How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  In 1915, when Albert Einstein finished his General Theory of Relativity, it was said that only three men in the world could understand it. Cambridge astronomer Arthur Eddington told of being at a party in Europe. Some foreigner from a second-class Eastern European country, a scientist Eddington knew vaguely but considered insignificant, came up to him and said, “Congratulations. You are one of the only three men on this earth who understands the theory of relativity.” Eddington answered, “Yes, there’s me and Professor Einstein, but who is the third?” The man talking to Eddington had been referring to himself. But Eddington snootily blew him off. And Eddington was so proud of that fact that he told the story over and over again. Eddington’s tale is where the notion that only three men understood Einstein came from. By 1955, the number said to understand Relativity had rocketed to seven.

  But Albert Einstein was opposed to the sort of snobbery that Eddington had displayed. Genius, Einstein wrote in the introduction to his skinny blue book, was not the ability to be obscure. It was not the ability to come up with a theory that only seven men in the world could comprehend. It was the ability to express that theory so simply that anyone with a high school education and a reasonable degree of intelligence could understand it. In other words, it was the ability to render the most difficult concepts understandable to even the village cretin. Which was what Einstein was hoping to accomplish with his sveltely skinny book. He only asked one thing from his reader—that as he turn the pages, he try not to drip saliva on the print. I apparently was precisely the sort of drooling cretin that Einstein was looking for.

  With his introduction to this skinny little blue book, it felt as if Albert Einstein had reached out though the printed page, grabbed me by the shirtfront, put his nose up to mine, and said, “Shmuck. Listen up. To be a genius, you have to be a writer.”

  When I finished the book that night I’d gotten a handle on the General Theory of Relativity, but the Special Theory of Relativity, which is where the hot stuff is located, still eluded me. In fact, I’d understood it. But I didn’t believe that what I’d understood could possibly be what Einstein had meant. So I was forced to slog back to school the next morning prepared to tell the girl who had shown such faith in my intellectual prowess that I hadn’t mastered relativity after all. Fortunately, she had received so much ridicule for speaking to me the previous day that she never came within 50 yards again. So the secret of my ignorance was safe.

  However, Einstein’s words had given me three lifetime goals: to become a scientific thinker, a genius…and a writer.

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  While I waited for my genius to flower (it never did), I made one tiny concession to normalcy. I believed in God until I was about twelve, and prayed fervently to Him for higher bowling scores. My classmates were landing 200 games, but my numbers were down in the 80s. Gutter balls were my specialty. Every variety of gutter ball you can imagine—from the raucous, sloshy one that rocks back and forth in the runnel and threatens to escape and jump to another lane, to the highly-disciplined, straight-as-an arrow kind that zooshes at high speed into the dark at the far end without threatening a single pin. Then I began to have doubts about the Lord of the Universe (my bowling scores never went up). But I stifled my disbelief because my Bar Mitzvah was coming and I didn’t want to miss out on the avalanche of presents.

  Once the critical ceremony was over and my father had bankrupted himself on a party that rivaled the ones thrown by the Shah of Iran, a bowling party where all the kids I’d been rejected by in grammar school showed their commitment to consistency by ganging up in foursomes and rolling murderously heavy balls toward ten poor, innocent pins, but not inviting me into the games—yet once I had put all the checks from relatives too lazy to buy me useless objects in the bank, I felt free to rethink things and came to the conclusion that I was, guess what? An atheist. Which led to a revelation.

  I dared confess my utter disbelief in god to myself on roughly August 5, 1956. A month later, the Jewish High Holidays rolled around. My parents insisted that I go to temple with them. In fact, dodging this obligation to my tribe was to my mom and dad utterly unthinkable. They managed to bully me into putting on a form of Western clothing that I loathed—a suit. That wasn’t easy. A dress suit is supposedly clothing. But in reality, it acts as your very own portable, personal prison. Try lifting your arms above your head to catch a falling squirrel in a suit jacket, and you’ll see what I mean. Or try gulping. Your necktie will throttle your Adam’s apple, strap it in to the upper reaches of your throat, and will threaten to crush it if it dares to move. I don’t know how my parents convinced me to tie a variation on a hangman’s noose around my neck and shove my arms into the sleeves of a restraint device disguised as formal attire. But that wasn’t the end of my nurturers’ accomplishments.

