Albert Einstein: religiously scientific

Harvard University professor Gerald Holton discusses Einstein's views on religion, ethics and relativity.

By Anne Reilly

(May 16, 2005)

Albert Einstein re-imagined the world around us. An interview with Gerald Holton

This year we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's relativity theory, which revolutionized the way we view the natural world.

Interest in Einstein's accomplishment is not limited to scientists. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger referred to relativity in a comment he made during the mass held in St. Peter's Basilica before the conclave that chose him as Pope Benedict XVI. He said, "We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism that recognizes nothing definite and leaves only one's own ego and one's desires as the final measure."

Gerald Holton, the Mallinckrodt Research Professor of Physics and Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, spoke with Science & Theology News' Anne Reilly about Einstein's own view of relativism and the relationship between science and religion.

In this interview:

a.. The Battle over Relativism b.. Moving Toward a Scientific Religion c.. An Ethical Legacy THE BATTLE OVER RELATIVISM

How does Pope Benedict's remark about the dangers of relativism reflect a contemporary view of Einstein's relativity theory?

There is again the perception that science and relativity may be responsible for not just advances in physics, which are undoubted, but also for the spillover of something called relativism into ethics and life.

That has been a great problem for church persons in England and America. During his life, in fact, Einstein was often asked whether relativity was not essentially a first move of atheism into common thought and life. He always rejected that. Many physicists would not identify themselves with the "dictatorship of relativism."

How did Einstein understand the religious implications of his work in relativity?

In 1928, he gave a talk in Switzerland about science and religion, and he said that science must be based on strict causality of phenomena. Einstein believed to his death that it showed the uselessness of seeking "to refer all that happens to the exercise of will on the part of invisible spirits." That, he said, is a belief worthy of only "primitive men." Now this was not his thought about relativity, but it was about his view of the play, in science and throughout the world, of causality, so that there would not be the place for miracles, for example, or for free will, following Arthur Schopenhauer.

How did he respond to criticisms of this view?

Einstein wrote in 1916, "What goal will and can be reached by the sciences to which I am dedicating myself? Well, I'm dedicating myself to what is essential against what is based only on the accident of development." Once more he was against accidents, against probabilities. He wanted to go to what is certain, and, for him, this is what is causal. As part of that, he confessed in 1918 that "the longing to establish the world's pre-established harmony, requiring inexhaustible patience and perseverance, can only come from a state of feeling akin of that of a religious worshipper, of one who is in love."

He then began to weave a relationship between scientific work of a sort that he admired and religiosity. Many did not agree with this view. For example, Boston Cardinal O'Connell famously charged Einstein's view of space and time as being "a cloak beneath which lies the ghastly operation of atheism." There were many editorials against Einstein for that reason, because they were beginning to smell out that Einstein might plant the idea of absolutism only in terms of no indeterminacy, and that religious activity at its best was doing science. That kind of thing, of course, caused a backlash.

Was the backlash justified?

Now there's an irony involved in that, because in 1905, Einstein, when he presented relativity in a letter to one of his friends, said it's not a revolutionary paper at all, it's just a point of view making use of a modification of the theory of space and time which already exists. To him this was a small step, nothing grand, nothing very important as we now know it was.

He thought later on that it shouldn't have been called relativity at all. It should have been called the theory of absolutes, because what he was proposing was not only that the speed of light is absolute, whether you travel with it or not. But more than that, he said that relativity, as properly understood, is the way of seeing physics, so that you see the same laws applying, regardless of where you stand or whether you're moving or not. It is the invariance of the laws that shows there is an absolute side to physics - not a relative side. In Einstein's mind, what he was doing was on behalf of absolutes, despite the fact that the theologians were thinking of him doing it in terms of relativism - a term he never used himself because he didn't believe in it.

Would his defense of certainty explain why he said that God does not play dice?

Yes. Einstein, like Newton, believed in causality - one thing strictly follows from another. The apple falls down; as it falls down it attracts the earth a little bit; the earth moves up a little bit. The fall of the apple is an interchange of place between two bodies: one very obvious, and the other hardly measurable. The mutual attraction is one of Newton's laws, that two bodies attract each other. They have no choice.

