A Theory of Everything (That Matters): A Brief Guide to Einstein, Relativity, and His Surprising Thoughts on God by Alister McGrath- Part 7, Chapter 5- Einstein and the Bigger Picture: Weaving Things Together

We are reviewing Alister McGrath’s new book, “A Theory of Everything (That Matters): A Brief Guide to Einstein, Relativity, and His Surprising Thoughts on God”.  Chapter 5 is Einstein and the Bigger Picture: Weaving Things Together.  In November 1944, Einstein wrote to Robert Thornton, who was hoping to launch a program at the University of Puerto Rico, emphasizing the importance of the philosophy of science.  Einstein wrote, “So many people today (including professional scientists) seemed to be “like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest”.  McGrath says that, for Einstein, it was important to develop a unified Weltbild—a coherent and comprehensive way of seeing the world.

The great German physicist, Max Planck, commenting on this aspect of Einstein’s thought said:

As Einstein has said, you could not be a scientist if you did not know that the external world existed in reality—but that knowledge is not gained by any process of reasoning.  It is a direct perception and therefore in its nature akin to what we call Faith.  It is a metaphysical belief. (Planck, Where is Science Going? p. 218)

The fundamental unity of phenomena turns out to a philosophical or even theological belief, which provides both a motivation and justification for the scientific enterprise.  It is not something that can be proved, but it nevertheless provides a working basis for the scientific project.  For scientists like Planck and Einstein, there is a faith that there is an underlying yet unseen order to all things.  Einstein said:

Creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place.  It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering new connections between our starting point and its rich environment.  But the point from which we started still exists and can be seen, although it appears smaller and forms a tiny part of our broad view gained by the mastery of the obstacles on our way up. (Einstein and Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, p. 159)

The best theory, for Einstein, weaves together what might have once been seen as disconnected threads but that can now be seen as integral parts of the same “big picture”.  And Einstein rightly saw this as an act of imagination as much as of understanding.  He said:

Imagination is more important than knowledge.  For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.  It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research. (Einstein, Cosmic Religion with Other Opinions and Aphorisms, p. 97)

Einstein suggested that he never thought in logical symbols or mathematical equations but rather found it more natural to use images, feelings, or even musical structures in his attempts to visualize the complex realities that could only be partly disclosed  through science.  He quipped that if he were not a physicist, he would probably be a musician.

Einstein’s viewpoint is not shared by many postmodern philosophers.  Many suggest that there is no “big picture”, only a number of smaller pictures that are not necessarily connected with each other.  In works such as Nancy Cartwright’s The Dappled World and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, reality is suggested to be like a patchwork quilt, each panel different and has little connection to its neighbor.  They say there is no fundamental coherence to our universe, at best, just localized areas of patterns and meanings, none of which can claim exclusive authority.

Einstein held to a unified view of nature while emphasizing the limits placed on humanity as we seek to grasp our vast universe in its totality.  In 1914, Einstein wrote a letter to a fried using an analogy to help explain this limited grasp of reality: “Nature shows us only the tail of the lion.  But I do not doubt that the lion belongs to it even though he cannot at once reveal himself because of his enormous size.”  The first point Einstein’s parable conveys is that what we observe of the universe is a manifestation of a far greater unseen reality that lies beyond to grasp and hold.  Einstein often pointed out that the “real” is not given to us directly; what is given is our experience of the real.  There is indeed a connection between our experience and reality, but it is indirect.

Einstein raises the deep question: is there some fundamental harmony between human thought and the deeper structures of the universe, an idea that was often discussed during the Renaissance in terms of “the music of the spheres”.  Einstein’s well known love of music was linked with a sense that certain composers were tuning in to something deeper about our world.  He said, “Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.” (Isaacson, Einstein, p. 14)  Einstein often spoke of theoretical physics as an attempt to uncover “the music of the spheres”, which revealed a “pre-established harmony” within the fabric of the universe.

