4/16/2024 0 Comments Erwin schrödinger atomic theoryThese theories are entirely consistent with the ‘lawful harmony’ established by Einstein’s God. The special and general theories of relativity provided a radical new way of conceiving of space and time and their active interactions with matter and energy. Thus, there is no room in Einstein’s philosophy for free will: ‘Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control … we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.’ As far as Einstein was concerned, God’s ‘lawful harmony’ is established throughout the cosmos by strict adherence to the physical principles of cause and effect. For this, he was considered a dangerous heretic, and was excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam.Įinstein’s God is infinitely superior but impersonal and intangible, subtle but not malicious. When asked many years later whether he believed in God, he replied: ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.’ Baruch Spinoza, a contemporary of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, had conceived of God as identical with nature. When asked about the basis for his realist stance, he explained: ‘I have no better expression than the term “religious” for this trust in the rational character of reality and in its being accessible, at least to some extent, to human reason.’īut Einstein’s was a God of philosophy, not religion. And, although he wanted no part of religion, the belief in God that he had carried with him from his brief flirtation with Judaism became the foundation on which he constructed his philosophy. ![]() He preferred to accept the content of a scientific theory realistically, as a contingently ‘true’ representation of an objective physical reality. ![]() Over time, Einstein evolved a much more realist position. But as he grew older (and wiser), he came to reject Mach’s aggressive empiricism, and once declared that ‘Mach was as good at mechanics as he was wretched at philosophy.’ Ten years later, Einstein would complete the transformation of our understanding of space and time with the formulation of his general theory of relativity, in which the force of gravity is replaced by curved spacetime. Mach’s rejection of absolute space and time helped to shape Einstein’s special theory of relativity (including the iconic equation E = mc 2), which he formulated in 1905 while working as a ‘technical expert, third class’ at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. This youthful, heavy diet of empiricist philosophy would serve Einstein well some 14 years later. He developed a deep aversion to the dogma of organised religion that would last for his lifetime, an aversion that extended to all forms of authoritarianism, including any kind of dogmatic atheism. From Hume, it was a relatively short step to the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, whose stridently empiricist, seeing-is-believing brand of philosophy demanded a complete rejection of metaphysics, including notions of absolute space and time, and the existence of atoms.īut this intellectual journey had mercilessly exposed the conflict between science and scripture. ![]() Talmud then steered him in the direction of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), from which he migrated to the philosophy of David Hume. He consumed all 21 volumes of Aaron Bernstein’s joyful Popular Books on Natural Science (1880). Following Jewish custom, his parents would invite a poor scholar to share a meal with them each week, and from the impoverished medical student Max Talmud (later Talmey) the young and impressionable Einstein learned about mathematics and science. Despite his parents’ secularism, the nine-year-old Albert discovered and embraced Judaism with some considerable passion, and for a time he was a dutiful, observant Jew. Hermann and Pauline Einstein were nonobservant Ashkenazi Jews. What did Einstein mean by it? And how did Einstein conceive of God? And in some circumstances we might get the other.Įinstein was having none of it, and his insistence that God does not play dice with the Universe has echoed down the decades, as familiar and yet as elusive in its meaning as E = mc 2. Whereas physics before the quantum had always been about doing this and getting that, the new quantum mechanics appeared to say that when we do this, we get that only with a certain probability. The heart of the new theory of quantum mechanics, Born had argued, beats randomly and uncertainly, as though suffering from arrhythmia. ‘I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.’Įinstein was responding to a letter from the German physicist Max Born. ![]() ‘The theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One,’ wrote Albert Einstein in December 1926.
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