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Albert Einstein |
| Childish superstition: Einstein's letter
makes view of religion relatively clear Scientist's reply to sell for up to £8,000, and stoke debate over his beliefs The Guardian, Tuesday May 13 2008 "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." So said Albert Einstein, and his famous aphorism has been the source of endless debate between believers and non-believers wanting to claim the greatest scientist of the 20th century as their own. A little known letter written by him, however, may help to settle the argument - or at least provoke further controversy about his views. Due to be auctioned this week in London after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, the document leaves no doubt that the theoretical physicist was no supporter of religious beliefs, which he regarded as "childish superstitions". Einstein penned the letter on January 3 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind who had sent him a copy of his book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. The letter went on public sale a year later and has remained in private hands ever since. In the letter, he states: "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this." Einstein, who was Jewish and who declined an offer to be the state of Israel's second president, also rejected the idea that the Jews are God's favoured people. "For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them." The letter will go on sale at Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair on Thursday and is expected to fetch up to £8,000. The handwritten piece, in German, is not listed in the source material of the most authoritative academic text on the subject, Max Jammer's book Einstein and Religion. One of the country's leading experts on the scientist, John Brooke of Oxford University, admitted he had not heard of it. Einstein is best known for his theories of relativity and for the famous E=mc2 equation that describes the equivalence of mass and energy, but his thoughts on religion have long attracted conjecture. His parents were not religious but he attended a Catholic primary school and at the same time received private tuition in Judaism. This prompted what he later called, his "religious paradise of youth", during which he observed religious rules such as not eating pork. This did not last long though and by 12 he was questioning the truth of many biblical stories. "The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression," he later wrote. In his later years he referred to a "cosmic religious feeling" that permeated and sustained his scientific work. In 1954, a year before his death, he spoke of wishing to "experience the universe as a single cosmic whole". He was also fond of using religious flourishes, in 1926 declaring that "He [God] does not throw dice" when referring to randomness thrown up by quantum theory. His position on God has been widely misrepresented by people on both sides of the atheism/religion divide but he always resisted easy stereotyping on the subject. "Like other great scientists he does not fit the boxes in which popular polemicists like to pigeonhole him," said Brooke. "It is clear for example that he had respect for the religious values enshrined within Judaic and Christian traditions ... but what he understood by religion was something far more subtle than what is usually meant by the word in popular discussion." Despite his categorical rejection of conventional religion, Brooke said that Einstein became angry when his views were appropriated by evangelists for atheism. He was offended by their lack of humility and once wrote. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." |
| That famous equation and you
Brian Greene The New York Times FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2005 NEW YORK During the summer of 1905, while fulfilling his duties in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, Albert Einstein was fiddling with a tantalizing outcome of the special theory of relativity he'd published in June. His new insight, at once simple and startling, led him to wonder whether "the Lord might be laughing and leading me around by the nose." But by September, confident in the result, Einstein wrote a three-page supplement to the June paper, publishing perhaps the most profound afterthought in the history of science. A hundred years ago this month, the final equation of his short article gave the world E=mc. In the century since, E=mc has become the most recognized icon of the modern scientific era. There is nothing you can do, not a move you can make, not a thought you can have, that doesn't tap directly into E=mc. It's an equation that tells of matter, energy and a remarkable bridge between them. Before E=mc scientists described matter using two distinct attributes: how much it weighed (its mass) and how much change the matter could exert on its environment (its energy). A 19th-century physicist would say that a baseball resting on the ground has the same mass as a baseball speeding along at 100 miles per hour. The key difference between the two balls, the physicist would emphasize, is that the fast-moving baseball has more energy: If sent ricocheting through a china shop, for example, it would surely break more dishes than the ball at rest. And once the moving ball has done its damage and stopped, the 19th-century physicist would say that it has exhausted its capacity for exerting change and hence contains no energy. After E=mc, scientists realized that mass and energy are not distinct. They are the same stuff packaged in forms that make them appear different. Just as solid ice can melt into liquid water, Einstein showed, mass is a frozen form of energy that can be converted into the more familiar energy of motion. The amount of energy (E) produced by the conversion is given by his formula: Multiply the amount of mass converted (m) by the speed of light squared (c). Since the speed of light is a few hundred million meters per second (fast enough to travel around the earth seven times in a single second), c, in these familiar units, is a huge number, about 100,000,000,000,-000,000. A little bit of mass can thus yield enormous energy. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fueled by converting less than an ounce of matter into energy; the energy consumed by New York City in a month is less than that contained in the newspaper you're holding. Far from having no energy, that baseball that has come to rest contains enough energy to keep an average car running continuously at 65 m.p.h. for about 5,000 years. When you drive your car, E=mc is at work. As the engine burns gasoline to produce energy in the form of motion, it does so by converting some of the gasoline's mass into energy, in accord with Einstein's formula. As you read this text, E=mc is at work. The processes in the eye and brain, underlying perception and thought, rely on chemical reactions that interchange mass and energy, once again in accord with Einstein's formula. The point is that although E=mc expresses the interchangeability of mass and energy, it doesn't single out any particular reaction for executing the conversion. The distinguishing feature of nuclear reactions, compared with the chemical reactions involved in burning gasoline or running a battery, is that they