Einstein is scathing toward those who are tone-deaf to the beauty of the universe and especially to the mathematical representations of its structures, which often possess an elegance that seems to be correlated with their truth.  He singles out what he terms “fanatical atheists” for particular comment, remarking that “their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’ makes them unable to “hear the music of the spheres”. (Letter to an unidentified recipient, dated August 7, 1941, Einstein Archive, Reel pp. 54-297)

McGrath notes that Einstein’s writings of the 1930’s and 1940’s show an increasing interest in areas beyond the field of natural sciences, in particular including ethics, politics, and religion.  Einstein was keen on scientists realizing their responsibility to deal with the social, ethical, and political consequences of their discoveries and to not compartmentalize them, but see them as interconnected.  McGrath says:

This is particularly evident in Einstein’s 1949 essay, “Why Socialism?”  Einstein here argued that the natural sciences cannot create moral goals, even though science may provide means by which those goals could be achieved. Such goals do not themselves arise as a result of scientific inquiry, yet science might help implement their application—for example, in the field of medicine.  “Science… cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends.”  Einstein makes a moral case for socialism, fully aware that those moral norms cannot be established or confirmed by the natural sciences.

It is generally agreed that it is difficult to find a comprehensive ethical system either explicitly stated or implicitly assumed in Einstein’s writings.  Nevertheless, there is clearly an intuitive ethical vision that led Einstein to affirm the value of scientific research while criticizing some of its outcomes.  Consider, for example, this powerful 1948 statement on the moral obligations of scientists (Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, p. 148):

Rational thinking does not suffice to solve the problems of our social life.  Penetrating research and keen scientific work have often had tragic implications for mankind, producing, on the one hand, inventions which liberated man from exhausting physical labor… but on the other hand… creating the means for his own mass destruction…  We scientists, whose tragic destination has been to help in making the methods of annihilation more gruesome and more effective, must consider it our solemn and transcendent duty to do all in our power in preventing these weapons from being used for the brutal purpose for which they were invented.

The fact that science enables us to do certain things does not make those things moral.  A framework of values originating from outside science is needed to make such judgments.  Where can that framework come from?  Is Einstein’s concept of the connectedness of all things just his own mystical musings, or is there a true value in that realization?  McGrath tries to answer that question in the next chapter by looking more closely at Einstein’s quite distinct concept of religion and consider the role that this plays in his thought.

A Theory of Everything (That Matters): A Brief Guide to Einstein, Relativity, and His Surprising Thoughts on God by Alister McGrath- Part 6, Chapter 4- The Theory of General Relativity: Final Formulation and Confirmation

We are reviewing Alister McGrath’s new book, “A Theory of Everything (That Matters): A Brief Guide to Einstein, Relativity, and His Surprising Thoughts on God”.  Chapter 4 is “The Theory of General Relativity: Final Formulation and Confirmation”.  Even though we have come to admire the “wonder year” of 1905, at the time no offers of academic employment were offered.  In July the University of Zurich accepted Einstein’s doctoral thesis, “A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions” but did not offer him a position.  In April 1906 he was promoted to technical expert, second class, at the Bern patent office, which salary increase he was grateful for, but still not what he really wanted.  Finally in October 1909, the University of Zurich appointed him an adjunct professor in theoretical physics.  Two years later, he was appointed as full professor at the Karl-Ferdinand University of Prague, before returning to Switzerland in 1912 to take up a chair at the Eidgenössiche Technische Hochschule in Zurich.  In 1914, Einstein was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and professor in the University of Berlin.  But despite the academic achievements, Einstein and Mileva Marić separated and in 1919 divorced, shortly after which Einstein married Elsa Loewenthal.

With the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, international scientific collaboration ceased and Einstein was isolated in Germany during this period.  He now had the time to try and develop a generalization of his theory of special relativity. Special relativity considered only the effects of relativity to an observer moving at constant speed.  So what about bodies that were moving at changing velocities?  And what about the influence of gravitational fields on space-time?

Newton had proposed gravity as a force between bodies as they moved through space, understanding space as a vast empty container.  Then James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday introduced the idea of electromagnetic fields and show that light is an electromagnetic disturbance in the form of waves propagated through the electromagnetic field according to electromagnetic laws. Einstein came to the view that, like electricity and magnetism, gravity was conveyed through a “gravitational field” – and more radically, that this gravitational field is actually what Newton considered to be “space”.  Instead of thinking of space as a container through which the planets move under the influence of gravity, we need to think of space itself as a gravitational field, which is distorted locally on account of the mass of stars.

