Einstein, the searcher

by Alexander Moszkowski

It may indeed be doubted whether its time had already come. In the case of many important events in the history of thought their moment of birth can be fixed to within about ten years, as for example the Theory of Evolution, which had been conceived in several minds at the same time and had of necessity to come to life in one of them, even if it had failed in the case of the others. I venture to say that without Einstein, the Theory of Relativity in its widest sense, that is, including the new doctrine of gravitation, would perhaps have had to wait another two hundred years before being born.

This contradiction is cleared up if we use sufficiently great time intervals. History does not adapt itself to the time measures of politics and of journalism, and philosophies are not to be calculated in terms of days. The philosophy of Aristotle held sway right through the Middle Ages, and that of Epicurus will gain its full force only in the coming generation. But if we make our unit a hundred years the connexion between philosophies and great discoveries remains true.

Whoever undertakes to explore the necessity of this connexion cannot evade the fact that the lines of the result had been marked out in the region of pure thought, as can be proved, before even the great discovery or invention was able to present it in a fully intelligible form. Even the achievement of Copernicus would follow this general rule of development: it was the last consequence of the belief in the Sun Myth which had never been forsaken by man in spite of the violent efforts of the Church and of man himself to force the geocentric view. Copernicus concentrated what had survived of the wisdom of the earliest priests—which includes also the germ of our modern ideas of energy and electricity—of the teachings of Anaxagoras and the Eleatics which had remained latent in our consciousness: his discovery was the transformation of a myth into science. Mankind, whose wandering fancy first feels presentiments, then thinks and wishes to know, is a large edition of the individual thinker. The latter sees further only because he, so to speak, stands on the shoulders of a sum-total of beings with a world-view.

Let us turn our attention to an example from the most recent history of philosophy and discovery. The absolute continuity of events was one of the generally accepted canons of thought, and is even nowadays taught by serious philosophers as an incontrovertible element in our knowledge. The old quotation Natura non facit saltus, popularized by Linné, is one of the formulae of this apparently invincible truth. But deep down in the consciousness of man there has always been an opposition to it, and when the French philosopher Henri Bergson set out to break up this line of continuity by metaphysical means in ascribing to human knowledge an intermittent, cinematographic character, he was proclaiming in an audible and eloquent form only what had lain latent in a new but as yet incomplete philosophy. Bergson made no new "discovery," he felt his way intuitively into a new field of knowledge and recognized that the time was ripe for the real discovery. This was actually presented to us in our day by the eminent physicist Max Planck, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1919, in the form of his "Quantum Theory." This is not to be taken as meaning that a revolutionary philosophy and a triumph of scientific research now become coincident, but only that a discontinuous, intermittent sequence, an atomistic structure, was proved by means of the weapons of exact science, to be true of energies which, according to current belief, were expected to be radiated regularly and connectedly. This was probably not a case of the accidental coincidence of a new philosophical view with the results of reasoning from physical grounds, but a demand of time, exacting that the claims of a new principle of thought be recognized.

As above suggested, it is more difficult to find a link between Einstein's discoveries and antecedent presentiments of relativity. For a mere reference to the downfall of absolutism in the world of human events will not suffice. In the case of Einstein, we see such a tremendous rush of thought in one being that we almost feel compelled to recognize an analogy with the Quantum Theory and believe in a discontinuity in the course of intellectual history. Yet there are certainly threads that connect Einstein's achievement with a prophetic insight. In this case, however, we must spread out over centuries what in the case of other discoveries extends, in comparison, only over decades. That doubt of Faust, which troubles the spirit of every thinker: "whether in yonder spheres there is also an Above and a Below," and which goes back as far as Pyrrhon and Protagoras, is itself relativistic; it expresses doubt whether the co-ordinate system passing through our own lifes as centres is valid. It is ultimately a matter of point of view, and the mathematico-physical consequences of the endless series of questions, and the relation, which arises from the couple, Above-Below, probably leads to a new mode of comprehending the constitution of the world, for which Einstein's creative work found the adequate expression in abstract terms. And from this point onwards, in accordance with the principle of reciprocal action, a new stream of knowledge will pour itself into the hazy stretches of philosophy. A fundamental and radical reform of our philosophy seems inevitable, particularly with respect to our conceptions of Space and Time, perhaps, too, even with respect to Infinity and Causality. Much dross will have to be sifted out of our old categories of thought and out of our world wisdom, which once served as material for fine structures. What will the finer ones look like that are to take their places in obedience to the command of physics? Who would care to take it upon himself to form an estimate?