  They also managed to shoehorn me into their blue, four-door Frazier, a long-forgotten car named after industrialist Henry J. Kaiser (more about him later). And they succeeded in driving me the two miles to Richmond Avenue without my opening the door at a red light and bolting for home. But when it came time for me to exit the car and walk the block to Temple Beth El, a building so old that all of the classrooms in the basement smelled like urine, they ran into a difficulty. I refused to leave the car. I wanted nothing to do with a long and boring ceremony whose efficacy in persuading a non-existent entity to treat you gently for the next twelve months I didn’t believe in. So my parents opened the car door and literally tried to haul me out by my ankles. While they shredded my socks, I held on to the solid door frame that Henry J. Kaiser’s laborers, using legendary American craftsmanship, had made of sturdy steel.

  From this wrestling match came an epiphany. Yes, we atheists can epiphanize. Flares of static electricity can illuminate the dark corridors that crease and wrinkle our brains. The starring epiphany of the moment? There were no gods in the skies above the eight-story-high elm trees of Richmond Avenue. And there were no gods below Richmond Avenue’s cement pavement. Yet there were gods in this scene. Yes, gods. Real gods.

  Where were these deities? Or, to be more specific, where was my mishpacha’s thunder-maker-of-choice, Jehovah, the gray-haired mountain of muscle and fury in a beard and a bathrobe who allegedly lived above the clouds and kept a double-entry bookkeeping account of your life and mine? The Ruler of the Universe was deep inside of my dad and mom. So deep that my parents were using my ankles as handles in their efforts to drag me to the house of the supernatural.

  There is a tradition in science. It comes from the men I’d latched onto as mentors when I was ten—Galileo and Anton van Leeuwenhoek. Their legacy? Break the rules. Look for the unexpected. Turn the tables. Step outside the traditional perceptual frame. Galileo was a consultant to the arsenal of Venice on next-generation armaments. The techno-geek heard of a miracle military device that a Dutchman named Hans Lippershey had invented in Holland. It was a tube that allowed the Dutch to see the armies of their arch enemy, King Phillip III of Spain, at a distance so great that in the past it had invisibilized incoming marches of men intent on mass murder. In other words, with the spy glass you could see your enemy before he could see you. The spy glass was based on a clever use of another high-tech gadget—the lens. Galileo gathered information on this newly-invented gizmo, a tube with a lens at each end. Then he made one of his own. And he increased the magnification of the spy glass by a factor of ten. He turned it into the telescope.

  Because the spy glass had been invented to see armed men marching in your direction with ill intent, the instrument was used horizontally. Galileo’s breakthrough came from breaking convention. He decided to turn an optical instrument made for flat and level viewing in another direction. Instead of training his telescope on the horizon, Galileo turned it to the skies. The night skies, to be specific.

  Now this was downright crazy. Everybody knew what was in the ebony heavens. Aristotle had described it. And Ptolemy had confirmed it. The heavens were filled with God
’s perfection. I mean, they were the heavens. As in “God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world.” The skies were the living room carpet of the Almighty. And God was perfect. So were his heavenly furnishings. Aristotle decreed that the circle was the most perfect of geometric forms. So in heaven, it was circles all the way. Perfect spheres rotating in perfect circles. A direct reflection of the aesthetic preferences of a geometry-obsessed Creator. In other words, by pointing his telescope up, Galileo was committing an act of heresy. He was peeping-tomming into the private apartment of the most perfect of all beings. Sort of like installing a spy cam in the bathroom of the woman you idolize. Or going through the underwear drawer of your dad. What did Galileo spot up there in the skies? A moon that looked broken and craggy. And planets that behaved less like Aristotle’s perfect circles and more like stones. From that observation and its consequences came a Pope so upset that he gave Galileo ten years of house arrest for heresy.

