Breakthroughs, Briefly

Photo: Oren Jack Turner

What Spooked Einstein

That modern physics owes a huge debt to Albert Einstein is beyond debate. His contributions to the general and special theories of relativity, gravitational theory and quantum theory are foundational.

Yet, his pointed criticism that quantum mechanics was incomplete because extrapolating the mathematics predicted the bizarre phenomenon of entanglement—that particles separated in space could nonetheless interact—put him at odds with the mainstream physics community. "Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing," he wrote to Max Born in 1926, "but an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. . . . I, at any rate, am convinced that [God] is not playing at dice."

"Most physicists took Einstein's hostility to quantum mechanics to be a sign of senility," says philosophy professor Thomas Ryckman. The impression dogged the great theoretician for the latter third of his life, despite his continued professional productivity. But Ryckman, whose scholarship focuses on the philosophy and history of physics, argues that Einstein "wasn't crazy; he was prescient."

In 1982, the phenomenon Einstein had dismissively dubbed "spooky action at a distance" was confirmed experimentally by French physicist Alain Aspect. Thus, in seeking to poke holes in the dominant paradigm, Einstein unwittingly opened a door to the emerging fields of quantum information theory, quantum computation and quantum cryptography.

Ryckman's research draws on materials held in archives at Caltech and in Jerusalem as well as Einstein's published collected papers. With Arthur Fine, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Washington, he is writing a book, Einstein, slated to be published in 2015 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the theory of relativity.

The vindication of Einstein's schismatic assertion is just one example of the value of examining science through a philosophical lens, Ryckman contends. "Technically trained and historically informed philosophers can help physicists think through and even extend the field of possibilities for resolving these problems," he says.

People Stay Purple

Despite a seemingly ever-widening ideological gulf between Democrats and Republicans at the party leadership level, ordinary citizens in the United States are less polarized, says Amir Goldberg, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Graduate School of Business.

Working with Delia Baldassarri of NYU, Goldberg applied a method of analyzing survey data known as relational class analysis, or RCA, which looks at responses across all issues to identify subgroups that share similar patterns of opinions—even if those opinions differ. Consider, for example, respondents who support health-care reform and oppose gay rights, and those who oppose health-care reform and support gay rights: The relationship between their attitudes on the two issues is the same. "These patterns of agreement and opposition reflect how these people think about politics," says Goldberg, who developed the method with his PhD adviser at Princeton, Paul DiMaggio.

He and Baldassarri examined two decades of data from the American National Election Studies and identified three groups of voters: "ideologues," whose views on economic and social issues align closely with either the liberal or conservative platform; "alternatives," whose opinions on either economic or social issues contradict the stance of the party they identify with; and "agnostics," who show no consistent relationship between their positions on economic and social issues.

Goldberg was stunned to find that the proportions of these three groups—34 percent, 41 percent and 25 percent of the electorate, respectively—remained remarkably consistent over time. "Survey data is very messy because every year it's a cross-section sample of different people," he says. "So, the fact that we see the same three groups year after year, for 20 years, is a staggering finding of stability in a field we know is riddled with noise."

While the voters Goldberg identifies as "ideologues" have indeed tended to become more deeply red or blue, following the lead of party elites, "alternatives" have actually become a more even shade of purple.