Science, Materialism, Mysticism

The Originality of Einstein

A "Close-Up" of the World's Greatest Scientist

On April 18, 1955, died Albert Einstein who had been born on March 14, 1879. To have lived in the time of a man like him has been a rare privilege. For, there is not the slightest doubt that he is the most original thinker in the whole history of science. }.W.N. Sullivan perhaps hits the mark when he says that while we can imagine Galileo's and Newton's work done by other geniuses we find it extremely difficult to believe anyone would have discovered relativity theory if Einstein had not lived!

An Entirely New Turn of Mind

Indeed so original was the discovery that for years even scientists did not know what exactly to make of it. It introduced an entirely new turn of mind. Its revolutionariness lay essentially in bringing to sharp focus a manner of looking at physical things which is at utter variance with our habits of thought for thousands of years. Our mental habits with regard to physical things have been based on the assumption that Nature can be described on any scale by the so-called "laws" we find in the phenomena familiar in our man-sized world, such as that an object coming to meet another moving object travels faster relatively to it than an object going at the same speed away from it or that two events in different places can be said to occur simultaneously or that, given the facilities, a straight line can be drawn through space as far as we like or that the sum of the angles of a triangle always equals two right angles. What came to be known as Newto­nian physics was an immense development of such "laws." The opposite of these "laws" was considered inconceivable and impossible; they were taken to be self-evident truths of the world and the essence of rationality. Before Einstein, there had been a little scepticism here and there about them,

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but it was Einstein who, in the strictest scientific sense, proved them wrong and showed the physical universe to be inexplicable in their terms. This is the fundamental revolu­tion by relativity theory: its crowning concept is the "curved" continuum in which space-measures and time-measures are indistinguishably fused, a mysterious continuum underlying the world we study with our instruments. The revolution has been interpreted in several ways by philosophers and, though some of the interpretations may be misguided, its ultimate import must bear positively, as we shall later see, against the materialistic and mechanistic world-view which was in fashion after Newton had completed the traditional trend of thought about physical things.

Grasping of Reality by Pure Thought

Thanks to Einstein, the mind of man has found an hitherto unsuspected "liberation" in its mode of understand­ing the phenomena of Nature. As part of this liberation is the Einsteinian method of arriving at basic principles. Formerly people believed that the basic principles of physics were to be reached by generalising from observations. Einstein made it clear that they can be reached only by a creative act of the scientific imagination: all mere generalisations fail to co­ordinate the large variety of observed phenomena and so in order to co-ordinate them we have to cast about creatively or inventively for mathematical formulas. These formulas can be of any sort, no matter how "fantastic" and "unphysical" they may seem in their significance: "pure mathematics" must be given a free hand and "axioms" hypothetised without any direct reference to observed events. The only reference these must have to them is indirect: deductions must be made from the hypothetised axioms, and conclu­sions at the end of a long chain of reasoning are alone to be experimentally tested. Of course, the experimental test is the crucial criterion, but the axioms themselves remain, as it were, metaphysical - beyond experimental or observational

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verification. "In this sense," says Einstein, "I agree with the ancients that pure thought can grasp reality." By pure thought Einstein here means a leap of intuition far above the range of observable phenomena, a leap which out of many imaginable alternatives strikes upon the fundamental truth which mathematically, by means of the fewest principles, correlates past observations and provides guidance for cor­rectly predicting future ones. "The really important factor is ultimately intuition," said Einstein to Alexander Moszkows­ki. And Einstein believes also that if mathematical intuition is to be a discovery of truth, there must be a pre-established harmony between man's mind and the nature of the universe and that this nature must be expressing a supreme Intelli­gence ordering things mathematically. Einstein has often declared himself to be a pantheist.

The Irony of the Nobel Prize

Both the method of Einsteinian physics and the non­Newtonian attitude towards Nature were an obstacle in the way of his getting the Nobel Prize. The popular idea is that the award of this Prize was most spontaneous. In fact, the Committee long debated whether the terms set up by Nobel - "a discovery in physics from which mankind has derived great use" - were satisfied by the highly abstract mathematical formulas of Einstein. Could these formulas be called physical discoveries and were they practically useful to mankind in general? Besides, Einstein was bitterly attacked by many schools of thinkers and his theory was even linked to political controversies. The Swedish Academy postponed giving him the Prize for a while. And when in 1922 it did give it to him the chief ground for the award was stated to be not relativity theory but Einstein's work in quantum theory! If Einstein had not done any work in quantum theory and not discovered the photo-electric effect and the photo-chemical law but rested only with the Special and the General Theories of Relativity which are his main life-work he would never

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have received the Nobel Prize in 1922.

