Einstein's Third Paradise, by Gerald Holton

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Historians              of modern science have good reason to be grateful to Paul Arthur Schilpp,

His motto              was: "The asking of questions about a philosopher's meaning while              he is alive."

And to his everlasting credit, he persuaded Albert              Einstein to do what he had resisted all his years: to sit down to              write, in 1946 at age sixty-seven, an extensive autobiography –              forty-five pages long in print.

o be sure, Einstein excluded there most of what he called "the                merely personal.

He wrote                that when still very young, he had searched for an escape from the                seemingly hopeless and demoralizing chase after one's desires and                strivings.

hat escape offered itself first in religion. Although                brought up as the son of "entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents,"                through the teaching in his Catholic primary school, mixed with                his private instruction in elements of the Jewish religion, Einstein                found within himself a "deep religiosity"– indeed,                "the religious paradise of youth."

The primacy of young Albert's First                Paradise came to an abrupt en

As he put it early in his "Autobiographical Notes," through reading popular science books he came to doubt the stories of the Bible. Thus he passed first through what he colorfully described as a "positively fanatic indulgence in free thinking."¹ But then he found new enchantments. First, at age twelve, he read a little book on Euclidean plane geometry – he called it "holy," a veritable "Wunder."

Then, still as a boy, he became entranced by the contemplation of                that huge external, extra-personal world of science, which presented                itself to him "like a great, eternal riddle.

To that                study one could devote oneself, finding thereby "inner freedom                and security."

He believed that choosing the "road to this Paradise,"

. Indeed, by age                sixteen, he had his father declare him to the authorities as "without                confession," and for the rest of his life he tried to dissociate                himself from organized religious activities and associations, inventing                his own form of religiousness, just as he was creating his own physics.

On the contrary, my task here                is to demonstrate that at the heart of Einstein's mature identity                there developed a fusion of his First and his Second Paradise –                into a Third Paradise, where the meaning of a life of brilliant                scientific activity drew on the remnants of his fervent first feelings                of youthful religiosity.

In 1918 he gave a glimpse of it in a speech ("Prinzipien                der Forschung") honoring the sixtieth birthday of his friend                and colleague Max Planck, to whose rather metaphysical conception                about the purpose of science Einstein had drifted while moving away                from the quite opposite, positivistic one of an early intellectual                mentor, Ernst Mach.

"simplified and lucid image of the world" not                only was the supreme task for a scientist, but also corresponded                to a psychological need: to flee from personal, everyday life, with                all its dreary disappointments, and escape into the world of objective                perception and thought.

Into the formation of such a world picture                the scientist could place the "center of gravity of his emotional                life [Gefühlsleben]."

And in a sentence with special                significance, he added that persevering on the most difficult scientific                problems requires "a state of feeling [Gefühlszustand]                similar to that of a religious person or a lover."

Weltanschauung

Einstein was of course not alone in this pursuit. The German literature                of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contained a                seemingly obsessive flood of books and essays on the oneness of                the world picture

They included writings by both Ernst Mach and                Max Planck, and, for good measure, a 1912 general manifesto appealing                to scholars in all fields of knowledge to combine their efforts                in order to "bring forth a comprehensive Weltanschauung."

The thirty-four signatories included Ernst Mach, Sigmund Freud,                Ferdinand Tonnies, David Hilbert, Jacques Loeb. and the then still                little-known Albert Einstein.

ut while for most others this culturally profound longing for                unity – already embedded in the philosophical and literary                works they all had studied – was mostly the subject of an occasional                opportunity for exhortation (nothing came of the manifesto), for                Einstein it was different, a constant preoccupation responding to                a persistent, deeply felt intellectual and psychological need.

Fundamental Ideas and Methods of Relativity."

the happiest thought of my life"

a thought experiment that came to him in 1907: nothing less than                the definition of the equivalence principle, later developed in                his general relativity theory.

It occurred to Einstein – thinking                first of all in visual terms, as was usual for him – that if                a man were falling from the roof of his house and tried to let anything                drop, it would only move alongside him, thus indicating the equivalence                of acceleration and gravity

In Einstein's words, "the acceleration                of free fall with respect to the material is therefore a mighty                argument that the postulate of relativity is to be extended to coordinate                systems that move nonuniformly relative to one another . . . ."

General Relativity Theory,

the "thought concerning the Faraday [experiment]                on electromagnetic induction played for me a leading role."

special theory

well-known fact, discovered by Faraday in 1831,

that the induced current is                the same whether it is the coil or the magnet that is in motion                relative to the other,

hereas the "theoretical interpretation                of the phenomenon in these two cases is quite different

While                other physicists, for many decades, had been quite satisfied with                that difference, here Einstein reveals a central preoccupation at                the depth of his soul: "The thought that one is dealing here                with two fundamentally different cases was for me unbearable [war                mir unertraeglich]. The difference between these two cases could                not be a real difference . . . . The phenomenon of the electromagnetic                induction forced me to postulate the (special) relativity principle.

"By and by                I despaired [verzweifelte ich] of discovering the true laws                by means of constructive efforts based on known facts.

