Science Secrets

by Alberto A. Martinez

  It is a myth that J. J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897, but by “myth” I do not mean to belittle it as a plain falsehood. It is a myth because it functions as a marker, an apparent milestone to punctuate and orient our historical imagination. The electron, many students think, is a solid, discrete particle of electricity, like an invisibly small billiard ball. Such a thing, yes, such a solid natural thing, known for ages for its awesome effects—lightning and static electricity—begs for a story of origins, at least about how we came to find it. Such a definite object seems to demand a location in space, time, and history; like atoms and other subatomic particles, it seems to require a historical junction that pinpoints its entry into the common consciousness. Myths give a neat account of how somebody ingeniously overcame a great difficulty. After setting up the initial ambiguity between wave and particle theories, teachers have traditionally used the story of J. J. Thomson to convey an apparently neat solution, to give a sense of finality, and then move on. But really, no single person deserves sole authorship for this particular discovery.

  Moreover, just as its discovery is actually smeared in time, the electron itself seems also to be smeared in space. In 1928, Thomson's own son made a perplexing experimental discovery. George Paget Thomson showed that electrons passing through extremely thin metal films behave not as discrete particles, but like waves smeared in space. Months earlier, C. J. Davisson independently discovered this as well, and they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1937. In light of their finding, physicists who earlier had stopped short of asserting that electrons are particles now seem more prudent than Thomson. For example, in 1897, Walter Kaufmann had argued already that “the hypothesis that construes the cathode rays to be charged particles shot from the cathode is insufficient.”50 So, instead of saying that in 1897 J. J. Thomson discovered the electron, we can better say that several times since the 1870s, several physicists have found compelling evidence that electricity consists of particles; but time and again, others have encountered evidence to the contrary.

  In the end, the textbook writers should just revise the old tasty myths. It's not enough to perpetuate old sayings by writing ambiguities: that so-and-so “is credited with” this, or that some discovery “is attributed to” such and such. Remember these ancient lines:

  There's no P in J. J. Thomson,

  no plum-pudding in his atom.

  Fourth or fifth on the electron.

  9

  Did Einstein Believe in God?

  ALBERT EINSTEIN became famous not only for his physics, but for various clever statements that impressed many people. He sometimes spoke of God and religion, with measured words that resonated across a range of beliefs. Many Jews and Christians alike considered him a kindred soul, while many atheists and agnostics celebrated him as a fellow skeptic. When pressed, he sometimes spoke in ambiguous terms. What did the physicist really believe about religion?

  He described his parents as “entirely irreligious” Jews.1 His sister Maja also recalled that their parents did not discuss religious matters or rules. Yet they chose to provide a religious education for their son. At the age of six, they sent him to a public Catholic school in Munich, while also arranging to have someone teach him the principles of Judaism. Consequently, the boy sensed no major conflict between the two religions and somehow mainly harmonized them. He developed deep religious feelings, and he began to observe religious prescriptions in every detail.2 He stopped eating pork. He read and accepted the Bible. He composed short songs of praise to God and sang them often to himself.

  The young Albert also became increasingly impressed by mathematics and enjoyed reading popular books on science. At the age of twelve, in thinking about science, he became convinced that some of the stories in the Bible were just not possible. Right then, he abruptly abandoned religion. At that age, nearly all Jewish boys prepared to carry out their religious confirmation, the bar mitzvah, even in liberal Jewish families, yet the young Einstein refused to do so.3

  And at the same time, he became fascinated instead with math, thanks to what seemed to him a “holy book” on geometry. It provided the clarity and certainty that he lost in religion. He was not bothered by how the geometrical proofs depended on assumptions that remained unproven and only apparently clear.4 He lacked a sense of which parts of mathematics deserved critical attention. Accordingly, he did not pursue pure mathematics; he became a physicist instead, because in physics he could pinpoint assumptions that seemed annoying and questionable.

  For Einstein, scientific inquiry, not science doctrine, became a sort of religious activity. He was motivated by a “holy curiosity” focused on an immense world that beckoned “like a great, eternal riddle” to a trustworthy “paradise” that would liberate him from the miseries of life.5 The young guy was an irreligious freethinker, yet for him, science and math came to function as a substitute religiosity.

