GOD IN THE EQUATION: How Einstein Transformed Religion
Corey S. Powell
1. THE GOD OF SCI/RELIGION
THE WORLD'S NEWEST spiritual center is a long way from Mecca or Jerusalem, Vatican City or Lhasa. It lies at the remote summit of Mauna Kea, a million-year-mountain of lava and ash jutting nearly three miles above the tropical Hawaiian shore. While the old sites still hold a sacred place in the imaginations of countless billions, their spiritual wisdom hasn't changed in centuries. Hearing the latest gospel requires a pilgrimage to the top of this hulking, dormant volcano. Antiseptic white domed buildings, mysteriously unmarked, interrupt the desolate landscape. There are no spires, no stained glass, no columns or gilded doorways to welcome the visitor. Inside, the high priests of science and their electronic surrogates peer through the dry, rarefied atmosphere into the vastness above. A Ј to this remote pinnacle of astronomical power begins on the lightly traveled Saddle Road, which runs between Mauna Kea and active twin, Mauna Loa, on Hawaii's Big Island. Your rental car is wheezing by the time you reach the stopping point halfway up, at Hale Ph. Even after a night of acclimation, your own lungs are ang double time when you reach the top, an altitude of just fourteen thousand feet. At night the stars appear strangely dim, because your retinas are starved for air and unable to pull their normal duty. The sky swims with the blackness of a near faint, similar to the kind of negative rush you see when you stand up too quickly. Take a deep breath of pure oxygen from a tank and all the visual chemistry falls back into place. Then, a revelation: The sky blooms with light, the universe made manifest by a dose of rudimentary medical technology.
The two Keck telescopes are the supreme oracles of Mauna Kea. After a half hour in the dark, a healthy person's pupils open not quite one-third of an inch, and behind them the retinas store about one-tenth of a second of visual information. Keck I and its newer twin, Keck II, maintain an unblinking gaze thirty-three feet across and can hold it for hours. Their thirty-six-piece, segmented mirrors gather billion-year-old light from faraway quasars and galaxies, amassing the raw information to answer questions otherwise unknowable to mere mortals. Photon by photon, the Kecks are validating the new way of understanding the world.
The word coming down from Mauna Kea is not traditional science. It is too grand in scope, embracing all of space out to the edge of the universe and all of time back to the moment of cosmic origin. It is empirical, but it knowingly overreaches, describing particles that have never been detected, fields that have never been felt, and regions of space that have never been seen. It utterly dwarfs human conceptions, much like an omnipotent deity. Yet this celestial form of enlightenment also bears little resemblance to Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or any other old-time religion. In place of the unity of God, it seeks out simplicity of explanation. In place of a central dogma, it rests on the falsification of theory through empirical data. It develops its own entrenched doctrines, but it also provides the tools with which to discard them. This new faith has acquired millions of converts and permeated every corner of American culture. It has changed our world, but until now it hasn't had a name.
Call it sci/religion, because it blends elements of the experimental and the mystical. The name also works as a pun on two defining aspects of modern science. In quantum theory, the Greek letter psi represents the fundamental uncertainty of measurement. At any moment, a subatomic particle does not have a single well-defined position; instead, it has a statistical blur of potential positions. In essence, this uncertainty principle means a particle can be in two places at the same time, allowing interactions that would be forbidden according to classical physics or common sense. Such quantum rule bending permits the nuclear reactions that cause stars to shine, and in some current cosmological models it even explains the origin of the universe. So: “psi religion.” Sci/religion also evokes scientists' wariness about openly discussing the metaphysical strains that are increasingly obvious in their work. They shy away from questions about their personal faith, fearing that any answer will only make them look foolish or reactionary. When you ask them if they believe in God, they always respond the same way, with a sigh. So: “sigh, religion.”
