Read The Perfect Theory for Free Online Page A

Astronomical Society, who had a German background, was asked to resign. British scientists’ relations with their German colleagues were frozen for the duration of the war.
    Eddington thought and behaved differently. As a Quaker he was passionately opposed to war. During the mounting anger against the German intelligentsia, he found himself speaking out in dissent.“Think, not of a symbolic German, but of your former friend Prof. X, for instance,” he appealed to his colleagues. “Call him Hun, pirate, baby-killer, and try to work up a little fury. The attempt breaks down ludicrously.” Eddington not only spoke out for the Germans; he refused to be sent into battle and to fight. As he witnessed some of his friends and colleagues being shipped off to the front to be killed in action, Eddington campaigned against the war. Given an exemption out of “national importance”—he was more important to the nation as an astronomer than as a foot soldier—he made few friends.
    Â 
    Alone in Berlin, surrounded by the mayhem of war, Einstein worked on perfecting his final theory. It looked correct, but he needed more math to make it right. So he set off to the University of Göttingen, then the mecca of modern mathematics, to visit the mathematician David Hilbert. Hilbert was a colossus and ruled the world of mathematicians. He had transformed the field, attempting to lay down an unshakable formal foundation from which all of mathematics could be constructed. There would be no more looseness in mathematics. Everything would have to be deduced from a basic set of principles using well-established formal rules. Mathematical truths were
really
truths only if proved according to these rules. This had become known as the “Hilbert Program.”
    Hilbert had surrounded himself with some of the most important mathematicians in the world. One of his colleagues had been Hermann Minkowski, who had shown Einstein how his special theory of relativity could be written in a far more elegant, mathematical language—the “superfluous erudition” that Einstein had disparaged a few years before. Hilbert’s students and assistants—such as Hermann Weyl, John von Neumann, and Ernst Zermelo—would be leading figures in twentieth-century mathematics. Along with his group at Göttingen, Hilbert had grand plans: to construct a complete theory of the natural world based on first principles, just as in mathematics. He saw Einstein’s work as an integral part of his project.
    During Einstein’s short visit to Göttingen in June of 1915, Einstein lectured and Hilbert took notes. They discussed and argued back and forth about the details. Einstein was strong on the physics and Hilbert on the mathematics. But they didn’t make any progress. Einstein, still wary of mathematics and still shaky in his understanding of Riemannian geometry, found it difficult to completely understand Hilbert’s detailed, technical points.
    Shortly after Einstein ended what seemed like a fruitless visit, he began to doubt his new theory of relativity. He already knew that it wasn’t truly general—when he and Grossmann had finished their papers in 1913, it was clear to him that the law of gravity
still
didn’t fit. And some of his predictions were off. For example, his theory predicted a drift for Mercury, very much as Le Verrier had observed almost fifty years before, but it wasn’t
exactly
right. It was still off by a factor of two. Einstein had to look at his equations again.
    Over a period of just three weeks, Einstein decided to ditch the new law of gravity that he had proposed with Grossmann, which didn’t obey the general principle of relativity. He wanted a law of gravity that would be true in any reference frame, much as he had already done with the other laws of physics. And he wanted to use the new Riemannian geometry that he had learned from Grossmann. Every few days he