has juice!”

“What is this unified field theory?”

“Gödel, your little woman is insatiable!”

“Don’t feel any obligation, Herr Einstein. She won’t understand a thing.”

“Don’t be such a prude! I am happy to take part in this sort of exercise.”

He kneaded a morsel of bread.

“The physical world, dear woman, is subject to four major forces: electromagnetism; weak interaction, which is the source of radioactivity; strong nuclear force, which holds matter together; and—”

He tossed his bread ball at Pauli.

“Gravitation. Every body attracts every other body. I’m not referring, of course, to my young friend’s carnal attractions, which have little sway over me. The tiny force of gravity is an enormous pebble in the physicist’s shoe. We can’t manage to classify it in a coherent model next to the three others. And yet, we confirm its existence every moment of our lives. I fall, you fall, we fall from a height. Miraculously the stars do not fall on our heads. In short, you see me needling Pauli for the sport of it. We are both right, but not at the same time. We each propose an accurate description of the world, he for the infinitely small, and I for the infinitely large. We hope to be reconciled in a magnificent unified theory to the cheering of crowds and with garlands of flowers. I’m working on it like crazy, and Wolfgang loves flowers.”

Kurt, as though he’d missed an entire section of space-time, returned to the previous conversation.

“In any case, Russell doesn’t like Princeton. He’s so British. He claims that the neo-Gothic university buildings just ape the ones at Oxford.”