Subtle Is The Lord Book

Really illuminating and surprisingly critical on two fronts. One, Pais is critical of Einstein himself and does not write the usual hagiography of the great man, but deals with him as a working scientist who made occasional errors as all humans do. The relativity "revolution" is put in perspective as a continuation of classical physics, by comparison with the true break with the past that was occurring in quantum theory. He is also aware that Einstein's opposition to quantum theory cannot be dismissed with the usual tagline of "God does not play dice." The opposition to QM is deeper and more philosophical in nature and concerns the criteria needed for any theory to be considered an account of objective reality, a question scientists have not even begun to consider and one which Bell's theorem does not clear up at all (Bell spoke on the same issue at the end of his life in speaking about the be-ables of a theory, which do not include the wave function). Einstein knew how isolated he was in later years from the mainstream of physics but then again he was always an outsider from day one. It would be difficult if not impossible for a person like this to succeed in physics (or anywhere in academia) today, as we are much more social and prone to groupthink in our current approach to knowledge.