THE ULTIMATE AUTODIDACT!

THE ULTIMATE AUTODIDACT!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 18, 2009

“Autodidact” – a self-taught person.”

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Buried in Albert Einstein’s mail one spring day in 1953 lay a letter from a twenty-year-old high school dropout, who claimed to be a disciple named, John Moffat. He wanted to be an artist and was painting landscapes without much financial success. Moffat claimed in the letter that he was working on one of Einstein’s theories.

Einstein received daily scores of letters many of which he never found the time or inclination to read much less answer. Two more dissimilar correspondents would be hard to imagine: Moffat an impoverished artist and self-taught physicist who didn’t even have the benefit of a high school diploma, and Einstein an iconic mythic figure and the most celebrated scientist in the world.

Moffat was living with his British father and Danish mother in Copenhagen, while Einstein was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey.

What both men had in common, however, was that they were both outsiders. This was two years before Einstein’s death, and he had become increasingly isolated from the physics community for his failure to support and embrace the theory of quantum mechanics, which he had himself discovered. Quantum Mechanics has to do with particles that are also waves and that exist in no specific place until they are observed. Einstein was adamant in his belief that Nature could never be so perverse as to be no more identifiable than by mere statistical verification. Einstein had won the Nobel Prize in Physics for research that showed that light consists of particles of energy, research that laid the groundwork for quantum mechanics. He dismissed the theory out of hand although his colleagues embraced it enthusiastically.

He was deterministic and resolute in his goal to prove them wrong with a unified field theory, which would bring his general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics into clear mathematical certitude.

It was in this climate that Einstein received Moffat’s letter. Moffat was bold enough in his letter to suggest that he, who had no formal education in physics, could offer the great man some constructive criticism. “I am not happy with what you are doing,” Moffat wrote, “and have some suggestions that might help.”

Moffat’s boldness was not disturbing to Einstein. He received plenty of such correspondents, but not all of them so genuinely rational and sincere. Something unexpected happened in Moffat’s case, Einstein wrote back.

“Dear Mr. Moffat,” Einstein wrote, “Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open, and we try hard to discover about what is and is not in it.”

The closed box is the universe, and no one had done more to pry off the lid than Einstein, yet in the past twenty years or since 1935, in the eyes of his colleagues, he had contributed almost nothing important to physics.

The letter was written in German. Moffat ran down to his barbershop in Copenhagen to have his barber translate the letter for him. Through that summer and fall, Moffat and Einstein exchanged about half a dozen letters. The local press picked up on these stories, which then caught the attention of the great physicist Niels Bohr, and others. Suddenly doors of opportunity were opened to him.

Imagine John Moffat, a dropout, a failed painter, who to fill the time took an interest in cosmology by browsing through books in the Copenhagen library. To his surprise, although without any formal training, he found he could easily absorb the advanced mathematics and physics in popular science books and magazines. He plowed through four years’ worth of college level material in about a year without a tutor or any academic guidance, and then moved on to professional physics journals. “I got hold of some of Einstein’s papers,” he says, “and decided that there was some weakness in what he was doing. So, I wrote two papers and sent them to him at Princeton. I never thought I’d here anything from him.”

Moffat had identified a mistaken assumption in the mathematics Einstein was using to describe the electromagnetic force. Einstein conceded that Moffat had a point. They went on to exchange several letters over the next six months, inspiring Moffat to pursue a career in physics.

Although he lacked formal training in the field, Moffat knew that Einstein’s letters might earn him an audience with other physicists. So, he contacted Niels Bohr’s secretary at the University of Copenhagen and mentioned the letters. Bohr readily agreed to meet. “Einstein was confiding his problems in physics to me,” he says, “and Bohr wanted to know what Einstein was saying.”

It surprised Moffat how Bohr felt, “he claimed Einstein had become an alchemist.”

Moffat’s encounters with Einstein and Bohr and that story prompted the British consulate in Copenhagen to contact the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in London to set up a meeting with Erwin Schrodinger at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Dublin for an interview. Bedridden, Schrodinger, most famous for the wave equation that bears his name, an elegant mathematical description of one of the central mysteries of quantum theory, commenced to shout what a fool Einstein was. It quite overwhelmed Moffat on the level of his animosity.

Meanwhile, Moffat was accepted in the graduate program in mathematical and theoretical physics at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, due to a surprisingly strong recommendation from Schrodinger. In 1958, Moffat became the first student in the 800-year history of the school to earn his Ph.D. without first completing an undergraduate degree. He now works at the Perimeter Institute near Toronto, Canada.

During the past five decades, Moffat has established himself as a ranking world physicist working on a variety of subjects in theoretical physics, which includes particle physics, quantum field theory, quantum gravity and cosmology.

In the early 1990s, he proposed a radical alternative theory that the speed of light was as much as 30 orders of magnitude faster than its present value just following the big bang. He also has proposed a finite, non-local quantum field theory. He has devoted his career to completing the work of Einstein who was in search of a Unified Field Theory. Moffat departs from Einstein in proposing that the antisymmetric component is another form of gravity and not electromagnetism. In 2008, he published “Reinventing Gravity,” a popular science book that offers an account of his research into gravity theory.

In his long and productive life, now 77, he has remained devoted to his mentor, Einstein, believing his colleagues were wrong, and that history will prove Einstein ahead of the physics community today.

WHY TELL THIS STORY?

When I was in undergraduate school, I had an enlisted US Air Force classmate in my calculus class. He was brilliant, far more brilliant than my professor, and a great tutor of the intricacies of the discipline. After a semester, he asked to be reinstated in the Air Force because he didn’t like the drudgery of academic life. The Air Force, which had a transcript of his work in mathematics and physics, told him to stay on to his degree, and that they would prefer him stay on through his Ph.D. before returning to the military’s Research Institute. He did.

I once asked him how he was as a math student in high school. He said he didn’t take any math, but was a high school dropout, and got his high school diploma in the Air Force. He had worked on some advanced systems in the military, and had completed all the top applied courses offered. It was his instructors who had encouraged the academic sojourn. I don’t remember his real first name but we called him, “Dusty Rhodes.”

My wonder is how many potential brilliant autodidacts like Moffat and Rhodes never received such mentoring and encouragement. I sense that it is in the millions. Sad.

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