A century of relativity

Jim Checkley

July 17, 2005

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A Century of Relativity

by Jim Checkley

One of my intellectual heroes is the French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincare. This is because he is universally regarded as the last generalist—that is, the last person to do original work in all branches of mathematics. In 1902 Poincare wrote a book called Science and Hypothesis in which he posited three fundamental problems that befuddled physics: first, the motion of particles suspended in liquid, called Brownian motion, that defied explanation; second, the strange fact that when light hit a sensitive metal plate, electrons were knocked off the plate, a phenomenon called the photoelectric effect; and finally, the abject failure of physicists to detect the “ether”, the hypothesized medium in space through which light waves were said to propagate.

Three years later, in 1905, a 26 year old patent clerk living in Bern, Switzerland, named Albert Einstein, solved all three problems and then some. “A storm broke loose in my mind,” Einstein said about that heady year. Between March and September he published five remarkable papers (all without citation to other work), each of which either created or transformed a field of physics. Physicists call 1905 Einstein’s Miracle Year and his output is generally regarded as the single most productive burst of creativity in the history of science.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the Miracle Year, 2005 has been declared the World Year of Physics by the United Nations General Assembly, the United States Congress, and a host of physics institutions around the world. Celebrations are happening in more than 30 nations and in the United States, scores of universities have conducted or plan to conduct programs in honor of Einstein’s accomplishments and to promote science generally.

And what accomplishments they were! I promise to talk physics for only a minute or two, in order to sum up what happened in 1905. Most famously, Einstein created Special Relativity, and with it, the only equation Steven Hawking’s publishers would allow him to put in his book A Short History of Time. You all know it, E = mc2, which was derived in its own three page paper that might as well have been attached to Einstein’s original paper on Special Relativity.

Ever pithy, Einstein described relativity this way: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.” Special Relativity was subsumed into General Relativity, published in 1915, which overturned Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity. Einstein, and relativity, truly entered into our culture in 1919, when Sir Arthur Eddington conducted starlight bending around the sun experiments that showed the superiority of Einstein’s equations over those of Newton. Relativity revolutionized how we view space and time and lead to the development of atomic power and nuclear weapons.

In explaining the photoelectric effect, Einstein discovered that light is both a wave and a particle and set the foundations for quantum mechanics, one of the most important disciplines of the 20th century. It was for this discovery, and not relativity, that Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921. The irony here, of course, is that Einstein never accepted that quantum mechanics gave a sensible picture of the universe, asserting that “God does not play at dice.”

In the third of the big three papers, Einstein proved the correctness of the atomic theory of matter by explaining that Brownian motion was caused when particles suspended in a liquid collide with the atoms or molecules that make up the liquid. That may sound obvious now, but back then, Einstein’s paper was crucial in converting the last skeptics of atomic theory.

Oh, and Einstein also published his thesis dissertation in 1905; it remains one of the most cited scientific papers ever.

Through his radical and revolutionary discoveries, Einstein became the very symbol of genius in the 20th century. Many experts on such things believe that in the history of Western Civilization, only Aristotle, Galileo, and Newton were his equals. Einstein, however, frequently downplayed his brain power with statements such as: “I have no special gift. I am only passionately curious.”

But there was no denying that Einstein was eccentric. His famously chaotic hair actually represented a famously chaotic personality. Einstein never learned to drive, for example, and when he walked home from his office at Princeton University, sockless and deep in thought, he would rattle his umbrella against the bars of an iron fence. If for any reason the umbrella missed a bar, he would go back to the beginning. And his lack of fashion sense would appall any self-respecting metrosexual. But, as always, Einstein had a clever quip to disarm his critics. Comparing the difficulty of physics and fashion, Einstein remarked: “Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.”

And Einstein was famous. Oh, was he famous. He is the only scientist to achieve pop star status—something that has endured, if not increased, after his death 50 years ago. I think part of the magic of Einstein is that most people do not understand much about what he did, but they know it was important, they know it changed the world, and he seemed like a self-effacing, harmless eccentric who was accessible and not encased in some ivory tower. Americans like their geniuses to be nonthreatening—and Einstein fit the bill.

Whatever the reasons for it, Einstein used his celebrity to speak out against fascism, racial prejudice, and the McCarthy hearings. He was the only scientist with enough prestige and authority to sign the letter that convinced Franklin Roosevelt to authorize the creation of the atomic bomb. And in 1952, just three years before his death from a heart aneurysm, he was offered the presidency of Israel, which he politely declined.

It is difficult to overestimate how large an influence Einstein’s theories, especially relativity, have had on us and our culture. “We are a different race of people than we were a century ago,” says astrophysicist Michael Shara of the American Museum of Natural History, “utterly and completely different, because of Einstein.”

