1928 / Chicago

Norman Maclean Learns From the Master

Tags:: age,; Albert Einstein,; amateurs,; billiards,; games,; physics

I said, “I am sure. The easy shot would have left the balls spread all over the table. Any of the good players down at Bensinger’s would have played it the way you did, and a lot of them would have missed.”

I think that he was glad I had stopped him from blaming old age, but he was through for the day. He locked his cue into the rack on the wall, and said, either to me or himself or the wall, “Billiards is a good game.”

He made sure that his tie was in the center of his stiff collar before he added, “But billiards is not as good a game as painting.”

He rolled down his sleeves and put on his coat. Elegant as he was, he was a workman and took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves when he played billiards. As he stood on the first step between the billiard room and the card room, he added, “But painting is not as good a game as music.”

On the next and top step, he concluded, “But then music is not as good a game as physics.”

Image: Jas. Maturo, one of the top pocket billiards players in the country, c. 1919. Library of Congress.

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A nice piece of writing but with two glaring factual errors.

First, Einstein worked out the basics of special relativity on his own, and barely took notice of the Michelson-Morley light experiments. They were anything but an impetus for him, and later in life he stated that he was almost unaware of them at the time. As with general relativity later, his confidence in his work was so great that experimental confirmation was almost an afterthought for him.

Secondly, he did not leave "Newtonian physics lying in a heap feebly struggling to get out from under its own ruins." As with many scientific theories, Newton's gravitation became a framework for a more specific successor model. Relativity itself is a theory, and may be outmoded eventually by a successor, perhaps the long-sought theory that can contain both quantum mechanics and relativity together. But both QM and relativity work fine in their own domains. And Newton's theory is still good enough that gravitational effects in space travel are calculated using IT, rather than the more complex relativity.

Posted by Charles Zigmund on Tue 5 Oct 2010
As if that's not enough, an entire episode of "Bonanza" was dedicated to Albert Michelson. The young Michelson was mentored in his studies by none other than Adam Cartwright, while still finding time to reform an anti-semitic teacher.

Posted by Dave on Tue 5 Oct 2010
Dear Charles Zigmund: Actually Einstein may have been indirectly aware of the Michelson-Morley experiment through Lorentz. He also knew, through Poincare, of the idea of Lorentz contraction and the problem of simultaneity applied to moving bodies without charge. Einstein applied these ideas to electromagnetic phenomena as well and drew some very remarkable logical conclusions. At least this is the way I understand the nub of what Pais says about it in his biography of Einstein. The history of ideas is almost always more complicated than we think and are told, not just in physics, but all fields. No offense. thanks,

Posted by Luke Lea on Wed 6 Oct 2010
I agree with you, this is a very nice article.
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/norman-maclean-learns-from-the-master.php?page=all

Posted by piert on Fri 8 Oct 2010

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Sports & Games

About the Text

From “‘Billiards Is a Good Game’: Gamesmanship and America’s First Nobel Prize Scientist.” Maclean’s father taught his two sons the Bible and how to fish, a pedagogy alluded to in the opening sentence of the titular novella of his only completed book, A River Runs Through It—“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” Having devoted most of his life to teaching Romanticism and Shakespeare, Maclean died at the age of eighty-seven in 1990.

A win always seems shallow: it is the loss that is so profound and suggests nasty infinities.