On the basis of this approach, Einstein predicted the phenomenon of the gravitational dilation of time.  The closer a body is to a large mass, with its substantial gravitational pull, the slower time runs for it.  This phenomenon is now well known and important for the functioning of Global Positioning Systems (GPS), which rely on signals from satellites orbiting above the Earth to establish the observer’s position.  However, as we have already stated, the atomic clocks in those satellites run 32 microseconds faster than clocks here on the surface of the Earth (I think I had that reversed in the last post – my error – see this summary here)   In other words, time passes at a different rate on the surface of the Earth due to the greater effect of the Earth’s gravity.

Newton had understood matter to attract other matter across empty space – I daresay most of us still have this conception.  Einstein developed the quite different idea that matter distorts space-time. Newton himself never applied his theory of universal gravitation to the behavior of light.  Scientists who held that light could be thought of as a beam of particles predicted that gravity would affect its passage through space.  Two predictions are of special interest.  The first is John Mitchell’s 1783 prediction of “dark stars” that could not be seen because light could not break free from their gravity (a remarkable prescient intuition of black holes!).  The second is the 1804 prediction of Johann Georg von Soldner that a beam of light would be deflected by the gravitational field of a star; he even calculated the extent of deflection. But Einstein did not regard light as a beam of particles affected by gravity on account of their mass, rather based on the principle of the equivalence of mass and energy, light on account of its enormous velocity had an “effective mass”.   Newton thought light had mass; Einstein showed that it behaved as if it had mass.  In effect, Einstein’s theory of general relativity confirmed both these predictions but place them on a different theoretical foundation.  Einstein published his paper, “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity” in March 2016 to the German scientific journal Annalen der Physik.

McGrath says the analogy he finds most helpful in visualizing this effect is that of space-time as a trampoline with a heavy object placed on it.  The trampoline fabric sags toward the heavy object and any ball rolled across the trampoline will move towards the heavy object.  Why? Because it is drawn to the object, or because it naturally follows the deformation in the shape of the fabric resulting from the weight of the object?  The second explanation is correct.  General relativity asks us to think of the sun and planets warping space-time.  The planets orbiting the sun are not really being pulled by the sun; they are actually following the curved space-time deformation caused by the sun, like the ball rolling towards the heavy object on the trampoline. All the pictures I’ve been showing are 2-dimensional representations, Einstein was theorizing that the deformation takes place in all 3 dimensions of space and the dimension of time as well!  Hence the term space-time: the concepts of time and three-dimensional space regarded as fused in a four-dimensional continuum.

One of the most significant aspects of Einstein’s “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity” was its specific predictions of what would be observed if the theory was correct.  The three main predictions Einstein made were:

1. A shifting of the perihelion of the planet Mercury. Although this effect should be observed for all the planets, it would be most pronounce for Mercury because it was so close to the sun.
2. The phenomenon of gravitational lensing, in which the warping of space-time due to the gravitational influence of the sun caused light to bend.
3. The phenomenon of cosmological redshift. This prediction followed from Einstein’s equivalence principle noted in 1907.

Yet one prediction is strikingly absent from this list – the expansion of the universe.  Einstein’s first cosmological solution of his field equation indicated the universe was expanding.  Einstein modified his equation, adding another term – the so-called “cosmological function or constant” – in order to yield a static universe.  By 1929 the research of Edwin Hubble suggested that the observational evidence was best explained by an expanding universe.  Einstein’s approach suggests that the universe expands not on account of the movement of galaxies but because space-time is expanding.

Why did Einstein not trust his original equations?  Why did he introduce a “fudge factor” designed to fit the soon-to-be abandoned model of a static universe?  McGrath says he has not found a convincing answer, although many suggestions have been made.  As an admirer of Dutch Jewish philosopher Spinoza, maybe he genuinely believed that the universe was necessarily eternal.