For all these reasons, and many more, Time Magazine declared Albert Einstein to be the Person of the Century and this year has been proclaimed his year. That is all I am going to say about Einstein directly, and if you are interested, there are a number of good biographies about him, including the one by Ronald W. Clark, which many people feel is the definitive work.

Instead, I want to talk about the impact that Einstein and science generally has had on us over the last century. Because I think it is ironic that the world is celebrating science this year, is trying to use this anniversary to rekindle interest in science across the globe. It is ironic because although the 20th century was the greatest 99 years of scientific and technical progress in the history of Western Civilization, much of it on the back of Einstein, it would be a mistake to claim we are a scientific society. I grant you that because we live in a highly technological society, it is only natural to believe that we also live in a highly scientific one. In fact, just the opposite is true.

Let me give you a few statistics I took off the Internet that I, at least, find disturbing. The belief in pseudo-science and fundamentalist religious assertions is staggering. Listen to this: 47 percent of people surveyed in the United States said they believed that the Book of Genesis was literally true and accurately set forth how the world was created; 65 percent believe in Noah’s Flood; 41 percent believe that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time. But it’s not just religious fundamentalism: according to a survey taken by the National Science Foundation, 70 percent of Americans do not understand the scientific process; 40 percent believe in Astrology, that is, that the alignment of the planets at one’s birth determines one’s personality and destiny; 60 percent agreed strongly that some people have psychic powers; 30 percent think UFOs are genuine alien spaceships; and millions call psychic hotlines to get advice about finances, romances, and the future.

Belief, not knowledge, is the preferred currency of the day. Magical, superstitions, and irrational thinking are everywhere and the dedication to observation, facts, and the truth those facts reveal, which is at the heart of the scientific approach, is sorely lacking in virtually every aspect of our culture. This phenomenon is, I think, directly correlated with the fantastic strides made by science in illuminating the nature of the world and human beings’ relation to it. It has been said that “The darkest shadows are cast by the brightest lights.” The bright light of science has cast terribly dark shadows for many people who desperately cling to superstition, mythology, and blind faith in order to feel comfortable and at home in a world science has revealed to be harsh, finite, deadly, and without much mystery or magic.

Thus, rather than enhance the scientific and fact based framework of reality, I think that the development of relativity–and quantum mechanics–as well as other scientific intellectual paradigms of the 20th century, including evolution, psychiatry, genetics, and many more, has resulted in the alienation of many people, who either do not understand or do not want to understand the implications of our scientific discoveries and therefore have chosen to base their perception of reality and the conduct of their lives on something other than the cold hard facts.

This is quite a turn of events from what our ancestors just a few hundred years ago believed would happened. The appeal to rationality, to science, to reason was seen during the Enlightenment as inevitably bringing about progress in how people lived, progress for the better, progress that would eventually lead to the perfecting of the world. Unitarians are fond of quoting Thomas Jefferson’s prediction that once all men became rational and reason held sway, then they would all be Unitarians. Well, Thomas Jefferson was a brilliant man of many wonderful accomplishments, but apparently being a seer was not one of them. We Unitarians remain a small minority religion and, in terms of influence, are arguably less influential as a movement than we were in the late 19th century when many of the patron saints of the denomination like Ralph Waldo Emerson held sway and divinity schools like Harvard were populated by many Unitarian thinkers.

What happened? We don’t have nearly enough time today to discuss that issue. Part of it, I believe, is as I suggested: science has revealed a world that is harsh, incomprehensible to the average person, and very unlike what we wish it would be. And, our world is full of uncertainty, ambiguity, and, a sense of insecurity and fear kicked up many notches by 9/11 and war. In this regard, I think Albert Einstein and relativity get a bad rap. That is, Einstein has been blamed or credited, take your pick, by many for the development of moral relativism during the 20th century. Today, moral relativism is used as a curse term by conservatives and the religious right. And while I utterly disagree with them regarding the value of thinking about morals in a relative rather than absolute way, it is also simply untrue that moral relativism derived from Einstein’s theory of relativity.

First of all, Einstein never said “everything is relative, there are no absolutes.” In fact, Einstein developed relativity theory (which he preferred to call a theory of invariances) so that all observers, in whatever reference frame, could get the same answers to their physics experiments. It is true that various measurements will be different in each reference frame, but there are right answers—the same ultimate answers that everybody would agree are correct. Einstein did not bring about the end of certainty in knowledge; by fixing the problems Poincare pointed out, he actually restored it.