That is the kind of lawfulness that Einstein liked. What he didn't like is the idea, coming out of Copenhagen with Niels Bohr and his colleague Werner Heisenberg from Germany, that what is under life - all this orderliness, the laws of nature - is an ocean of probability, an uncertainty at the very bottom of atomic phenomena.

In this view, only for big phenomena, like apples or moons, do you not see the play of uncertainty. But if you go to a little thing like the path of an electron, you can never tell where it is until it has arrived; it's not going from one place to another in a straight line. It just, so to speak, seeks around and finds the most probable place to appear.

So probability, dice playing, is at the bottom of things, in the view of the Copenhagen people, and that was never acceptable to Einstein. One reason is that if you believe in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, there are certain things about nature you can't ask. You can't ask, for example, what is the position of an object at a given moment if you know its speed well, because there's a relationship between its position and speed. If you know one well, you can't know the other well. The product of the two measurements has an uncertainty about it.

Hence, there is a veil behind which nature is going on and you can't see it, you can't ask about it. That is something Einstein would never accept, because he said that nature is in principle not going to hide from us any single phenomenon. He took steps toward a metaphysics that makes sure that certainty is at the bottom of things again.

MOVING TOWARD A COSMIC RELIGION

What were Einstein's views on religion?

Einstein began to write a set of articles between 1930 and 1948, and in them he developed his own statement on religion in very clear terms. He said that religion has come through two phases so far. One was the old religion of fear, which was replaced by the religion of ethics and ethical behavior, but the third stage, which is still to come, is called the cosmic religion, the joining of science and religion. He regarded it as his third paradise, and he said- similar to Spinoza - that only those who have this feeling of awe and sense of wonder in the rationality and beauty of the universe can be the true scientists and theologians. He said the idea of a Being who interferes in the course of events, such as causing prayers to be answered or miracles to occur, is not part of the cosmic religion that fuses science and religion. "Serious scientific workers," he said, "are the only profoundly religious people."

On which religious stage was Einstein located?

He felt that he was the prophet, so to speak, of that third phase of religion and had adopted it. In fact it was not novel. Others had preached on similar lines, including Baruch Spinoza in the 17th century. Einstein was very fond of one book, a posthumous work of Spinoza, Ethics, which was billed with the subtitle According to Geometric Principles. Like Euclid, Spinoza put axioms at top of things, such as the existence of a god, and deduced ethical imperatives.

Einstein read Ethics over and over again, and quoted from it again and again, because he loved that way of thinking. Spinoza said, "God and nature are one" and that the rationality of the universe is proof of the deity itself. So here we have the relationship of the philosopher and the scientist, leading Einstein to publish his own invention of a sort, on Spinoza's terms.

Did he simply restate Spinoza?

Oh, he went beyond it. But he was much encouraged by Spinoza, because we know that he read it many times. In fact, when his sister came to Princeton late in life and was quite ill, he said, "let me pull up a chair next to you, and read you a good book that will be very interesting to you," and he began to read her Spinoza's Ethics. He was deeply interested in that, but he went beyond it, as he did in physics. He invented his science; he invented his religion. And it is an irony that he thought his science to be absolute and religious.

What shaped Einstein's early religious views?

In his Autobiography, Einstein writes that, as a child, his nonobservant Jewish parents sent him to the nearest good school, which was, as it happened, a Catholic school. He was, throughout primary grades, brought up in the spirit of a Catholic school by the nuns, and he adored it. But some family members thought that as a child he also should know something about the Jewish religion, and so privately at home he got some ideas about Judaism as well.

Being already Einstein, he somehow knew how to fuse these two traditions, which are quite different in many ways. He was so happy about these ideas that he wrote in his Autobiography that he discovered his "first religious paradise" through the teaching of both traditions.

At one point he would compose songs in praise of God and sing them as he went to school as a small child. At age 12, believe it or not, he convinced his parents that they should keep to some degree a kosher household. Quite a boy!

What sparked his interest in science?

Somebody gave the child a copy of Euclid's Geometry, and there he discovered a very different way of thinking. He left his religious paradise, he said, and found his second paradise of science. From Euclid he went on to read various books on science and became very intrigued with the subject. It was only in the '30s when he became aware of what the Nazis were doing and the anti-Semitism going on, that he became deeply interested again in religion and then began to develop his idea of cosmic religion, which was his third paradise.

Was it at the same time that he began to support Zionism?

