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 of nature and to demystify the quantum world.
That was the occasion for Moffat’s letter. He thought he could offer Einstein some constructive criticism. “I wrote him to say that I wasn’t happy about what he was doing,” Moffat recalls. There was nothing unusual about this. Plenty of people sent letters to Einstein, not all of them rational. But in Moffat’s case something unexpected happened: Einstein wrote back.
“Dear Mr. Moffat,” the reply began. “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.” That closed box is the universe, of course, and no one had done more to pry off the lid than Einstein. Yet in the eyes of nearly all his colleagues he had contributed almost nothing of importance to physics for almost 20 years.
Were they right? Did he squander his genius by chasing vainly after an ultimate theory? That is the conventional view. But at least a few physicists now argue that Einstein was far ahead of his time, raising questions that will challenge researchers for decades. “It’s often said that Einstein wasted his time later in life,” says Moffat, who went on to become a theoretical physicist. “This, of course, is erroneous. Einstein never wasted his time.”