This did not stop the pundits from associating new ideas in art, literature, philosophy, and music with Einstein’s theory of relativity. Einstein rejected all such associations. Nevertheless, despite what Einstein said or didn’t say, the phrase “everything is relative” entered into our culture and became synonymous with the notion that there is never an absolutely right answer to any question. The phrases “it’s all relative” and “everything is relative” combine for about 165,000 hits on Google. This concept has saturated our culture in a way that Einstein would both reject and never imagined and has led, I believe, to the transformation of the belief that everybody is entitled to place his or her own opinion into the free market place of ideas, into the belief that each and every opinion must be treated with respect because there are no actually right answers to anything.

This concept—and so much more—has also provided a basis for all those who long for the good old days of traditional values, solid cultural boundaries, and, above all, certainty, to come together and rebel against a culture that, to them, has lost its moorings and exists in a world of ambiguity and doubt, with no boundaries, no guidance, and no rules. This is decidedly not what Jefferson had in mind when he foresaw a world where Unitarianism was the dominant religion.

But despite my discomfort with all this, it might not matter so much if the people who believed in unscientific, irrational things kept their beliefs to themselves. But that is decidedly not the case with regard to religious fundamentalism. Fundamentalist religions of all denominations are the fastest growing religions in the world. According to reports on the Internet, fundamentalist Islam has been the fastest growing religion in the world over the last 30 years. And you don’t need me to tell you about the growth of fundamentalist Christianity in this country and the increasing amount of power and influence Christian fundamentalists wield. Right after the last election, Time Magazine’s cover story was on the 25 most influential fundamentalists in the country. They, and millions like them, have, to their credit, gotten off their backsides and entered into the fray, and now have influence and sometimes control at all levels of government and are seeking more. And the effects are being felt over much of the country. Here are just a few examples.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the board governing of the local zoo has authorized the construction of an exhibit that presents Biblical creation as the explanation for how animals got on this planet and their diversity. The justification used for this was, in part, that a small statue of an elephant in the style of Hinduism was present at the zoo.

At a park called Dinosaur Adventure Land, run by creationists near Pensacola, Florida, visitors are informed that man coexisted with dinosaurs. This fantasy accommodates the creationists’ view that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that Darwin’s theory of evolution is false.

At the Grand Canyon, the Department of the Interior is selling creationist literature that claims that the canyon was made during Noah’s Flood and not over many millions of years of erosion by the Colorado River. This situation got the attention of scientists from seven organizations who sent a joint letter to the Department of the Interior demanding that the literature be removed from the book store. But when the Grand Canyon National Park superintendent attempted to block the sale of the book, he was overruled by headquarters. I can report to you that the privately run Noah’s Flood tours of the Grand Canyon have been cancelled for economic reasons, but as far as I can ascertain, the Bush Administration still condones the sale of the book.

In Texas, and around the country, fundamentalist pharmacists are refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control pills and other related devices based on personal moral standards. In 1965, the Supreme Court of the United States found that a Connecticut law making it illegal to sell contraceptives even to married couples was unconstitutional as a violation of the right of privacy. Today, however, legislation has been introduced in a number of states to specifically authorize pharmacists to refuse to fill a prescription based on their personal beliefs.

The Catholic Church has become more vocal and more radical on issues of science and religion. Two pieces in the Times last week (“Finding Design in Nature” by Christoph [Cardinal] Schonborn, July 7, 2005 and “Leading Cardinal Redefines Church’s View on Evolution: He Says Darwinism and Catholicism May Conflict” by Cornelia Dean and Laurie Goodstein, July 9, 2005) assert the view that evolution is in conflict with Catholic teaching.

And it’s impossible not to note that yesterday, J.K. Rowling sold millions of copies of the sixth volume in the Harry Potter series, a series that the Pope, who as a Cardinal was head of what used to be called the Inquisition, has condemned. According to signed letters scanned and published on LifeSiteNews.com, a family-oriented news portal on the Internet, Benedict wrote in 2003 to the author of a book critical of the Potter series: “It is good that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly.” My soul is probably too old and already too corrupted for the Potter books to do too much damage, but I picked up my copy of the sixth volume yesterday and have already read the first 130 pages.

Finally—and I could go on, you understand—in Cobb County, Georgia, the Board of Education required that stickers that asserted that evolution is only a theory be placed into science books. The stickers read: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.” This was in keeping with the President’s own scientific understanding of evolution when he said: “On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth.”

Now it’s true that the sticker requirement was struck down by the courts, but that’s not the point. The point is that fundamentalists are everywhere trying to remake the world in their own image, trying to undo 400 years of scientific progress in our understanding of ourselves and the world, trying to make the world safe for their version of Christianity and its dogma so that they can luxuriate in their framework of life–a framework that at its heart is, I believe, unsupportable, but one that, for them at least, is also full of hope, promise, and self-satisfaction.