He became a Zionist when he saw, even before Hitler and not only in Germany, that young Jewish scientists had a very difficult time getting academic positions. He himself was one of those in that he was never offered a proper position when he graduated.

He also thought that what was necessary for the Jewish people was to have a national home - not necessarily in political terms, but more in cultural terms. In 1922, when he had to flee from Berlin because his name was on a list of people to be killed by the Nazis, who were already roaming the streets, he accepted invitations to go abroad. He ended up visiting Palestine, where he gave his first talk at the Hebrew University, which was just being formed in those days. He became a member of the governing board and went to the United States to raise funds. Einstein was already sure that something awful was going to happen to the Jews and they had to have a place of refuge.

Did Einstein's science become his religion?

As mentioned, he did say that doing science was being religious. He even said once that it is only the scientists doing good work who are truly religious people because they don't believe all sorts of other things that he thought undermined religion - such as a personal god. Therefore scientists who are doing research in Spinoza's universe - where God and nature are fused, as they were for Galileo - are the only ones who are truly religious.

Galileo was a forerunner of this thinking. After all, it was Galileo who pointed out in one of his famous letters that there are two ways to reach God: one through the scriptures and one through the study of nature. Pope John Paul II accepted that, in his examination of the trials of Galileo. We can say that at least the previous pope would not have raised the problem of relativism [as] strongly as the new one does.

What sort of a god did Einstein believe in?

The God who created the unchangeable laws of the universe. That is very much what Spinoza would say is true for him, as well. That was being religious, to believe in the unchangeable laws of nature that started the universe in the first place.

Does this tie into his reasons for inserting lambda into the relativity equation? (See sidebar.)

Many think it had to do again with Spinoza. When you have the general relativity equations and solve them, one of the possible solutions shows how the universe might change in time, to grow or diminish. If it were to grow in the infinity of time, the amount of matter in it would be so diluted by the amount of growing space that it would become essentially trivial.

There is that famous saying of Spinoza in his book Ethics, "God would not have made an empty universe." Many people believe, and I think they are probably right, that this passage from Spinoza was very influential in Einstein trying to keep this equation from revealing a universe that could possibly expand forever and, therefore, become essentially empty. Therefore he put in, as he said, ad hoc, just out of the blue, the fudge factor, lambda, which would keep this from happening.

That was 1917. By 1929, however, Hubble had established that the universe does expand, and Einstein said that it was the biggest blunder of his life to put that lambda in. Since then, it has been discovered that not only does the universe expand, but is expanding faster and faster.

How did he resolve this contradiction?

He just had to eliminate the lambda and allow the universe to expand. He had to realize that one page of Spinoza was not applicable. But there were still other pages that he could, and still did, believe in.

AN ETHICAL LEGACY

What was Einstein's ethical code?

Einstein wrote a lot about how to get the laws of ethics, which he felt was absolutely necessary to do. You might think you could deduce them from observations, from the way people behave, but because people behave in so many different ways, you can't do it that way. He said that you have to find them in the way he did his physics - to find fundamental principles that can be put at the top, from which you can then deduce details. You have to have principles such as "God exists," human society flourishes when it is in harmony, and things of that sort, and, from them, deduce what ethical behavior is in the light of your axioms.

But where do you find these axioms? You and I and most people can't do it, but he says there are some very special people who know how to get those fundamental postulates, from whose teaching the fundamental principles of ethics can be discovered. He names three: Moses, Jesus and Buddha. To him they're all equally good, just as energy and mass are the same, space and time are the same, and God and nature are the same. Einstein didn't see those differences the way they stare us in the face.

In his case, he was mostly adhering to the Jewish ethics. That is to say, while after childhood he was no longer interested in the synagogue or eating kosher - he only went to the synagogue to give charity concerts - he nevertheless thought of himself as a Jew, and said so often. For example, in 1933 he arrived in London and said, "I want to tell you about myself: I am a man and a good European [not a German, a European] and a Jew." And in his book Ideas and Opinions, he discusses how to be a good and ethical Jew. He thought that the Jewish religion was in the second stage where ethics is the important thing.

How did Einstein reconcile his ethics and the destructive potential of science?

We all have that problem, of course, not just he.