The longer                and the more despairingly I tried, the more I came to the conviction                that only the discovery of a universal formal principle could lead                us to assured results.

He might have added that the same postulational                method had already been pioneered in their main works by two of                his heroes, Euclid and Newton.

Other physicists, for example Bohr                and Heisenberg, also reported that at times they were brought to                despair in their research. Still other scientists were evidently                even brought to suicide by such disappointment. For researchers                fiercely engaged at the very frontier, the psychological stakes                can be enormous. Einstein was able to resolve his discomfort by                turning, as he did in his 1905 relativity paper, to the postulation                of two formal principles (the principle of relativity throughout                physics, and the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo), and                adopting such postulations as one of his tools of thought.

Einstein also had a second method                to bridge the unbearable differences in a theory:

generalizing it

so that the apparently differently grounded phenomena are                revealed to be coming from the same base

"It is a wonderful feeling                [ein herrliches Gefuhl] to recognize the unity of a complex                of appearances which, to direct sense experiences, appear to be                quite separate things."

The postulation of universal formal principles, and the discovery                among phenomena of a unity, of Einheitlichkeit, through the                generalization of the basic theory – those were two                of Einstein's favorite weapons,

he confessed: "I am driven by my need to                generalize [mein Verallgemeinerungsbeduerfnis]." That                need, that compulsion, was also deeply entrenched in German culture                and resonated with, and supported, Einstein's approach

n order to get his certificate to be a high school science                teacher, Einstein took optional courses on Immanuel Kant and Goethe,                whose central works he had studied since his teenage years.

Thus he generalized from                old experimental results, like Faraday's, to arrive at special relativity,                in which he unified space and time, electric and magnetic forces,                energy and mass, and so resolved the whole long dispute among scientists                between adherence to a mechanistic versus an electromagnetic world                picture

Then he generalized the special theory to produce what                he first significantly called, in an article of 1913, not the general                but the generalized relativity theory.

And, finally, Einstein threw himself into the attempt                of a grand unification of quantum physics and of gravity: a unified                field theory.

It is an example of an intense and perhaps unique,                life-long, tenacious dedication, despite Einstein's failure at the                very end – which nevertheless, as a program, set the stage                for the ambition of some of today's best scientists, who have taken                over that search for the Holy Grail of physics – a theory of                everything.

As in his science, Einstein also lived under                the compulsion to unify – in his politics, in his social ideals,                even in his everyday behavior.

Later he supported the One World movement, dreamed of a unified                supernational form of government,

And at the other end of the spectrum, in his essay                on ethics, Einstein cited Moses, Jesus, and Buddha as equally valid                prophets.

No boundaries, no barriers; none in life, as there are none in                nature. Einstein's life and his work were so mutually resonant that                we recognize both to have been carried on together in the service                of one grand project – the fusion into one coherency.

There were also no boundaries or barriers                between Einstein's scientific and religious feelings.

After having                passed from the youthful first, religious paradise into his second,                immensely productive scientific one, he found in his middle years                a fusion of those two motivations – his Third Paradise.

We had a hint of this development in his remark in 1918, where                he observed the parallel states of feeling of the scientist and                of the "religious person."

"I learned nothing . .                . . he tended to express things in theological terms, and this was                often the only way to argue with him. I found it finally quite uninteresting."

One is his remark to one of his assistants,                Ernst Straus: "What really interests me is whether God had                any choice in the creation of the world." The second is Einstein's                reply to a curious telegram.

In 1929, Boston's Cardinal O'Connell branded Einstein's theory                of relativity as "befogged speculation producing universal                doubt about God and His Creation,

"Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid 50 words.

I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself                in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself                with the fate and the doings of mankind.

Einstein's theory, if carried to its logical conclusion,                would bring to mankind a scientific formula for monotheism.

Religion of Science"

If Einstein had read Carus's book,                The Religion of Science (1893)

"Scientific truth is not profane, it is sacred

and earlier in Robert                K. Merton's magisterial book of 1938, Science, Technology and                Society in Seventeenth-Century England.

The Integration of Religion and Science,"

Starting in the late 1920s, Einstein                became more and more serious about clarifying the relationship between                his transcendental and his scientific impulses.

He wrote several                essays on religiosity; five of them, composed between 1930 and the                early 1950s, are reproduced in his book Ideas and Opinions.

In those chapters we can watch the result of a struggle that had                its origins in his school years, as he developed, or rather invented,                a religion that offered a union with science.

three developmental stages

"with primitive man it is above all fear                that evokes religious notions. This 'religion of fear' .

. is                in an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special                priestly caste" that colludes with secular authority to take                advantage of it for its own interest

The next step – "admirably                illustrated in the Jewish scriptures" – was a moral religion                embodying the ethical imperative, "a development [that] continued                in the New Testament."

Yet it had a fatal flaw:

"the anthropomorphic character of the concept of God,

easy to grasp by "underdeveloped                minds" of the masses while freeing them of responsibility.

This flaw disappears at Einstein's third, mature stage of religion,                to which he believed mankind is now reaching and which the great                spirits (he names Democritus, St. Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza)

had already attained

cosmic religious feeling

n describing the driving                motivation toward that final, highest stage, Einstein uses the same                ideas, even some of the same phrases, with which he had celebrated                first his religious and then his scientific paradise

that sheds all anthropomorphic elements.