This is ironical and seldom known. Yet it brings out a point which too is not known widely. Einstein is a genius who has affected the whole realm of physics and not merely the sphere of large-scale phenomena. Even in the sphere of the ultra-microscopic his wonderful mind has shone. It is a commonplace of scientific knowledge today that light which was supposed for several centuries to be purely a wave motion is now found to consist also of bullet-like particles called photons. Very few realise that nobody except Einstein gave the conclusive proof of Planck's brilliant hypothesis that light was composed of quanta, separate packets of energy; what is more, Einstein proved these energy-packets to be possessing mass and inertia like any material object. Even if he had no relativity theory to his credit, this research and several other subsequent discussions of atomic phenomena would rank him among the top scientists of our century.

Einstein and the Atom Bomb

At present his name is most generally connected with the Atom Bomb. For, the search for atomic energy started from Einstein's formula that energy is equal to mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. But this equation origina­ted not in any quantum theory; it emerged as a logical conclusion by Einstein of his own relativity principle. An application of this equation to atomic changes shows that when a heavy atom breaks to form a lighter one a part of the mass escapes as energy. Nuclear fission, on which the Atom Bomb is based, is the production of energy by changing the heavy uranium to a lighter element: a small amount of difference in mass is the result, but as a minute quantity of mass is, according to Einstein's equation, equal to an im­mense quantity of energy, gigantic power is released. Although the finishing touch to the theory of the Atom Bomb was provided by Fermi and Hahn and Lise Meitner, Einstein provided the foundation and without him there would have

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been no Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A man like him who is a pacifist by disposition and averse to violence could not be expected to take Hiroshima and Nagasaki coolly. He greatly deplored that such terrible devastation should have been wrought. But we shall commit a gross mistake if we think him to have regretted that the Atom Bomb was the conse­quence of his relativity theory. He was a pacifist, but neither a mawkish nor a blindly rigid one. And our understanding of his position vis-a-vis the Atom Bomb will help us understand the character of his mind.

During World War D, Einstein the pacifist lent the fullest

support of his distinguished name to the appeal made by certain scientists to the American Government to expedite the making of the Atom Bomb. Why? The clue to the riddle lies in his words to the Belgian pacifists who prior to the war asked him what they should do in case they were attacked by Hitler. Without the slightest hesitation Einstein replied: "You must fight Hitler and defend your fatherland." He explained that where there was a question merely of a war between governments all more or less similar in fundamental princi­ples one must refuse to shed blood, but when there was a diabolical power like Nazism ranged against a country, the refusal to shed blood would only help to strengthen what was most bloodthirsty. As shown by his reply to the American Youth Congress which opposed participation in war even between democratic states and Germany, he was never deluded by the cry that such a war would be merely between rival imperialisms. And when the war did come, he was aware that Hitler was bent on finding the secret of nuclear fission and if the secret fell into his hands there would be the end of civilisation. So he urged with all his might the American Government to forestall Hitler and with the deadliest weapon of destruction be capable of worsting all anti-civilisation forces.

Nor was he oblivious of the dangers of Soviet Russia

under Stalin. He was passionately opposed to all totalitarian­ism, all autocratic regimes which ruthlessly crush what he

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deemed most precious in life - the impressionable indivi­duality, the creative personality. Not that he was against the existence of an elite to rule the masses: democrat though he was, he knew that in order to attain any definite goal it is imperative that one person should do the thinking and commanding and carry most of the responsibility. But, as he put it, "those who are led should not be driven, and they should be allowed to choose their leader." Both Fascism and Stalinism ran counter to the grain of his nature, though he might fancy several aspects of communist sociology. And, as his biographer Philipp Franck tells us, he was not of the party which advocated the sharing of the atomic secret by all nations. In his opinion, there must be an effective organisation for world government before such a secret could be indiscriminately shared. He wanted it for the time being to remain with the original manufacturers of the Atom Bomb: the United States, Great Britain and Canada

