Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe by Paul Sen

Author:Paul Sen [Sen, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008262808
Google: vwgIugEACAAJ
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Limited
Published: 2020-05-17T23:00:00+00:00

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Einstein continued to take an active interest in the science of heat for much of his career, in line with his belief that science should serve society. These days, Einstein is so routinely characterized as the absentminded professor that his practical, inventive side is little appreciated. After all, Einstein had been raised in a home where inventing, building, and tinkering with machines was commonplace. His father, Hermann, and Einstein’s uncle Jakob had run a small electrical engineering firm that built dynamos and electricity meters, and though the business struggled and eventually closed, it left the young Albert with a lifelong interest in technological innovation.

Einstein’s first partner in this was an inventor named Rudolf Goldschmidt, with whom Einstein registered a patent for electromagnetically driven loudspeakers in 1928. Then when a mutual friend, a singer called Olga Eisner, began suffering from deafness, the pair designed her a hearing aid.

Neither invention advanced beyond the design phase. The technology with which Einstein progressed furthest was directly inspired by his interest in heat and thermodynamics. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, he worked to help design, patent, and market a refrigerator. At the time, these devices were thermodynamically speaking quite advanced, but they used toxic chemicals such as ammonia, methyl chloride, or sulfur dioxide as their coolant fluid. Refrigerator pumps, if their seals leaked, would release these toxic chemicals into their owners’ homes with devastating consequences. In 1926, Einstein had read a harrowing newspaper account of one Berlin family, including several children, who had died from the fumes emanating from their malfunctioning refrigerator. The story prompted Einstein to try to design a safer one.

As collaborator, Einstein chose a former student named Leo Szilard. Born in Budapest in 1898, Szilard’s talents for physics and mathematics had showed early when he won a Hungarian national prize in mathematics at age eighteen. Soon after he began studying physics at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, where Einstein lectured. A lifelong and consequential friendship began. Szilard’s PhD, written in 1922, the first paper to detect a link between thermodynamics and information theory, was rated the best that year, and by the mid-1920s, Szilard and Einstein had become close friends. Both gifted scientists, the two men had similar values, which included a firm belief that science should serve society. So, when Einstein felt better refrigerators were needed to avoid unnecessary deaths, he called Szilard.

One of Einstein and Szilard’s refrigerator patents

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