Einstein's Third Paradise The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Holton, Gerald. 2003. Einstein's Third Paradise. Daedalus Fall 2003: 26-37. Published Version 10.1162/001152603771338751 Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:37878854 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA book Fa2003 composite.qxd 09/10/03 10:28 AM Page 26 Gerald Holton Einstein’s Third Paradise Historians of modern science have years: to sit down to write, in 1946 at age good reason to be grateful to Paul Arthur sixty-seven, an extensive autobiography Schilpp, professor of philosophy and –forty-½ve pages long in print. Methodist clergyman but better known To be sure, Einstein excluded there as the editor of a series of volumes on most of what he called “the merely per- “Living Philosophers,” which included sonal.” But on the very ½rst page he several volumes on scientist-philoso- shared a memory that will guide us to phers. His motto was: “The asking of the main conclusion of this essay. He questions about a philosopher’s mean- wrote that when still very young, he ing while he is alive.” And to his ever- had searched for an escape from the lasting credit, he persuaded Albert Ein- seemingly hopeless and demoralizing stein to do what he had resisted all his chase after one’s desires and strivings. That escape offered itself ½rst in reli- gion. Although brought up as the son of Gerald Holton is Mallinckrodt Research Professor “entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents,” of Physics and Research Professor of History of through the teaching in his Catholic pri- Science at Harvard University. A Fellow of the mary school, mixed with his private in- American Academy since 1956, he served the struction in elements of the Jewish reli- Academy for several decades in a variety of of- gion, Einstein found within himself a ½ces. Soon after his election as Editor, he founded “deep religiosity”–indeed, “the reli- “Dædalus” as the quarterly journal of the Acade- gious paradise of youth.” my, with its ½rst issue appearing in the winter of The accuracy of this memorable expe- 1958. At the request of the Albert Einstein estate, rience is documented in other sources, he initiated and for several years supervised the including the biographical account of conversion of the collection of Einstein’s largely Einstein’s sister, Maja. There she makes unpublished correspondence and manuscripts into a plausible extrapolation: that Einstein’s an archive suitable for scholarly study. Among his “religious feeling” found expression in recent books are “Einstein, History, and Other later years in his deep interest and ac- Passions” (2000), “Physics, the Human Adven- tions to ameliorate the dif½culties to ture” (with S. G. Brush, 2001), and “Ivory which fellow Jews were being subjected, Bridges: Connecting Science and Society” (with actions ranging from his ½ghts against G. Sonnert, 2002). anti-Semitism to his embrace of Zionism (in the hope, as he put it in one of his © 2003 by Gerald Holton 26 Dædalus Fall 2003 book Fa2003 composite.qxd 09/10/03 10:28 AM Page 27 speeches [April 20, 1935], that it would Third Paradise, where the meaning of a Einstein’s Third include a “peaceable and friendly coop- life of brilliant scienti½c activity drew on Paradise eration with the Arab people”). As we the remnants of his fervent ½rst feelings shall see, Maja’s extrapolation of the of youthful religiosity. reach of her brother’s early religious feelings might well have gone much fur- For this purpose, we shall have to make ther. what may seem like an excursus, but one that will in the end throw light on his The primacy of young Albert’s First overwhelming passion, throughout his Paradise came to an abrupt end. As scienti½c and personal life, to bring he put it early in his “Autobiographical about the joining of these and other Notes,” through reading popular science seemingly incommensurate aspects, books he came to doubt the stories of whether in nature or society. In 1918 he the Bible. Thus he passed ½rst through gave a glimpse of it in a speech (“Prinzipi- what he colorfully described as a “posi- en der Forschung”) honoring the sixtieth tively fanatic indulgence in free think- birthday of his friend and colleague Max ing.”1 But then he found new enchant- Planck, to whose rather metaphysical ments. First, at age twelve, he read a lit- conception about the purpose of science tle book on Euclidean plane geometry– Einstein had drifted while moving away he called it “holy,” a veritable “Wun- from the quite opposite, positivistic one der.” Then, still as a boy, he became en- of an early intellectual mentor, Ernst tranced by the contemplation of that Mach. As Einstein put it in that speech, huge external, extra-personal world of the search for one “simpli½ed and lucid science, which presented itself to him image of the world” not only