It is unreasonable and unrealistic to believe that fundamentalists are going to give up their religion, their beliefs, and the hope, promise, and satisfaction they provide, merely because somebody points out that scientific observation conflicts with those beliefs. You understand nothing about the human heart and soul if you do not understand the lengths to which they will go to keep an unwanted truth at bay. You understand nothing about the power of fundamentalist religion if you do not understand how deeply and powerfully it affects the people who surrender to it. The heart and soul do not care if something is true in the scientific, intellectual sense in order to become attached to it.

Human beings have the ability to invest themselves in beliefs that have no rational basis. You all know that. It happens all the time. But what quality of belief allows it to persist in the face of insurmountable evidence against it? This is a complicated question, one that I wish I knew the answer to, but I think we begin to understand it when we realize that whatever gives life purpose, meaning, and hope is the stuff that moves our hearts and souls and is believed. And for most people, there seems to be an imbalance between belief and knowledge in how they affect us and how they are valued. Knowledge tends to feed the intellect. Belief tends to feed the heart and soul. For so many people, satisfying the heart and soul, whatever is believed and however that is accomplished, is what is important in life; the rest, it doesn’t matter much, and can be left at the door.

In vivid and stark contrast, many Unitarians are the kind of people who, as Davidson is fond of saying, believe in salvation through bibliography. A central element of our religion is that it is one where knowledge and the intellect take precedence over, and in some sense control, what the heart and soul are able to believe. Unitarians insist on taking their brains with them into the pews.

The problem is that not only are they—we—in the minority, but the millions upon millions of people who believe in things that are irrational, delusional, unscientific, and downright wrong, they will never give up those beliefs on the basis of mere facts. We live in a post factual age—something I see increasingly expressed in outlets like the New York Times, the various news magazines, and even the cable news networks. I have concluded that Canon was right: Image is everything. And in a world where all things are relative, where everybody is entitled to his or her own opinion and have it respected out of PC etiquette, where there are no firm, absolute answers, then anything goes and belief–something that is at least an order of magnitude stronger than mere knowledge–will have its day.

I fear we are in danger of losing the gains made in the last 400 years against superstition, fear, and irrationality. Many before us have paid a high price to bring our culture to this point of understanding of the world and our place in it. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake because he asserted that the stars were suns and there were other planets and they were inhabited. Michael Servetus suffered the same fate for claiming there were errors in the concept of the Trinity and that it was nonbiblical. Galileo was condemned because he espoused the Copernican system, a system that yanked Earth, and with it humans, from the center of creation. Joseph Priestly, the discoverer of oxygen, was forced to flee from England after his laboratories were attacked because he was a Unitarian who asserted that Jesus was not the literal Son of God.

But we are not going to retain what has been so costly won by simply asserting that reason and logic should be honored over mere belief. We know too much about how human beings work to return to that. Even economists now admit that people do not behave rationally in the market based on evidence that demonstrates that where money is concerned, people do not behave rationally, but rather indulge their hearts and souls when buying cars, houses, clothes, and everything else. The wonder is that it has taken economists this long to figure that out.

I think the challenge to Unitarianism and to Unitarians everywhere is to develop and share a religion that provides something worth believing, worth cherishing, worth investing one’s life in, while not leaving our brains at the door, while not succumbing to illusion and delusion, and while being true to ourselves–and by that I mean our hearts and souls as well as our brains. The Unitarian religion has always provided an abundance of things worth knowing; we need to strive just as hard and just as passionately to provide something worth believing.

This won’t happen by itself. Like the fundamentalists, we have to leave the safety of our sanctuary, and venture out into the world and proclaim that it is possible to be both scientific and heartfelt, to demand understanding based on knowledge without throwing out the deeply held beliefs that nourish our souls. But that will require us to take a stand, to assert that this way—our way—is better than their way and thus leave behind the shackles of political correctness and an irrational tolerance of things that we don’t believe in and that we actually believe hurt us and our neighbors.

As you leave church today, consider that our building is invisible until you are on its very threshold. Consider that we are isolated from the world and think about whether that is what you want for your religion, the one you’ve chosen, the one you believe in. Consider if you are willing to stand up for what you know and believe against a world engulfed in fundamentalist and irrational beliefs, beliefs that clash with much that we in this church hold dear. Consider if you are willing to be a beacon on a hill before it’s too late.

Presented July 17, 2005

First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

Austin, Texas

Revised for Print

Permission is given for noncommercial, personal use.