We dealt with the advance of the perihelion of Mercury in Part 3.  The third prediction had to wait for significant technological advances before it could be measured.  The second prediction was verified in the total solar eclipse of May 29, 1919 by Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir Frank Watson Dyson, although not all physicists agreed with their conclusions at the time.  This resulted in the famous Times of London headline, “Revolution in Science, New Theory of the Universe.  Newtonian Ideas Overthrown”.  Einstein himself gave an interview with the New York Times in April 1921 in which he emphasized that his theories were to be seen as an evolution that consolidated Newton’s heritage rather than a revolution that discarded it.  Einstein thus did not regard his theories as revolutionary but as a systematic development of earlier approaches. But it was too late for popular media in Britain and the US, where he was lionized as the revolutionary thinker who had overthrown scientific orthodoxy.

Oddly enough, while the US and Britain heralded him, the German scientific establishment indulged  in a campaign to discredit him as a plagiarizer and a lightweight.  The ugly phrase “Jewish physics” began to be used in contrast with “German physics” that only intensified as Nazi sympathizers gained strength.  It is a measure of the controversy of the times that Einstein’s 1922 Nobel Prize was issued for his work on the photoelectric effect back in 1905, rather than his relativity theories.  Einstein was rightly alarmed at the rise of Nazism.  McGrath says it spurred him into developing his own political, social, and religious beliefs.  On December 12, 1932, Einstein and his wife left Berlin for the United States.  Hitler was installed as chancellor a month later, and it was made clear that he would not be welcomed if he returned.

As remarkable as Einstein’s body of works was, he himself saw it as incomplete.  Einstein’s writings of the 1910s show how driven he was for his quest for die Einheitlichkeit – “the uniformity” i.e. the fundamental unity of all phenomena.  Although the general theory of relativity is still the best generalized theory of gravitation and space-time structure, it cannot account for the quantum effects that govern the sub-atomic world.  Although most physicists adopt a pragmatic work-around to this problem, using general relativity to describe large-scale phenomena of astronomy and cosmology and using quantum mechanics to account for the behavior of atoms and elementary particles, Einstein himself was never satisfied.

General relativity has geometric precision and is deterministic; the world of quantum physics is shaped by uncertainties and is probabilistic.  This feature caused Einstein to have serious misgivings about its viability and that led to his famous (and often misunderstood) remark to the effect that God “does not play dice”.  This quote is found in a private letter from Einstein to the Hungarian physicist Cornelius Lanczos, who was then based at Princeton, dated March 12, 1942.  Einstein wrote:  “It seems hard to sneak a look at God’s cards.  But that he plays dice and uses ‘telepathic’ methods (as the present quantum theory requires of him) is something that I cannot believe for a single moment.”  This is unfortunately often simplified to “God does not play dice”.  For a more complete discussion, McGrath recommends Ghirandi, Sneaking a Look at God’s Cards, pages 149-164.

In the conference in Brussels in 1927, Einstein famously clashed with Niels Bohr over quantum mechanics, launching a feud that would last until Einstein’s death in 1955.  Bohr championed the strange new insights emerging from quantum mechanics. He believed that any single particle—be it an electron, proton, or photon—never occupies a definite position unless someone measures it. Until you observe a particle, Bohr argued, it makes no sense to ask where it is: It has no concrete position and exists only as a blur of probability.

Einstein scoffed at this. He believed, emphatically, in a universe that exists completely independent of human observation. All the strange properties of quantum theory are proof that the theory is flawed, he said. A better, more fundamental theory would eliminate such absurdities.  In 1935 Einstein was convinced that he had refuted quantum mechanics. And from then until his death 20 years later, he devoted nearly all his efforts to the search for a unified field theory. Einstein spent the rest of his life trying to formulate “The Theory of Everything”.  Einstein himself, came to believe he failed at that quest, and his critics contend he wasted his life.  But McGrath believes that Einstein, was, once again, ahead of his time, he says he may have started from the wrong place, but he rightly grasped the possibility of holding together the complexities of the universe within a single grand theory.  McGrath says:

Einstein’s pursuit of a unified view of the world remains important beyond the world of physics.  One of the central themes of this volume is the need to reflect on Einstein’s belief that it was possible to hold together – if not to weave together into a coherent unity – his views on science, ethics, politics, and religion.  The search for a unified view of reality is not limited to physicists or cosmologists.  We each, in our own way, try to weave together the threads of our beliefs and commitments in the hope of creating a coherent picture of reality… We shall turn to consider these questions in the second part of this book.