Einstein's Grand Quest for a Unified Theory

Buried in Albert Einstein’s mail one spring day in 1953 lay a letter from an ordinary mortal, a 20-year-old high school dropout named John Moffat. Two more disparate correspondents would be hard to imagine. Moffat was an impoverished artist and self-taught physicist. Einstein was a mythic figure—the world’s most famous scientist. Moffat was living with his British father and Danish mother in Copenhagen. Einstein was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Yet both men were outsiders. In his later years, Einstein had become increasingly isolated from the physics community, refusing to embrace the strange but powerful theory of quantum mechanics—with its particles that are also waves and that exist in no specific place until they’re observed. Nature, he argued, couldn’t be so perverse. So for nearly 30 years he had pursued a quixotic goal: the creation of a unified field theory to describe all the forces ...