A Mind Intuitively Plastic

Einstein's mind moved easily through complexities and arrived at the living truth in each particular. It was intuitively plastic. A homely illustration may be given of its freedom from cut-and-dried solutions. Replying to a man who had requested his opinion on the matter of Sunday rest, he said:

"Man must rest, yes. But what is rest? You cannot make a law and tell people how to do it. Some people rest when they lie down and go to sleep. Others rest when they are wide awake and are stimulated. Some must work or write or go to amusements to find rest. If you pass a law to show all people how to rest, that means you make everybody alike. But everybody is not alike." On another occasion he exposed the inadequacy of Edison's sweeping pronouncement that col­lege education had no value and that all education should be directed towards learning relevant facts. Edison drew up a questionnaire and challenged college graduates to prove their worth by answering it. Einstein was given a copy. As

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soon as he read the question: "What is the speed of sound?" he said, "I don't know. I don't burden my mind with facts that I can learn easily from any textbook. And the value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks."

Being intuitively plastic in thought, Einstein was also unhampered by ordinary environmental circumstances that so disturb others who laboriously use their intelligence. To his students he used to say: "I shall always be able to receive you. If you have a problem, come to me with it. You will never disturb me, since I can interrupt my own work at any moment and resume it immediately the interruption is past." Philipp Franck records how Einstein and he once decided to visit the Astrophysical Observatory at Potsdam together. They agreed to meet on a certain bridge, but since Dr. Franck was a stranger in Berlin he said, "I cannot promise to be there at the appointed time." "Oh," replied Einstein, "that makes no difference; then I will wait on the bridge." Dr. Franck suggested that that might waste his time too much. "Oh, no," was the rejoinder, "the kind of work I do can be done anywhere. Why should I be less capable of reflecting on my problems on the bridge than at home?"

When we ask what is the kind of work Einstein did, a general indication is in the attraction he always felt towards root problems. "The fascination of the difficult," to use Yeats's phrase, dominated him. He had no love for measur­ing superficialities. He attacked always the deep heart of a science, the most resistant core of a theory. Even to make a difficulty just more acutely felt was sufficient incentive to him: the hidden central things must be made our magnet, no matter if nothing comes out of our preoccupation for a long while. Einstein once remarked contemptuously about a fairly well-known physicist: "He strikes me as a man who looks for the thinnest spot in a board and then bores as many holes as possible through it."

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Personal Peculiarities

Living always in an atmosphere of deep and vast scienti­fic possibilities, a mind pressing beyond all common limits of theoretical physics, Einstein had a strange independence of bodily roles. Once when he had to go to Rio de Janeiro to lecture, his wife Elsa packed his case with everything he could possibly need on the way. When he returned, she found it intact - and, nonplussed for a moment, he laughed and confessed that he had never opened it! Prof. Plesch, one of his intimate friends, writes: "He sleeps until he is awa­kened; he stays awake until he is told to go to bed; he will go hungry until he is given something to eat; and then he eats until he is stopped - I can remember his consuming between five and ten pounds of strawberries at a sitting on more than one occasion at my country house at Gatow .... As Einstein never feels the ordinary impulses to eat, etc., he has to be looked after like a child."

He had certainly a child's unconventionality and lack of self-consciousness. In his home in Germany he never used to wear shoes or slippers. He would walk throughout the house in his stockings. In America later, where he resided at the Princeton Institute of Research, his happy idiosyncrasy was unabated. In summer, he was to be seen walking through the streets of Princeton in sandals without stockings, in a swea­ter without coat, eating an ice-cream cone, to the delight of his students and the amazement of the professors.

He was at home in any place, so little was he a creature of fixed habits and so free from individual or national attach­ments. When he and his wife left Germany for a trip to California Hitler had not yet denounced him. But, while getting out of his beautiful house at Caputh on which he had spent almost his whole fortune, he quietly remarked to his wife: "Take a good look at the house. We shall never look at it again." This remark shows not only his cool detachment but also his subtle sense of unperceived realities. His pro­phecy came true, for he never saw Germany again and his

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house was torn down by the Nazis and his property con­fiscated.