Much will be uprooted, and it is possible that even the defiant "ignorabimus," the antipole of the search for truth from Pyrrhon to Dubois, will again take up the cudgel. For in the face of despairing uncertainty there is the one certainty: what cannot be comprehended is being encircled more and more by the great discoverers! And even if the absolute point of convergence can never be reached, there is within our reach at least another point which is a haven of rest in the passing stream of philosophies, namely, a moral centre around which eddies of happiness circle. At the heart of this world-view there is the uplifting belief in an advance of knowledge in spite of all, and a belief in the vanishing of age-long problems and difficulties under the flood of discoveries. And even if afterwards and concurrently ever new problems and difficulties arise, these do not suppress our feeling of triumph. Every achievement in this field gives us a sense of enfranchisement from prejudices, not the least of which is narrowness of national outlook. Not only do discoverers construct bridges of thought that stretch to astronomical distances, but, what is more difficult, they build bridges for our feelings, that surmount political obstacles. Every thinking being who plays a part in the making of some great discovery and who, with deepened vision, bows before a new achievement of mind, gradually becomes a disciple of the religion of universal politics, the creed of which is faith in the brotherhood of thought. The nucleus of a philosophy that belongs to the future is the recognition that differing national view must be compounded into a unity, and that every great discovery means a step towards attaining this end.

Even if we accept Pascal's wonderful dictum that human knowledge is represented by a sphere which is continually growing and increasing its points of contact with the unknown, we must not interpret it as a sign of despair. It is not the enlargement of the unknown, but only that of knowledge that stirs our feelings with ethical forces. The positive calls up in us a living force by inspiring in us the feeling that the sphere of knowledge is destined to grow, and that there can be no higher duty for all the energies of mind than to obey the call for combined action towards this growth which will bring the world into harmony.

Full of such reflections I entered the home of the great discoverer, whose activities unceasingly hovered before my vision as ideal examples of creative effort. I discovered him, as almost always, seated before loose sheets of paper which his hand had covered with mathematical symbols, with hieroglyphics of that universal language in which, according to Galilei, the great book of Nature is written.

What a very different picture many an outsider draws of the manner in which a seeker in the heavens works! He is imagined like Tycho Brahe to be surrounded by unusual pieces of apparatus, spying through the ocular of a long range refractor into the universe, seeking to unravel its ultimate secrets. The true picture does not correspond to this fancy in the slightest. Nothing in the make-up of the room reminds one of super-earthly sublimity, no abundance of instruments or books is to be seen, and one soon becomes aware that here a thinker reigns whose only requirement for his work, which encompasses the world, is his own mind, plus a sheet of paper and a pencil. All that acts on the observatories outside, that gives rise to great scientific expeditions, that, indeed, ultimately regulates the relationship of mankind to the constitution of the universe, the revolution in the knowledge of things connecting heaven and earth, all this is here concentrated in the simple figure of a still youthful scholar, who spins out endless threads from the fabric of his mind: the words of a poet are recalled to our memory, which, addressed to all of us, have been fulfilled to the last degree by one living among us:—

"Whereso thou roamest in space, thy Zenith and Nadir unite thee—
This to the heavenly height, that to the pole of the world,—
Whatsoever thou do, let thy will mount up into Heaven—
But let the pole of the world still o'er thine actions preside."