The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (42 page)

With his poetic genius, Bergson was adept at using simile or metaphor to give subtler meaning to the dogmas of science or theology. So he adds an original theological note to his
élan vital.
Evolution is God’s “undertaking to create creators, that He may have, besides Himself, beings worthy of His love.” Or, in a metaphor borrowed from the mechanistic world he distrusted, he concludes his
Two Sources,
“The universe . . . is a machine for the making of God.”

Bergson insisted that he “had no system.” And he said he deserved no great credit, for he had “only got rid of a certain number of ready-made ideas. I have tried to develop a taste for introspection.” But perhaps because he was not competing with philosophic systems, he had a wide and permeating influence. He came to be considered the prophet of a “process philosophy.” He was the most widely read and perhaps most influential of the exponents of a new dynamism in philosophy and literature in the twentieth century. William James adored him and found him a guiding kindred spirit, George Santayana felt his influence, and Alfred North Whitehead shared his approach to nature. His sense of real duration was shared and elegantly developed in Marcel Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past
(1913-27; English translation 1922-31). Bergson had justified James’s judgment of his magical power to draw together the conflicting currents of the search for meaning in the twentieth century.

Defining the Mystery: Einstein’s Search for Unity

While technology had fragmented experience with its mechanical clock and distracted man from the unity of the lived experience, science in its way was fragmenting the physical world into separate universes of explanation. What Bergson did for biology and evolution, Einstein would do for physics. Both Seekers started with time and both would seek unity. Einstein saw the small and the large, the atomic and the cosmic, as a single puzzle. To find the whole explained by law and reason inspired what he called his “cosmic religious feeling.” “The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought,” Einstein explained. “Individual experience impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.” Search for that whole became his lifework. His was the modern search for meaning.

At the end of the nineteenth century when Einstein came to physics, the works of the great scientists had produced two convincing—grand but incompatible—schemes to describe the movements of the physical world. Sir Isaac Newton’s mechanics (since publication of his
Principia Mathematica
in 1687) had long dominated the world of science. Newton was elected president of the Royal Society in 1703 (and for the next twenty-five years); he was buried in Westminster Abbey, and celebrated by Wordsworth as “a mind forever / Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.” The other, more recent explanatory scheme was expressed in the equations of James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) for electricity and magnetism.

But the two schemes did not fit together. Newton’s mechanics and his theory of gravity depended on the powers of forces-at-a-distance, while the new Maxwellian world of electromagnetism depended on the attractions of forces in a “field.” Could they be brought together? “We must not be surprised,” Einstein observed in his “Autobiographical Notes,” “that . . . , so to speak, all physicists of the last century saw in classical mechanics a firm and final foundation for all physics, yes, indeed, for all natural science, and that they never grew tired in their attempts to base Maxwell’s theory of electro-magnetism, which, in the meantime, was slowly beginning to win out, upon mechanics as well.” Reading Ernst Mach’s
History of Mechanics
as a young man shook Einstein’s “dogmatic faith” in the Newtonian base: “The incorporation of wave-optics into the mechanical picture of the world was bound to arouse serious misgivings. If light was to be interpreted as undulatory motion in an elastic body (ether), this had to be a medium which permeates everything. . . . This ether had to lead a ghostly existence alongside the rest of matter. . . .” The electrodynamics of Faraday and Maxwell had brought physicists “slowly around to giving up the faith in the possibility that all of physics could be founded upon Newton’s mechanics.”

Newton had introduced the idea of “absolute space”—uninfluenced by masses and their motion. But, prepared by Faraday, Maxwell, and Hertz, physicists turned away from Newton’s theory of distant forces. And it was Maxwell’s theory, when Einstein was a student, that was “the transition from forces-at-a-distance to ‘fields’ as fundamental variables.” To Einstein, “The incorporation of optics into the theory of electromagnetism . . . was like a revelation.” The next revelation was Max Planck’s investigations (1900) into heat radiation, out of which Planck had succeeded in proving the “reality” of the atom and furnishing “exactly the correct size of the atom.” Which led Einstein into his studies of the Brownian movement and with new clues to the electromagnetic foundations of physics.

All of which led Einstein to “the conviction that only the discovery of a universal formal principle could lead us to assured results.” He noted the example of thermodynamics, with its general principle: the laws of nature are such that it is impossible to construct a
perpetuum mobile
[perpetual motion machine]. “How then, could such a universal principle be found? After ten years of reflection such a principle resulted from a paradox upon which I had already hit at the age of sixteen: If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity
c
(velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest. However, there seems to be no such thing, whether on the basis of experience or according to Maxwell’s equations. From the very beginning it appeared to me intuitively clear that, judged from the standpoint of such an observer, everything would have to happen according to the same laws as for an observer who, relative to the earth, was at rest. For how, otherwise, should the first observer know, i.e., be able to determine, that he is in a state of fast uniform motion?” “One sees,” Einstein concluded, “that in this paradox the germ of the special relativity theory is already contained.” In a footnote to his article he offered the essential idea—the equivalence of mass and energy—contained in his famous simplifying formula: E = MC
²
. In 1916 he went on to his general theory based on the idea that gravitation was not a force but a curved field in a space-time continuum.

Einstein never gave up his quest for “a universal formal principle.” And in the last years of his life, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he was still seeking a “unified field theory.” How was he first set on the path of the relentless Seeker?