The                individual feels the futility of human desires, and aims at the                sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature                and in the world of thought.

"Individual existence impresses                him as a sort of prison, and he wants to experience the universe                as a single, significant whole

By that time Spinoza's work and life had long been important to                Einstein

He had written an introduction to a biography of Spinoza                (by his son-in-law, Rudolf Kayser, 1946); he had contributed to                the Spinoza Dictionary (1951)

"I maintain that the cosmic religious                feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research                . . . . A contemporary has said not unjustly that in this materialistic                age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly                religious people.

he had referred to Spinoza                in many of his letters; and he even had composed a poem in Spinoza's                honor

He admired Spinoza for his independence of mind, his deterministic                philosophical outlook, his skepticism about organized religion and                orthodoxy – which had resulted in his excommunication from                his synagogue in 1656

and even for his ascetic preference,                which compelled him to remain in poverty and solitude to live in                a sort of spiritual ecstasy, instead of accepting a professorship                at the University of Heidelberg.

In another of his essays on religion, Einstein points to a plausible                source for his specific formulations: "Those individuals to                whom we owe the great creative achievements of science were all                of them imbued with a truly religious conviction that this universe                of ours is something perfect, and susceptible through the rational                striving for knowledge. If this conviction had not been a strongly                emotional one, and if those searching for knowledge had not been                inspired by Spinoza's amor dei intellectualis, they would                hardly have been capable of that untiring devotion which alone enables                man to attain his greatest achievements."

Originally neglected, Spinoza's                Ethics, published only posthumously, profoundly influenced                other thinkers, such as Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher,                Goethe (who called him "our common saint"), Albert Schweitzer,                and Romain Rolland (who, on reading Ethics, confessed, "I                deciphered not what he said, but what he meant to say")

As Spinoza wrote in                Proposition 15 in Ethics, he opposed assigning to God "body                and soul and being subject to passions."

n other pages of Ethics, Einstein could read Spinoza's                opposition to the idea of cosmic purpose, and that he favored the                primacy of the law of cause and effect – an all-pervasive determinism                that governs nature and life – rather than "playing at                dice," in Einstein's famous remark.

And as if he were merely                paraphrasing Spinoza, Einstein wrote in 1929 that the perception                in the universe of "profound reason and beauty constitute true                religiosity; in this sense, and in this sense alone, I am a deeply                religious man."

Much has been written about the response                of Einstein's contemporaries to his Spinozistic cosmic religion

But what finally                most interests us here is to what degree Einstein, having reached                his Third Paradise

Spinoza's Ethics and Einstein's publications in cosmology

For example, in Part I of Ethics ("Concerning God"), Proposition 29 begins: "In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things are determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and act in a certain manner." Here is at least a discernible overlap with Einstein's tenacious devotion to determinism and strict causality at the fundamental level, despite all the proofs from quantum mechanics of the reign of probabilism, at least in the subatomic realm.

Corollary 2 of                Proposition 20: "It follows that God is immutable or, which                is the same thing, all His attributes are immutable."

In a                letter of September 3, 1915, to Else (his cousin and later his wife),                Einstein, having read Spinoza's Ethics again, wrote, "I                think the Ethics will have a permanent effect on me."

Two years later, when he expanded his general relativity to include "cosmological considerations," Einstein found to his dismay that his system of equations did "not allow the hypothesis of a spatially closed-ness of the world [raeumliche Geschlossenheit]." How did Einstein cure this flaw? By something he had done very rarely: making an ad hoc addition, purely for convenience: "We can add, on the left side of the field equation a – for the time being – unknown universal constant, -

['lambda']." In fact, it seems that not much harm is done thereby. It does not change the covariance; it still corresponds with the observation of motions in the solar system ("as long as

is small"), and so forth. Moreover, the proposed new universal constant

also determines the average density of the universe with which it can remain in equilibrium, and provides the radius and volume of a presumed spherical universe.

Altogether a beautiful, immutable universe – one an immutable God could be identified with. But in 1922, Alexander Friedmann showed that the equations of general relativity did allow expansion or contraction. And in 1929 Edwin Hubble found by astronomical observations the fact that the universe does expand. Thus Einstein – at least according to the physicist George Gamow – remarked that "inserting

was the biggest blunder of my life."

Max Jammer and the physicist John Wheeler, both of whom knew Einstein, traced his unusual ad hoc insertion of

, nailing down that "spatially closed-ness of the world," to a relationship between Einstein's thoughts and Spinoza's Propositions

They also pointed to another possible reason for it: In Spinoza's                writings, one finds the concept that God would not have made an                empty world. But in an expanding universe, in the infinity of time,                the density of matter would be diluted to zero in the limit. Space                itself would disappear, since, as Einstein put it in 1952, "On                the basis of the general theory of relativity . . . space as opposed                to 'what fills space' . . . had no separate existence."

and at last to his recognition of science as the                devotion, in his words, of "a deeply religious unbeliever"                – his final embrace of seeming incommensurables in his Third                Paradise.

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