The founder and greatest prophet of sci/religion had no such qualms about finding common ground between the material and the mystical. Albert Einstein recognized the search for truth as an inherently spiritual endeavor. “Everyone who is seriously involved the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe—a spirit vastly superior to that of man,” he explained to one of his students in 1936. Explicitly and implicitly in his work, Einstein preached the doctrines of unity, implicitly, and universality. These principles are the guiding lights of sci/religion. Few of his followers speak as openly as he did, but their actions give them away. Just look at the beliefs that motivate experiments, their equations, and their journal articles. Look their research on Mauna Kea. They worship in the Temple of Einstein.
Like many people of my generation, I grew up. . . immersed in the faith of sci/religion. As a child I marveled at the drawings of swirling nebulae and colliding galaxies in classic books such as The World We Live In. Later I read about quasars in Astronomy magazine and puzzled over descriptions of curved space-time in Scientific American. Imagining the infernal fireball of the big bang sent chills down my spine back then, and it still does so today. Later, digging into the history of science, I learned how these ideas have kept changing as one theory failed a crucial test and a new theory came along. That realization only strengthened my appreciation for the mystical power of science. Each blip of starlight arrives loaded with meaning. The priests of sci/religion steer their telescopes, observe, analyze, and draw up new theories. They know they will never attain full understanding but labor away, confident that they will arrive ever closer toward cosmic enlightenment. That endless pilgrimage gives purpose to life.
Four years ago, I heard that one of Einstein's disciples had experienced a breakthrough in the sci/religious faith. Saul Perlmutter, a hard-driven and deceptively boyish cosmologist at California's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL), had been approaching the Keck Observatory with new versions of some of our oldest queries. Will the universe continue forever, or will it someday come to an end? Do the heavens operate according to the same physical rules as the terrestrial realm? Above all, is there more to the universe than meets the eye? Three thousand miles away, in his spare hilltop office above the San Francisco Bay, Perlmutter pored over his precious data. The answers he sought might already be encoded somewhere in the buckets of starlight gathered by the Kecks.
Perlmutter approached the great telescopes armed with a cunning plan to force those secrets into the open. In the late 1980s he developed a strategy to measure how the expansion of the universe is slowing down—one of the fundamental pieces of information sought by modern cosmologists—by studying the light from distant exploding stars. Many people had proposed this approach, but Perlmutter was the first to develop the analytical techniques and computerized tools that could translate the brief flaring of those detonations into meaningful messages. The plan worked beyond his wildest imaginings. By early 1998 he had collected enough observations to see signs of wonder.
The universe is not slowing down under the pull of gravity, as astronomers had naively assumed. It appears to be accelerating, galaxies rushing apart faster and faster under a mysterious repulsive influence. Perlmutter's collaborators were understandably skeptical, but they could find no flaw in his work. Neither could his fie competitors, led by the similarly youthful Brian Schmidt Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University. Schmidt's team got off to a later start pursued a similar line of attack and arrived at essentially iden
tical results. By early 2003, two balloon-borne instruments and a NASA satellite, called WMAP, added to the stack of supporting evidence in favor of a runaway, accelerating universe.
The oracles had spoken. Haltingly, Perlmutter and the other researchers accepted the message. The visible universe is only one part of what is out there. Even the invisible material, the “dark matter” believed to knit together clusters of galaxies, is a secondary element. Every known form of matter produces an attractive gravitational force over large scales. Cosmic acceleration indicates the universe must also contain something that produces a strong repulsion. Albert Einstein considered such a mystery component, which he called “the cosmological constant” and denoted by the Greek letter lambda, but later dismissed it as strange and unproven. Perlmutter's findings implied Lambda is real. It is so powerful that it overwhelms the inward pull of all the galaxies and dominates the universe. At face value, this discovery was the astronomical equivalent of learning that the United States is run not by President and Congress, but by an unsuspected race of elves we inside tree stumps. But the reaction to the news was nearly as significant as the result itself. When Perlmutter announced his results, nobody seemed terribly shocked. His colleagues received the word from Mauna Kea calmly and warmly. Soon they had given this antigravity force a nickname, “dark energy,” and added it to their regular vocabulary. As I watched this response, I fully appreciated for the first time how thoroughly cosmologists have embraced the faith of sci/religion.
