Physicist and historian Peter Galison to give Hofstadter Lecture on relativity

By Kendall Madden

Apple trees may have spurred Newton to discover gravity. Similarly, clocks may have helped Einstein conceive the theory of relativity.

So claims Harvard's Peter Galison, who has doctoral degrees in both the history of science and particle physics. Galison, who is the Mallinckrodt Professor of the History of Science and of Physics, will deliver this year's Robert Hofstadter Memorial Lecture at 8 p.m. Monday, May 23, in Room 200 of the Hewlett Teaching Center in the Science and Engineering Quad. The title of his talk, which is free and open to the public, is "The Assassin of Relativity." He also will give a more technical colloquium, titled "Physics: History of the Present," at 4:15 p.m. Tuesday, May 24, in the same location.

"Through history one can begin to understand why we ask the questions we do today and to grasp a little about why we consider the kind of answers we do as satisfactory," said Galison, who was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1997 and winner of the Max Planck Prize in 1999.

Galison is the 13th speaker chosen for the lecture series hosted by the Stanford Physics Department to commemorate the late Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter, who was a member of the Stanford faculty from 1950 to 1990.

Galison is an award-winning author of many books on the history and philosophical underpinnings of 20th-century physics and on the convergence of physics with other disciplines including other scientific fields, art and architecture. He is particularly interested in how scholars in different disciplines communicate with each other.

His most recent book, Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps, follows the story of the development of the theory of relativity and the lives of two genius physicists, one whose name became inextricably linked to the theory and one who fell just short of discovering it himself. Galison refutes the myth that Albert Einstein and Henri Poincaré were solitary thinkers and emphasizes the great influence of the social, political and technological climate on the development of scientific theory. Relativity, for example, may have been suggested to Einstein from train station clocks.

Einstein's theory of relativity is based on the concept that there is no absolute time. Galison's research into the historical context of that discovery indicates that the synchronization of clocks would have been an issue Einstein dealt with almost daily. During the time that Einstein was developing the theory of relativity, he was working a day job at a patent office in Bern, Switzerland. Many of the patent cases that came across Einstein's desk, Galison said, would have dealt with clock synchronization, especially in train stations. The problem with the synchronization of clocks, Galison thinks, may have been the spark that allowed Einstein to make the leap to the concept of relative times.

In his lecture, Galison will investigate another influence on Einsteinhis friendship with Friedrich Adler. Son of the leader of the Socialist Party in Vienna and a physicist himself, Adler attended Zurich Polytechnic with Einstein. Later, after both married and had children, they lived in the same building. Einstein and Adler shared an interest in the philosophy of Ernst Mach, an Austrian physicist and philosopher who proposed that the real lay in the perceptible. Both men eventually became critical of this view, but in different ways. In his lecture, Galison will explore how the thoughts and actions of Einstein and Adler were influenced by their responses to Mach.

Einstein and Adler's fates diverged dramatically, however, on Oct. 21, 1916, when Adler assassinated the Prime Minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Upon Adler's imprisonment and death sentence, Einstein publicly defended his friend and the two established a correspondence.

Galison describes the correspondence as "a heady mix of psychoanalysis, politics, physics and philosophy about the meaning and validity of relativity" that provides a unique insight into the minds of two of the great thinkers in physics and important players in modern history.

Said Galison: "For many years I have known two thingsthat Adler killed the prime minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and that he was a friend and colleague of Einstein. At last I have had a chance to explore how these two facts were connected!"