  In time, his theories acquired a mythical status, and Einstein became shrouded in false myths: that he was a bad student who dropped out of school but eventually became an absentminded professor who authored perfect theories; that he was an always-old saint, a bleeding-heart sufferer for all humanity, loved by everyone. Such myths have been corrected, so I need not review them here.6 But the question about his belief in God still requires attention. On one hand, it is quite clear that he entirely renounced religion at the age of twelve. On the other hand, the older Einstein is famously remembered for several moving and oft-quoted religious sayings. In 1919, Einstein received a telegram stating that astronomical observations confirmed his theory of gravity. A student asked Einstein what would have happened if the confirmation had not occurred, and Einstein replied: “Then I'd feel sorry for the dear God. The theory is correct anyhow.”7 In 1921, having heard about experimental evidence that his special theory of relativity might be wrong, Einstein commented: “Crafty is the Lord God, but malicious he is not.”8 Later, he criticized quantum theory by stating that nature, or God, does not act without causes. Einstein wrote to a friend: “The theory yields much, but it hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. Anyhow I am convinced that he does not play dice.”9 In 1940, Einstein pronounced: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”10 And moreover, he sometimes described himself as “a deeply religious man.”11

  However, the philosopher most admired by Einstein (as an adult) was Baruch Spinoza, a Jew who did not believe in free will, nor in any cosmic purpose, nor in the existence of a personal God. Spinoza expressed a kind of religious reverence toward the grandeur of nature and its causal structure. Einstein admired the way in which Spinoza treated the human body and soul as one entity. Spinoza was sometimes described as an atheist, and he also became known as a pantheist: one who believes that nature is God. In 1929, Einstein argued that the rationality of the world, involved in the best scientific work, is akin to religious feeling: “This firm belief, a belief bound up with deep feeling in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God. In common parlance it may be described as ‘pantheistic’ (Spinoza).”12 And also in 1929, Einstein claimed “I'm not an atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist.” But he added that “I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism.”13

  By “superior mind,” did he merely mean to say nature? Einstein repeatedly stated that he did not believe in a God who concerns himself with the actions and fates of people, and repeatedly noted that a God who punishes and rewards was inconceivable to him and incompatible with causality. He also argued that there is nothing divine about morality. Einstein did not believe in any sort of life after death, writing: “I do not believe in immortality of the individual.”14 He repeatedly denied the idea that there exists a God that answers prayers. He also denied the idea of an anthropomorphic God, and he said that he could not imagine any will or goal outside of humans.15

  So—did he believe in God? How many traditionally presupposed aspects may one subtract fro
m the notion of God before one should say that what is left is just not what anyone means by “God”? In 1929, rabbi Herbert Goldstein sent a telegram to Einstein, which read: “Do you believe in God?” He replied “I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”16

  In the 1930s, a famous actress, Elisabeth Bergner, also asked Einstein whether he believed in God. Instead of just answering yes or no, he said: “One should not ask that of someone who with growing wonderment tries to explore and understand the authoritative order of the universe.” Bergner asked why not, and he replied: “Because he would probably break down when faced with such a question.”17

  At the age of fifty-seven, in 1936, Einstein replied to a letter from a girl who asked whether he prayed. He did not, but he replied that “everyone seriously engaged in science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest a spirit which is vastly superior to man, and before which we, with our modest strength, must humbly bow.”18 What did he mean by a spirit? He added that this religiosity differs essentially from that of more naive people.

  Einstein was interviewed in 1954 by William Hermanns, a professor and veteran who sympathized with Einstein's so-called “cosmic religion” and had interviewed him previously. Among other things, Hermanns asked him to state precisely his views about God. Years later, he reported Einstein's reply:

  About God, I cannot accept any concept based on the authority of the Church. As long as I can remember, I have resented mass indoctrination. I do not believe in the fear of life, in the fear of death, in blind faith. I cannot prove to you that there is no personal God, but if I were to speak of him, I would be a liar. I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. My God created laws that take care of that. His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking, but by immutable laws.19

  This seems, again, a strange and seemingly abrupt contradiction. The first five sentences seem to come quite clearly from someone who seems to be an atheist or a nonbeliever, even a heretic. But suddenly, in two more sentences we suddenly hear the voice of a believer. Here, in contradistinction to many other instances, Einstein seemed to speak about a God prior to nature, who created the laws of physics. Likewise, a student of physics once wrote that Einstein told her: “I want to know how God created this world. I'm not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts, the rest are details.”20

  On the grounds of these latter statements, Max Jammer argued that Albert Einstein never renounced his cosmic religion. In his excellent book, Einstein and Religion, Jammer argued, however, that Einstein's allusions to God were not a return to the notion of a personal God, but were just a manner of speaking. Accordingly, one of Einstein's assistants in the 1940s, reported that Einstein once said: “What I am really interested in is knowing whether God could have created the world in a different way; in other words, whether the requirement of logical simplicity admits a margin of freedom.”21 If the second half of that sentence was meant to explain the first half, then it just gives an abstract physical meaning to a superficially religious statement. Likewise, when Einstein once said that God is crafty but not malicious, he later added the following clarification: what he meant, really, was that “Nature hides its secret through the sublimity of its essence, but not though trickery.”22