The observers, the folks who spend agonizing nights scrutinizing the faintest flecks in the sky, nodded in encouragement. They agreed that the accelerating universe was a provocative discovery, merely cautioning that measuring the rate of cosmic expansion is difficult research, prone to many possible errors. They had seen plenty of unexpected phenomena before and were always prepared to be caught off guard again. Meanwhile, the theoretical cosmologists—the mathematical thinkers who spin physical tales about the origin and fate of the universe—responded with an equal mix of enthusiasm and sangfroid. Not only had they already considered the possibility of Lambda, they had gone a step further and assumed something like it had to exist, because Lambda provided crucial symmetry to theories that otherwise appeared out of balance. Even the public took the reports in stride. Writers in the newspapers and popular magazines trumpeted Perlmutter's findings as startling and bizarre, but the coverage quickly returned to a familiar tone of reverent wonder.
There were plenty of follow-up news stories and articles, of course. Science magazine, the leading American general-science journal, touted the finding as its “Breakthrough of the Year” at the end of 1998. “Scientists and philosophers will be grappling with the implications for years to come,” the magazine promised in the standard grandiose-yet-deadpan language of academic salesmanship. Cosmologists developed competing theories about the energy driving the runaway expansion. Observers suggested new ways to make sure the supernova results were not flawed. What was missing was a visceral reaction—amazement, confusion, perhaps even outrage—that the universe had pulled a fast one on us. Earlier trailblazing discoveries, such as Einstein's theory of relativity and the discovery of the expanding universe, engendered fierce scientific debate that spilled over into the public consciousness. Why the great calm this time around?
The simple answer is that science had transformed into sci/religion. Those earlier discoveries were so wrenching precisely because they were the ones that effected the change. Quantum physics introduced the idea that space is never really empty but seethes with potential energy and matter. Most important of all, the general theory of relativity smashed the false idols of classical science. Time, dimension, and mass are not fixed entities, Einstein declared, and must be replaced by new concepts that illuminate a deeper reality. Sci/religion unfolded from this prophecy. In the gospel according to Einstein, space can bend and stretch. These improbable ideas soon found validation in the discovery of the expanding universe. In his vision of cosmic unity, Einstein linked all of space through his equations of general relativity and connected every mass with every other mass. A dandelion seed floating over a suburban lawn influences a distant quasar, and vice versa. To make this vision into a coherent picture of the universe, Einstein created the hypothetical propulsive component, Lambda, and folded it into his omnipotent equations.
Scientists accept the non-intuitive notions of modern physics because they match up with experimental data. But scientists embrace these ideas emotionally because they promise a transcendent demanding of the true nature of the universe. Call it prayer in the Temple of Einstein. When Perlmutter and Schmidt uncovered evidence of cosmic antigravity, the discovery did not contradict scientific expectation. It affirmed what scientists already believed what they already felt. Cosmologists had been expecting, even earning for, something like Lambda to fill in the gaps in their models. Lambda deepened the blissful sensation that sci/religion has transcended the human world.
As the apotheosis of sci/religion, Lambda perfectly illustrates how close science and religion have been all along. In the old-time religions, there is more to the world than matter. There is heaven and hell, there is the immortal soul, and above all there is the unseen and unknowable divine Creator. In science, there has been a parallel search for immaterial forces that animate the world. Religion searches for knowledge about the intangibles through the reading of Scripture. Science carries out its pursuit through the reading of experimental evidence. Both assume that such readings will lead ever closer to an ultimate, but perhaps never fully attainable, truth. In both worlds, the drunken excitement of enlightenment is fundamentally the same.