* * *

We know a great deal about the youth of Einstein, and his biographies were written by intimate collaborators. Still, the sources of his seeking impulses remain as much a mystery as the order that he would find in the universe. And his fame would itself be a paradox in the history of science. Sir Isaac Newton, his predecessor in the pantheon of modern physics, was widely acclaimed in his own time. “Nature and Nature’s law lay hid in night:” Alexander Pope (1688-1744) proclaimed in the epitaph he prepared, “God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” Newton’s laws were expounded in popular lectures and books. Einstein, too, in his turn, became a symbol of the most modern science—but at the same time a symbol of the unintelligible. Even while a tobacco company sought his permission to use his picture on their box of “Relativity Cigars,” a colloquial expression of bewilderment was “It’s all Einstein to me!”

Born in 1879 in Ulm, Germany, a manufacturing town, to an unsuccessful businessman, as a child he was moved with his family in his father’s quest for prosperity to Munich, then to Milan. His parents were Jewish, but did not attend synagogue or observe the dietary laws. In his autobiography (which he called his obituary) that he wrote at the age of sixty-seven he recalled his childhood:

Even while I was a fairly precocious young man the nothingness of the hopes and strivings which chases most men restlessly through life came to my consciousness with considerable vitality. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase. . . . By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase. Moreover, it was possible to satisfy the stomach by such participation, but not man in so far as he is a thinking and feeling being. As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted in every child by way of the traditional education-machine. Thus I came—despite the fact that I was the son of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents—to a deep religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt ending at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy] of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression.

In his doubtless idealized account of how he became the historic Seeker of his generation, Einstein recounts that this “religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the ‘merely personal,’ from an existence which is dominated by wishes, hopes and primitive feelings.”

Where would he do his seeking? How would he find meaning? Surely not in any Descartian self-obsession, nor any island within. “Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in devoted occupation with it. The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of the given possibilities swam as highest aim half consciously and half unconsciously before my mind’s eye.” Ironically, his historic cosmic quest would reveal the inescapable contradiction between the “huge world” out there and the revelations to the senses of the human observer. He had found the path of his seeking. “The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has proved itself as trustworthy, and I have never regretted having chosen it.”

He recounted two early inspirations of his sense of “wonder” at the world. One was at the age of four or five when his father showed him a compass, with its needle that behaved in a strangely “determined” way. The other, at the age of twelve, came when a book of Euclidean geometry showed how triangles behaved with such “lucidity and certainty.” His uncle Jacob stirred his interest in mathematics, and his mother encouraged an interest in music. He became an accomplished violinist and enjoyed playing as long as he was physically able. But he was not a promising student at school, and his teachers called him “Herr Langweil” (Mister Bore). After graduation from Catholic primary school, his father wanted him to train for a practical engineering career. But the young Einstein’s interests were more academic and theoretical. On his second attempt he passed the entrance examination for the rigorous Polytechnic Academy in Zurich, where he would pursue physics for four years. Graduating in 1900, he became a Swiss citizen, and decided to pursue a career as a physics teacher, doing theoretical physics on the side. A young physics teacher in those days was said to “earn too little to live, and too much to die.” After an unsuccessful stint of teaching, when he was fired for being “too informal,” he found a job as examiner in the Swiss Patent Office. He enjoyed his scientific friends and colleagues, married Mileva Maric, a fellow student, and kept alive his interest in music.

Then at the age of twenty-six he began his spectacular career as a productive physicist. And then, too, he began to puzzle over the problems that led him to the theory of relativity. Pursuing the suggestions of Max Planck’s quantum theory that radiation did not come in waves but in packets of corpuscles (“quanta”), he applied the theory to light and invented the word “photon” for those packets of energy that were light. But all the while Einstein remained the Seeker—in quest of “a universal formal principle.” His first statement of what came to be called “relativity” appeared in 1905 in an article in the German scientific journal
Annalen der Physik,
“On the Electrodynamics of Bodies in Motion.” There he provided a new way of mediating between the disparate worlds of mechanics (Newtonian) and of electrodynamics (Faraday-Maxwell). But the article was slow to make a stir. And was not easy for the lay mind to comprehend. The thirty-page article was unorthodox in form, for it did not cite authorities or offer footnotes. In this and other related articles the young Einstein proposed a new scheme of physics, revising some of Newton’s basic assumptions. Newton’s comfortingly simple scheme of forces-at-a-distance in a world of absolute space and time would no longer satisfy. Any explanation of the physical world after Faraday and Maxwell and the forces of electrodynamics would have to be more subtle and complex, barely intelligible to the literate layman but of cosmic significance.

The basic idea of what came to be called the Special Theory of Relativity was a denial of Newton’s notions of absolute space and time. This was demonstrated by the fact that for all frames of reference the speed of light is constant (and could not be increased by applying more energy), and if all natural laws remain the same, then space and time are relative to the observer. The “ghostly” hypothetical “ether” was no longer needed. This meant, too, that there was no absolute simultaneity in nature. And Newton’s laws were valid, then, only in circumstances limited by our physical senses. For space and time were relatively different in stationary and in moving systems. Clocks in motion moved more slowly than stationary clocks, and objects in motion contracted in relation to the observer. But these changes of objects in motion were so small at speeds less than the speed of light that they were hardly perceptible to the human senses. Yet they plainly contradicted the notions of absolute space and time. “The theory of relativity,” Einstein once observed, “was nothing more than a further consequential development of the field theory.” But he resisted the suggestion that his theory was not consistent with observed facts. He insisted, in 1921, “that this theory is not speculative in origin; it owes its invention entirely to the desire to make physical theory fit observed fact as well as possible.”