  We might well wonder whether Einstein just did not believe in God, but liked to refer to nature in religious language. He certainly felt a kind of religious reverence for nature. Did he use the name God merely as a convenient name for nature? No, claimed Walter Isaacson, in his number-one-bestselling biography of Einstein. Isaacson argued, “it was not Einstein's style to speak disingenuously in order to appear to conform. In fact, just the opposite. So we should do him the honor of taking him at his word when he insists, repeatedly, that these oft-used phrases were not merely a semantic way of disguising that he was actually an atheist.”23 Isaacson contended, instead, that Einstein believed in an impersonal God reflected in the glory of creation but who does not meddle in daily existence.24 But what if Einstein was not hiding atheism, but agnosticism?

  Einstein denied being an atheist. In his comprehensive book, Max Jammer agreed that Einstein was not an atheist. Jammer also quoted a statement by a rabbi who commented on Einstein's “cosmic religion” by saying that some theologians complained that it “may become a kind of Pantheism almost identical with Atheism.”25 Likewise, an editorial in the newspaper of the Vatican claimed that Einstein's views were an “authentic atheism even if it is camouflaged as cosmic pantheism.”26 Yet Jammer did not label Einstein a pantheist. Jammer also argued that Einstein was not agnostic.27 Yet Jammer did not quote statements in which Einstein himself accepted the label of agnostic.

  Once, writing to an inquisitive sailor, Einstein wrote: “I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer the attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our being.”28 In 1950, he even more clearly explained “My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid awareness of the foremost importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment.”29

  Discrete labels, “-isms,” are often inadequate when trying to pin down someone's views in what actually are not discrete categories, but broad spectrums of beliefs. Anyhow, almost ten years after Jammer's book was first published, a surprising letter by Einstein came to light. In 2008, Bloomsbury Auctions in London put up for sale a letter written by Einstein in early 1954, when he was nearly seventy-five years old. The letter had sat in a private collection for fifty years. It is just one and a half pages long, handwritten in ink on slightly browned, folded paper, with Einstein's signature; plus the envelope. In 1952, the philosopher Eric Gutkind published a book titled Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. Gutkind mailed a copy of his book to Einstein, with whom he had exchanged a couple of letters in 1946. In January 1954, Einstein mailed a letter to Gutkind, thanking him for sending him the book, and stating that he had read much of it. But he criticized Gutkind for proudly claiming a privileged position for Jews. And Einstein wrote:

  The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends aplenty. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this (for me). Such refined interpretations are naturally highly varied and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the unmodified Jewish religion, like all other religions, is an incarnation of primitive superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mindset I have a deep affinity, have no different quality for me than other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better at anything than other human groups, though at least a lack of power keeps them from the worst excesses. Thus I can ascertain nothing “Chosen” about them.30

  Instead, Einstein reaffirmed his admiration for Spinoza, for having asserted that humans, like the rest of nature, are not at all free from causality. Then Einstein set his intellectual differences aside, and noted that he yet was close to Gutkind “in essential things”: their common overall attitude toward the community and their similar appraisals of human behaviors. Einstein died a year later, in 1955.

  A spokesman for Bloomsbury Auctions stated that they were “100 percent certain” of the letter's authenticity. They estimated that Einstein's handwritten, brief letter would sell for £6,000 to £8,000 (roughly $11,676 to $15,568 in conversion to dollars at the time). But on May 15, 2008, it drew spectacular bidding. The successful buyer purchased t
he letter for the staggering sum of £207,600 (that is, $404,000), almost thirty times its presale estimate. The anonymous overseas collector was described only as someone who had “a passion for theoretical physics and all that that entails.”

  Thus, Einstein had privately admitted that, to him, the word God was only an expression of human weakness. The New York Times reported: “From the grave, Albert Einstein poured gasoline on the culture wars between science and religion this week.”31 For decades, many believers had gladly argued that Albert Einstein was on their side, quoting any of his many expressions. But regardless of what we believe or want to believe, we should recognize that Einstein did not necessarily share such beliefs. Much of what he said was subjected to public scrutiny. Accordingly, Einstein learned to express himself in ways that many people could find agreeable, even if they disagreed with one another.

  In short, Einstein did not believe in Judaism and he did not believe in Christianity. He denied being an atheist. He admired Spinoza's pantheism, and at least once called himself a pantheist. And he sometimes accepted the label of agnostic. Do agnostics believe in God? No, but they also abstain from presuming to know the fundamental ordering of the universe. Early on, Einstein's thoughts about science erased his boyhood faith in Jewish and Christian theologies. But instead of abandoning “religion,” he chose to redefine it, so that, for him, religion became the sense of awe and reverence for the harmony and hopefully causal order of the universe.