Claiming parallels between science and religion tends to offend people on both sides of the fence. Scientists disapprove of the implication that their work is guided by dogma rather than data. Theologians fear that attempts to link religion to the empirical study of the world undermines faith. After the church's battle with Galileo in the seventeenth century, the two sides worked out a rough line of demarcation: Science would tackle the material world, while religion would take responsibility for matters moral and spiritual. Saint Augustine of Hippo and Saint Thomas Aquinas had established the basic argument that the Bible was not intended as a textbook on the physical workings of the world. In essence, the church accepted Galileo's argument—voiced originally by a member of the clergy, Cardinal Baronius—that Scripture explains “how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go.” Yet violations of the borders still occur, mostly carried out by adherents of the old-time religions seeking to defend their turf.
There is, first of all, the drearily familiar battle between biblical literalists and schools that teach evolution. (Big bang cosmology and the geological history of the Earth also contradict Genesis, but are not as commonly taught, nor are they as emotionally heated as human origins.) This disagreement led to the Scopes trial in 1925 and the 1999 Kansas School Board decision—since reversed to strike evolution from the state's science curriculum. In essence, the creationists assert that science has overstepped its boundaries by proposing theories of origin for humans and for the universe, and they seek to reclaim the material world in order to rent any conflicts with the Bible. The most extreme creationists hold that the Earth is six thousand years old and reject any evidence that could interfere with that belief. In addition to the obvious rebuttals from the fossil record, these creationist arguments disintegrate on their own logic. If you take every word of Scripture ice value, then you have ridiculous situations such as Noah try to cram thirty million species into his ark. On the other hand, if you accept that some of the Bible is allegorical or metaphorical, why try to make any of it function as a scientific textbook?
Then there is the reverse argument, that modern cosmology actually proves the story of Genesis and, by extension, the existence of God. In his famous book, God and the Astronomers, former NASA director Robert Jastrow helped promote this idea with his much misinterpreted quote, “For the scientist who has lived by his faith
in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the nest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” Jastrow, a self-professed agnostic, well understood that the similarities between the Bible and the big bang are mostly superficial. Any description of cosmic creation will have a beginning or it not. Either way, the scientific version would correspond loosely to one of the world's major religions. And as many cosmologists point out, the discovery that the universe evolved from a hot, dense state does not prove a divine agent was responsible for wishing those initial conditions.
Many creationists look past the big bang and make the more subtle argument from design: The cosmic laws are so intricate and perfectly tuned to allow the existence of intelligent life that they must be the handiwork of a divine being—an argument also commonly applied to the biological world. The enormous hole in this reasoning is that it depends on a very human, subjective judgment regarding which aspects of the universe are so wonderful that they could only have come directly from God. But as human knowledge progresses, the boundaries change constantly. The circular motion of the heavens no longer seems miraculous once you understand that the Earth rotates. The jagged thrust of the Himalayas seems quite natural once you recognize that continents move and collide. Knowing about DNA instantly takes the mystery out of heredity and mutations. The argument from design is a modern variant of the old ontological argument, which states that God must exist because something had to put the concept of God into our heads. In its contemporary form—that God must exist because nature seems so incomprehensibly wonderful to us—the reasoning is equally unsatisfying.
These attacks spring from a misguided premise. They assume science has no place for faith, so religion must create one. But sci/religion abounds with faith. It doesn't simply reduce the world to ordinary, material explanations, as many critics of science contend. Sci/religion constantly carves out new space for the extraordinary and the intangible as it proceeds in its relentless search for underlying reality. Its mystical visions are as fantastic as anything in the Bible, but they are fundamentally different. The modern sci/religious liturgy has tremendous credibility because it rests on the same principles—testable theories and repeatable observations—that have produced so many other tangible scientific and technological advances. That is why more people today probably believe in black holes than believe that Moses literally parted the Red Sea to lead the Israelites out of Egypt.
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