Tidbits on the Famous and Less Famous
Victor J. Stenger
Cranks, Quarks, and the Cosmos.  Writings on Science by
Jeremy Bernstein (Basic Books, New York, 1993), 220 pp.,
$23.
Published in Physics Today, August, 1993

	Ever wonder what happened to Tom Lehrer?  
He's teaching math and musicals in Santa Cruz. 
That's one of the interesting tidbits you can find in
Jeremy Bernstein's Cranks, Quarks, and the Cosmos, a
selection of his profiles of scientists from The New
Yorker. 
	Two of the essays concern Einstein.  In Einstein
When Young, Bernstein reviews the 1987 publication of
the first volume of Einstein's personal correspondence
and other papers.  These include letters between Einstein
and his first wife, Mileva Mariôc.  They offer a fascinating
new perspective on the humanitarian who never
mentioned Mileva or his children in his autobiography,
emphasizing instead his lifelong attempt to free himself
from the "merely personal."
	Mileva was a physicist, very unusual for the time,
and the letters between Albert and Mileva contain a
mixture of physics and the personal.  Some revisionists
have suggested that Mileva was the one who actually
developed relativity.  Einstein's letters to Mileva
frequently refer to "our theory," but he gives her
no acknowledgment in any of his publications.  Bernstein
draws no conclusion other than that the letters leave
Einstein as much as an enigma as he was before.
	The physics in the letters is less interesting than
the personal, and Bernstein includes a hilarious quotation
in which Einstein tells about his Jewish mother's
reaction to the prospect of him marrying an older gentile. 
"You are ruining your future and blocking your path
through life, Albert's mother wails.  "That woman
cannot gain entrance to a decent family. . . . When
you'll be 30, she'll be an old hag."
	In several of the other essays, Bernstein criticizes
biographers for giving too many details about the lively
heterosexuality of Schrödinger, Feynman, Watson, and
Crick, and the tragic homosexuality of Alan Turing. 
However this criticism comes across a bit hypocritical,
since Bernstein includes enough racy details himself to
make his own book more interesting.  You won't find
much dry science here.
	However, Cranks is not simply a survey of the
diversions of famous scientists.  Several essays offer
new insights on historically important characters. I
found the essay on Ernst Mach particularly interesting
since I have been curious about his role in scientific
history.  Einstein credits Mach as one of his inspirations,
and Mach's Principle is usually mentioned pro-forma
in cosmology books, but it is not really used anywhere in
Einstein's relativity.  Mach was an interesting
character, though.  He doubted both atoms and relativity,
and the essay relates his interactions with Boltzmann
and Einstein.
	You wont learn much about cranks, quarks, or the
cosmos in his book, but you will find some entertaining
tales about a few of the more famous, and one or two of
the less famous,  stars in the scientific drama.
__________________
Victor J. Stenger is professor of physics at the
University of Hawaii and the author of Not By Design:  The
Origin of the Universe  (Prometheus Books, 1988) and
Physics and Psychics:  The Search for a World Beyond the
Senses  (Prometheus Books, 1990).