generate less waste and thus produce more energy - by a factor of roughly a million. But don't let the spectacle of E=mc in nuclear reactions inure you to its calmer but thoroughly pervasive incarnations in everyday life. Here's a story for E=mc. Two equally strong and skilled jousters, riding identical horses and gripping identical (blunt) lances, head toward each other at an identical speed. As they pass, each thrusts his lance across his breastplate toward his opponent, slamming blunt end into blunt end. Because they're equally matched, neither lance pushes farther than the other, and so the referee calls it a draw. This story contains the essence of Einstein's discovery. His first relativity paper, the one in June 1905, shattered the idea that time elapses identically for everyone. Instead, Einstein showed that if from your perspective someone is moving, you will see time elapsing slower for him than it does for you. Everything he does - sipping his coffee, turning his head, blinking his eyes - will appear in slow motion. This is hard to grasp because at everyday speeds the slowing is less than one part in a trillion and is thus imperceptibly small. Even so, using extraordinarily precise atomic clocks, scientists have repeatedly confirmed that it happens just as Einstein predicted. Let's see what the slowing of time means for the joust. To do so, think about the story not from the perspective of the referee, but instead imagine you are one of the jousters. From your perspective, it is your opponent - getting ever closer - who is moving. Imagine that he is approaching at nearly the speed of light so the slowing of all his movements - readying his joust, tightening his face - is obvious. When he shoves his lance toward you in slow motion, you naturally think he's no match for your swifter thrust; you expect to win. Yet we already know the outcome. No matter how strange relativity is, it can't change a draw into a win. After the match, you naturally wonder how your opponent's slowly thrusted lance hit with the same force as your own. There's only one answer. The force with which something hits depends not only on its speed but also on its mass. That's why you don't fear getting hit by a fast-moving Ping-Pong ball (tiny mass) but you do fear getting hit by a fast-moving Mack truck (big mass). Thus, the only explanation for how the slowly thrust lance hit with the same force as your own is that it's more massive. This is astonishing. The lances are identically constructed. Yet you conclude that one of them - the one that from your point of view is in motion, being carried toward you by your opponent on his galloping horse - is more massive than the other. That's the essence of Einstein's discovery. Energy of motion contributes to an object's mass. As with the slowing of time, this is unfamiliar because at everyday speeds the effect is imperceptibly tiny. But if, from your viewpoint, your opponent were to approach at 99.99999999 percent of the speed of light, his lance would be about 70,000 times more massive than yours. Luckily, his thrusting speed would be 70,000 times slower than yours, and so the resulting force would equal your own. Once Einstein realized that mass and energy were convertible, getting the exact formula relating them - E=mc - was a fairly basic exercise, requiring nothing more than high school algebra. His genius was not in the math; it was in his ability to see beyond centuries of misunderstanding and recognize that there was a connection between mass and energy at all. Over the last couple of decades, Einstein's equation has helped physicists explain why everything ever encountered has the mass that it does. Experiments have shown that the subatomic particles making up matter have almost no mass of their own. But because of their motions and interactions inside of atoms, these particles contain substantial energy - and it's this energy that gives matter its heft. Take away Einstein's equation, and matter loses its mass. You can't get much more pervasive than that. Its singular fame notwithstanding, E=mc fits into the pattern of work and discovery that Einstein pursued with relentless passion throughout his entire life. Einstein believed that deep truths about the workings of the universe would always be "as simple as possible, but no simpler." And in his view, simplicity was epitomized by unifying concepts - like matter and energy - previously deemed separate. In 1916, Einstein simplified our understanding even further by combining gravity with space, time, matter and energy in his General Theory of Relativity. For my money, this is the most beautiful scientific synthesis ever achieved. With these successes, Einstein's belief in unification grew ever stronger. But the sword of his success was double-edged. It allowed him to dream of a single theory encompassing all of nature's laws, but led him to expect that the methods that had worked so well for him in the past would continue to work for him in the future. It wasn't to be. For the better part of his last 30 years, Einstein pursued the "unified theory," but it stubbornly remained beyond his grasp. As the years passed, he became increasingly isolated; mainstream physics was concerned with prying apart the atom and paid little attention to Einstein's grandiose quest. In a 1942 letter, Einstein described himself as having become a "a lonely old man who is displayed now and then as a curiosity because he doesn't wear socks." Today, Einstein's quest for unification is no curiosity - it is the driving force for many physicists of my generation. No one knows how close we've gotten. Without a unified theory it's hard to imagine we will ever resolve the deepest of all mysteries - how the universe began - so the stakes are high and the motivation strong. But even if our science proves unable to determine the origin of the universe, recent progress has already established that a fraction of a second after creation (however that happened), the universe was filled with tremendous energy in the form of wildly moving exotic particles and radiation. Within a few minutes, this energy employed E=mc to transform itself into more familiar matter - the simplest atoms - which, in the course of about a billion years, clumped into planets and stars. During the 13 billion years that have followed, stars have used E=mc to transform their mass back into energy in the form of heat and light; about 5 billion years ago, our closest star - the sun - began to shine, and the heat and light generated was essential to the formation of life on our planet. If prevailing theory and observations are correct, the conversion of matter to energy throughout the cosmos, mediated by stars, black holes and various forms of radioactive decay, will continue unabated. In the far, far future, essentially all matter will have returned to energy. But because of the enormous expansion of space, this energy will be spread so thinly that it will hardly ever convert back to even the lightest particles of matter. Instead, a faint mist of light will fall for eternity through an ever colder and quieter cosmos. The guiding hand of Einstein's E=mc will have finally come to rest. (Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia, is the author of ''The Elegant Universe'' and ''The Fabric of the Cosmos.'') |
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