  But what had been Galileo’s biggest screw you to the Almighty? And his biggest contribution to science? Changing the direction in which he pointed the lens. Forgetting about eye level and aiming his telescope up.

  Then there’s Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who fiddled with the same next-tech gizmo sixty years down the line—the lens. Van Leeuwenhoek was a draper. He was in the fabric business. The lens came in handy for examining the quality of the cloth he was about to sell. It helped him see how tight and regular the weave was. Van Leeuwenhoek’s big innovation was like Galileo’s. It came from noticing the norm…and stepping outside of it. It came from breaking the rules. Galileo had pointed his lenses up. Van Leeuwenhoek pointed his lenses down. Down at pond water. Down at blood. Down at his own spurt of semen. And, like Galileo, van Leeuwenhoek discovered an unexpected world. Galileo discovered that the sky was filled with stones. Van Leeuwenhoek revealed that the micro-territory down here on earth was riddled with “animalcules.” As you know, he uncovered the hidden world of what we today call “microorganisms.”

  My parents’ passionate belief gave me a job, a mandate, a mission. So did Galileo and van Leeuwenhoek. If the gods were not in the scud of clouds across the sky and not in the muck beneath our feet after a big rain, then where were they? Deep, deep inside. Inside of all of us. Including inside of atheists like me. And, no matter what your beliefs are, inside of you, too. My job? Turn the lens not up, not down, but inside. Train it on the inner world and its passions. Illuminate the realm where the spirits reside. Find the gods inside. And in finding the source of deity, I was certain I’d find the forces of history. But why is a subject we’ll save for later.

  Meanwhile, let’s give credit where credit’s due. Turning the lens to the world inside wasn’t original. The guy who had set the standard for this sort of thing was Sigmund Freud.

  And finding the gods inside also had a precedent, a forefather.

  When I was fourteen, I heard about a book called The Varieties of the Religious Experience, a 1902 work by the father of American psychology, William James. This sounded like the ringing of the bell of a kindred soul. The brass walls of my identity resonated to the very sound of the title. There was no Amazon.com in those pitiful, primitive days. So it took me four months to hunt down a copy of the tome. But when I got it, it was another one of those volumes that reaches a hand out from the flat paper of the pages and grabs you by the collar of your shirt. James laid out the extreme experiences of folks like Saint Teresa of Avila and George Fox, the man who founded the Quaker movement in 1652. James saw a deep validity in whacko visitations that, under ordinary circumstances, would be deemed what he called “psychopathic.”

  For example, Saint Teresa was a nun, a bride of Christ, in Spain in the 1530s. Lying in her monastic cell, she would feel Christ coming through the walls, penetrating her body, and filling her with rapture. Or she would be caught up to heaven in an out of body experience, an ecstatic experience. Here’s her description of one of her mystic raptures:

  I saw an angel near me, on the left side, in bodily form…He was not tall, but short, marvelously beautiful, with a face which shone as though he were one of the highest of the angels, who seem to be all of fire: they must be those whom we call Seraphim…I saw in his hands a long golden spear, and at the point of the iron there seemed to be a little fire. This I thought that he thrust several times into my heart, and that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew out the spear he seemed to be drawing them with it, leaving me all on fire with a wondrous love for God. The pain was so great that it caused me to utter several moans; and yet so exceeding sweet is this greatest of pains that it is impossible to desire to be rid of it, or for the soul to be content with less than God.

  “What empire is comparable to that of a soul who,” she writes, “from this sublime summit to which God has raised her, sees all the things of earth beneath her feet.” But these moments of mystic madness, explains James, can be harvested. They can turn those they visit into some “of the most powerfully practical human engines that ever lived.”

  Somehow men and women like Saint Teresa turn madness into truth. Or at least that’s how William James saw it. So where are the gods? In the margins just outside of sanity, in the dark outskirts of the psyche where lunacy lies. Your psyche and mine.

  James had no scientific explanations for experiences like Saint Teresa’s. He simply laid them out on a lab bench, explained that they were specimens that went to the heart of something powerful and profound, then left his samples of “the religious experience” in the pages of a book for fifty to five years waiting for—guess who?—you. Or, to be more specific, me. Waiting for you and me to approach the puzzle of truths that can be milked from delusions. Waiting for us to analyze mystic raptures with scientific tools that did not exist in James’s day. Which is where drugs would someday come into the picture. But not for another six years.