was the “like a great, eternal riddle.” To that supreme task for a scientist, but also cor- study one could devote oneself, ½nding responded to a psychological need: to thereby “inner freedom and security.” flee from personal, everyday life, with all He believed that choosing the “road to its dreary disappointments, and escape this Paradise,” although quite antitheti- into the world of objective perception cal to the ½rst one and less alluring, did and thought. Into the formation of such prove itself trustworthy. Indeed, by age a world picture the scientist could place sixteen, he had his father declare him to the “center of gravity of his emotional the authorities as “without confession,” life [Gefühlsleben].” And in a sentence and for the rest of his life he tried to dis- with special signi½cance, he added that sociate himself from organized religious persevering on the most dif½cult scien- activities and associations, inventing his ti½c problems requires “a state of feeling own form of religiousness, just as he [Gefühlszustand] similar to that of a reli- was creating his own physics. gious person or a lover.” These two realms appeared to him eventually not as separate as numerous Throughout Einstein’s writings, one biographers would suggest. On the con- can watch him searching for that world trary, my task here is to demonstrate picture, for a comprehensive Weltan- that at the heart of Einstein’s mature schauung, one yielding a total conception identity there developed a fusion of his that, as he put it, would include every First and his Second Paradise–into a empirical fact (Gesamtheit der Erfahrungs- 1 All translations from the original German are tatsachen)–not only of physical science, this author’s, where necessary. but also of life. Dædalus Fall 2003 27 book Fa2003 composite.qxd 09/10/03 10:28 AM Page 28 Gerald Einstein was of course not alone in move alongside him, thus indicating the Holton on this pursuit. The German literature of equivalence of acceleration and gravity. science the late nineteenth and early twentieth In Einstein’s words, “the acceleration of centuries contained a seemingly obses- free fall with respect to the material is sive flood of books and essays on the therefore a mighty argument that the oneness of the world picture. They in- postulate of relativity is to be extended cluded writings by both Ernst Mach and to coordinate systems that move non- Max Planck, and, for good measure, a uniformly relative to one another . ” 1912 general manifesto appealing to For the present purpose I want to draw scholars in all ½elds of knowledge to attention to another passage in that combine their efforts in order to “bring manuscript. His essay actually begins in forth a comprehensive Weltanschauung.” a largely impersonal, pedagogic tone, The thirty-four signatories included similar to that of his ½rst popular book Ernst Mach, Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand on relativity, published in 1917. But in a Tönnies, David Hilbert, Jacques Loeb– surprising way, in the section titled and the then still little-known Albert “General Relativity Theory,” Einstein Einstein. suddenly switches to a personal account. But while for most others this cultural- He reports that in the construction of ly profound longing for unity–already the special theory, the “thought con- embedded in the philosophical and liter- cerning the Faraday [experiment] on ary works they all had studied–was electromagnetic induction played for me mostly the subject of an occasional op- a leading role.” He then describes that portunity for exhortation (nothing came old experiment, in words similar to the of the manifesto), for Einstein it was ½rst paragraph of his 1905 relativity pa- different, a constant preoccupation re- per, concentrating on the well-known sponding to a persistent, deeply felt in- fact, discovered by Faraday in 1831, that tellectual and psychological need. the induced current is the same whether This fact can be most simply illustrat- it is the coil or the magnet that is in mo- ed in Einstein’s scienti½c writings. As a tion relative to the other, whereas the ½rst example, I turn to one of my favor- “theoretical interpretation of the phe- ite manuscripts in his archive. It is a nomenon in these two cases is quite dif- lengthy manuscript in his handwriting, ferent.” While other physicists, for many of around 1920, titled, in translation, decades, had been quite satis½ed with “Fundamental Ideas and Methods of that difference, here Einstein reveals a Relativity.” It contains the passage in central preoccupation at the depth of his which Einstein revealed what in his soul: “The thought that one is dealing words was “the happiest thought of my here with two fundamentally different life” [der gluecklichste Gedanke meines cases was for me unbearable [war mir Lebens]–a thought experiment that unertraeglich].