Einstein's Ideas and Opinions has a considerable number of essays on that topic. At a talk in the California Institute of Technology, he said, "Whenever you do technological work, make sure that someone is also worried about the misuse of your work." It is part of your own task, which means that you must be politically active as well; you can't just sit back and let the evildoers go ahead with the evil.

That's why he stopped being a pacifist. He was a lifelong pacifist until he saw the Nazis were going to overturn all of Western Civilization. At that point, he spoke out against their kind of warfare.

What is Einstein's legacy to the current era?

There are two. One of them is more narrow.

Among physical scientists, his program of the unification of all physical forces under one theory has become what we call string theory. Einstein tried to do it with unified field theory. That theory didn't work. It was too difficult, even for him, because he would have had to put in more knowledge about nuclear physics than existed in those days.

If you want to have a model of Einstein's work for us, it is that many of the most powerful physicists have adopted his way of thinking about their task. In addition to solving the outstanding, relatively small puzzles, you also have to worry about the big picture and find a theory that incorporates all phenomena.

The second legacy comes from the visible fact that Einstein is adored, in a way, by people who know nothing about his science. You see him on t-shirts, in pictures in the apartments of students and so on.

Why is that? I think it is for two reasons. They feel that he is one of the few possible role models of an effective and moral human being. He seems to have a direct line to what goes on beyond anyone else's imagination, certainly in science. There's been nobody like this in the 21st century so far, and all the way back to Darwin and Newton, hardly any other. He has charisma, which means he is thought to be in touch with eternity.

The other reason is his concern with democracy and social justice. He spoke up during the McCarthy period. He counseled people to be against the war when he was still in Berlin, [although] most of his colleagues were all for the First World War. He tried to stop it by manifesto, but could only find three other people to sign it. He spoke powerfully against the arms race.

That strength of moral conviction throughout his life is the reason why Time magazine chose him in 1999 as person of the century. It wasn't just for his physics, but because he was an ethical role model as well.

Anne Reilly is an editorial intern at Science and Theology News.

An Einstein timeline

1879 Born on March 14 to Hermann and Pauline Einstein in Ulm, Germany

1885 Begins attending the Petersschule, a Catholic elementary school, while also receiving Jewish instruction at home

1891 Introduced to Euclidean geometry and discovers the world of science

1894 After attempting to finish school on his own, leaves Munich and joins his family in Pavia, Italy

1896 Graduates from high school in Aarau, Switzerland, and enrolls at the Zurich Polytechnic

1903 Marries Mileva Maric, a Hungarian classmate whom he fell in love with in 1898, and has three children: a daughter in 1902 and sons in 1904 and 1910

1905 (Einstein's year of wonders) Enjoys a "miracle year" during which he publishes his four papers while working in Bern, Switzerland, at the Swiss Patent Office

1914 Signs manifesto opposing World War I

1916 Publishes general theory of relativity

1919 After divorcing Mileva, marries his cousin Elsa. On May 29, a solar eclipse proves Einstein's General Theory of Relativity

1922 Awarded Nobel Prize

1923 Visits Palestine and inaugurates the Hebrew University

1931 Rejects the cosmological constant (lambda), which he first introduced in 1917

1933 Renounces German citizenship, speaks out against Fascism. Flees Germany to settle in Princeton, New Jersey, where he works for the Institute for Advanced Study

1939 Signs letter warning President Roosevelt that the Germans could possibly build an atomic bomb

1940 Becomes U.S. citizen, but retains Swiss citizenship

1952 Offered the presidency of Israel, but refuses

1955 Dies of heart failure on April 18

For a more detailed timeline, see the Einstein Year Timeline.

Einstein's greatest blunder: In 1917, Albert Einstein inserted the Greek letter lambda, ?, into his theory of general relativity. This cosmological constant ensured the equilibrium of the universe by balancing the attractive force of gravity. Einstein, like most of his contemporaries, believed the universe was static and did not expand or contract.

A constant would make theoretical expansion impossible. However, in 1929, Edwin Hubble announced that the universe does expand, and Einstein had to remove lambda from his equation.

Today physicists continue to debate the presence of a cosmological constant, which many associate with the energy density of the vacuum. Recent research has revealed that universal expansion is actually accelerating, indicating that there must be an opposing force to gravity.

- Anne Reilly

http://www.stnews.org/articles.php?article_id=510&category=News