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  To my parents, the whole thing was one unending nightmare. I not only bore the family name, but I was dragging it through some very strange mud. My mom seldom spent time with me. She was busy running organizations. But every once in a while, she did something truly remarkable. I took a liking to Johns Hopkins University when I was ten because I’d heard it was called the Johns Hopkins University of Science. And science was my main thrill in life. So my mom helped me get my hands on a catalog from the place. When I was twelve, she took me to a used-medical-equipment store and bought me the brass barreled professional medical microscope with Zeiss lenses that shimmered itself into this narrative a few minutes ago. She never bought me toys. But when I was still twelve, I begged her for the cash to send for a build-it-yourself computer kit. She gave me the money on the spot. Alas, what a disappointment. It turned out to be a kit for a Boolean Algebra machine. A symbolic logic contraption. Heck, it wasn’t even binary. Real computers would have snickered and behaved as contemptuously as Sir Arthur Eddington had to that hapless Eastern European upstart who had presumptuously claimed to understand Einstein.

  To make up for the Boolean humiliation, my mom introduced me to the son of a friend of hers, a kid three years older than I was with whom I co-conceived a real computer that won a few local science awards.

  Then, when I was still twelve, my mom realized that one of her distant relatives was the head of research and development at a company that made futuristic engine valves for the first planes to make it to the edge of space—the X planes. Her relative spearheaded R&D at a company whose name sounded like the bleat of a queasy cow—the Moog Valve Corporation. Despite the ludicrous name, my mom persuaded the poor man to give me private tutoring sessions in weird scientific and engineering concepts. But when this genius of the fluttering valve saw that I didn’t seem to grasp the significance of cycloids, he gave up on me. Perhaps he shared the opinion of my first grade teacher that I had rusted Brillo pads where my brains should have been.

  My mother, in another of her periodic fits of helpfulness, scored an even greater success. She dragg
ed me off to converse with the head of the graduate physics department at the University of Buffalo. Remember, I was twelve. There is no reason on earth why a savant of this magnitude should have wasted time with me. My mom must have twisted arms like telephone wire to get me this audience. My guess is that the august graduate department head had grudgingly granted me five minutes in his busy schedule smashing atoms until they screamed. But the session lasted an hour. Why? Because the two of us—the department head and, yes, I—dished into the hottest issue in the science of the day—Big Bang versus Steady State theory of the universe. It was 1955, the year when Steady State ring leader Fred Hoyle was certain that he was about to demolish George Gamow, the leader of the Big Bang Gang. Hoyle knew with absolute certainty that within a year, Gamow’s Big Bang would be ridiculed, and within two years it would be utterly forgotten.

  The outcome of the showdown between Hoyle and Gamow hinged on the interpretation of that cosmic smudge you’ve heard about in earlier pages, the phenomenon that makes the light of some stars blush bright red—the Doppler Shift. And Christian Doppler’s Shift was what the department head and I laced into with gusto and glee. Meanwhile, my poor mom sat in the professor’s tiny waiting room with his assistant and a copy of Colliers Magazine. The five minutes allotted to a snotty twelve year old dragged on and on. At the fifty-nine-minute mark, my mother was grinding through a magazine she loathed, the Readers’ Digest, searching for jokes that wouldn’t make her wince. When the physics department head and I finally emerged from our session, the fellow towered over me, put his hand on my right shoulder, and told my mom not to save for my grad school education. I’d get a fellowship in theoretical physics, he declared, at any school in the country. It wasn’t until I was forty-eight years old that I discovered she’d saved the money for my graduate education anyway.

  By then, it was too late. I’d acted on the notion that my only grad school funding would come from fellowships. More about how that flipped me off the academic track and into twenty years of adventure in the world of Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, AC/DC, Aerosmith, KISS, Queen, Paul Simon, and Billy Joel later. Be patient with me.