Though genial and warm when in company, Einstein's intense inner concentration on fundamental scientific pro­blems made him not only indifferent to trivialities and creature-comforts but also aloof in his mind from the human beings around him. Even in the midst of his generous activity on behalf of charitable, social and political organisations he would suddenly tell you: "Sincerely speaking, I have never been much interested in people but only in things." And if you had asked him what he meant by "things", he would have said: "physical phenomena and methods to handle them."

Philosophical Position

Here we strike upon a limitation which prevents his unusually intuitive mind from embracing fully the meta­physical. When he philosophises he is admirable up to a certain point. His grip on the pantheistic vision is firm, and not only at the source of art - especially music, his apprecia­tion of which is evident in his having been a keen violinist and an authority on Mozart - but also at the source of all genuine scientific thought which reaches down to basic realities he puts what he calls "cosmic religious feeling", the emotional sense of an all-pervading all-ordering Intelligence. But, in his eyes, the universal Intelligence is impersonal; for, Einstein seeks predominantly the metaphysics of impersonal physical facts, and his intuitiveness, though appreciating the variety and value of human personality and dealing most plastically with them, never pierces satisfactorily to the metaphysics of psychological facts. He does not conceive the immortal soul and its intimate relation to some divine Over soul who is the essence and perfection of the personal as well as of the impersonal. Also, the absorption in "physical phenomena and methods to handle them" lays too much emphasis on the mathematical function of the consciousness

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and leads Einstein to believe no path to truth is possible except the path of mathematical divination and its logical development. He has little understanding of the mystic's non-mathematical insight into reality's ultimate nature. That mysticism is more than a vague delightful feeling of a vast Intelligence, that it is an ecstasy whereby the human con­sciousness is luminously caught up into a direct perception, a direct cognition, a direct knowledge of a truth of the world deeper than scientific truth and more potent than it, a knowledge by self-identification with a Cosmic and Tran­scendental Being - all this escapes Einstein. But it must surely be said that, in spite of this philosophical shortcom­ing, he remains the supreme example of what the intuitive mind, whose full and final glory is in the realisations of Yoga, can do when it operates in the purely scientific form and how, while confining itself to physical phenomena, it can suggest an immense background of the Supra sensible and the Superhuman.

Beyond Materialism and Mechanism

How it can do so may briefly be set forth. Materialism and mechanism are often said to be overpassed by relativity theory - but mostly the interpretations are erroneous. Either some sort of personal subjectivism is postulated or else there is the subtlety of the Vienna Circle which says: "Science is a mere systematisation of sense-observations. To posit a material world with mechanistic laws, as the Newtonian scientists did, is to exceed the legitimate boundaries of scienti­fic thought. We have to abstain from materialism and mechanism, because, like all philosophy other than that of correlated sense-observations, they make an extrapolation beyond the latter and give us Meta-physics." Here is actually a refusal to philosophise and the non-materialism and non­mechanism are only apparent. The immense background we have in mind of the Supra sensible and the Superhuman is reached along a different track of thought altogether.

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First, just think of what the time-space fusion implies.

Not that time becomes a space-dimension but it acquires the character, in time-terms, of what a fourth dimension would have in space-terms, exactly as all points of length, breadth and height have to be conceived as coexistent in space, so also by being held in a single though not necessarily sym­metrical formula with these points all moments of time ­past, present and future - have to be conceived as co-existent as if in the totality of an ever-standing Now. There seems to be here a physical suggestion of the mystic's vision of Eternity.

Again, what was understood as causality or determinism, the linkage of events by a power from the past, so to speak, assumes a new complexion. If the past, present and future are co-existent, a power from the present such as we feel in our sense of "freewill" and a power from the future such as we experience in our sense of goals to be realised - these powers can have a scientific rationale in the Einsteinian continuum. That continuum suggests an all-powerful all comprehensive conscious Creativity.

Thirdly, mathematics shows that the geometric properties of the Einsteinian continuum - the properties connected with its "curvature" - lead to expressions which obey precisely the same equations as density, stress, momentum, etc. Now these quantities, density and so forth, form what a physicist means by a piece of matter. This suggests that the physical quantities and the geometrical properties are the same thing. In other words, all matter is a manifestation of the conti­nuum's ever-standing Now of creative conscious Power. And, if Einstein's formulation, in his last years, of a unified field-theory taking into its sweep electromagnetism no less than gravitation and accounting for the particle-nature of matter could be deemed successful, we should have a complete picture of our universe as such a manifestation.

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