Einstein, the searcher

by Alexander Moszkowski

EINSTEIN: Your remarks show that Leipzig scientists did so at that time with no better result than that Zöllners mental confusion became still greater.

M.: The conjecture remains that the Leipzig experiments, abundant as they were, did not suffice. Allow me to ask a direct question, Professor. Supposing another such agent of miracles should appear, would you yourself feel impelled to test him experimentally?

EINSTEIN: Your question is misdirected. I explained above that I share the point of view taken up by Dubois-Reymond and his colleagues.

M.: The following case may be conceived. A certain man, X, might suddenly appear, who has control of a certain natural force that has never before been investigated; like one who knew how to use electricity at a time when people had never experienced any electrical phenomenon. He would be able to give hundreds of demonstrations, all of which we should relegate to the realm of inexplicable magic. We should, for instance, be much astonished if he were to draw sparks from a living person. Now, suppose two professors express an opinion. Professor A declares the whole thing to be a farce, and refuses to look into it at all. Professor B is ready to investigate the achievements of X only if the latter subjects himself from the beginning to all the physical conditions that are to be determined beforehand. And suppose the professor arranges his conditions so that they make impossible the occurrence of electrical phenomena. If, now, all scientists were to behave like A and B, the consequences would be very depressing. For here was an important field of investigation, which is cut off owing to the distrust or obstinacy of scientists, who should have been the first to open it up. It is quite irrelevant whether X had the character of a charlatan or not, for behind his charlatanism there were facts which clamoured for investigation.

EINSTEIN: The most that I can grant is that your imagined case does not lie outside the scope of possibility. Yet the chance that there is such a "natural force" hitherto undiscovered by Man, that is, one that is a "secret force" as far as we are concerned, is so vanishingly small that it may be set down as equal to impossible. I should refuse to take part in any such practices, served up in the form of sensation, for one reason that I should regret the waste of time, as there are better things to do. It is a different matter if the mood takes me to visit a variety entertainment, in order to derive amusement from such mystifications. For example, only yesterday I was in a little theatre, in which, among diverse items, a thought-reading woman was performing. She correctly guessed the numbers 61 and 59 that I had in my mind. But let no one mention this as a case of telepathic actions at a distance or wireless communication between minds, for an intermediate person, the manager, was present, and I had to whisper the numbers to him. The distance to the stage was certainly too great to allow the sound to be conveyed directly to an audible degree. Hence there must have been a different, very cunningly arranged code of signals, which eluded the notice of people in the stalls. The process consists actually in an extraordinary refinement of observation, which does not, however, seem to me any more wonderful than the training of a reckoner who extracts cubic roots mentally, or than the practised muscles of a juggler all working in unison to enable him to perform feats with twelve plates simultaneously.

M.: It gives me enough satisfaction, Professor, that you conceded me before a certain limited chance of finding a last refuge in occultism. And even if you, yourself, as a representative of the most rigorous research of physical reality, refuse to consider it, yet the fact that many others are drawn irresistibly towards mysterious phenomena cannot be denied. Should one feel shame on this account? I believe that, in this matter, we are touching on inner confessions that are quite independent of the standard of the mind in which they are embedded. Newton considered the key of the universe to be a personal God, whereas Laplace proclaimed: Dieu—je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse: this contrast allows no inference to be drawn as to their relative keenness of mind. And probably the same may be said of the question whether there are other hidden universes besides the one in which we live. In any case, those who feel enthusiasm for such questions can quote in their support good names from the learned world. Immanuel Kant occupied himself seriously and intensively with the wonders of Swedenborg, Kepler practised Astrology, in which he had a firm belief, Roger Bacon, Cardanus, Agrippa, Nostradamus, van Helmont, Pascal, and, among the modern, Fechner, Wallace, Crookes, are to be counted among the mystics. No matter whether the views they held were theosophical, occult, four-dimensional in the spiritistic sense, or coloured by any other superstition; they proclaimed that things that could be rigorously proved were, alone, insufficient for them. Out of presentiment and conjecture they constructed wings with which to fly into regions extra naturam. This is how it happened that, as the common folk could not find a place in science for many extraordinary achievements, they assigned their authors to the realm of magicians, as in the case of Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus, Raimundus Lullus, Sylvester II, who were regarded as sorcerers. And this coin is still current: to Edison, of our times, the term, "sorcerer of Menlo-Park," has become attached. In the minds of the populace discovery and invention, works of genius and supernatural phenomena, become confused and indistinguishable; it may even happen to you. Professor, that your works will become invested with legend. I should not like to conjure up what your fate would have been if your theory of relativity had originated at the time of the Inquisition. For the views put forward by Giordano Bruno are mere child's play compared with your theory of the universe as a quasi-spherical closed space of hyper-Euclidean character. The tribunal of the Inquisition would not have understood your differential equation, gravitational potentials, tensors, and equivalence theory; they would abruptly have declared the whole theory to be a magical formula or a manifestation of the devil, and would have honoured it and you with a funeral pyre.

EINSTEIN: This is clearly a slight exaggeration. Mathematico-physical and astronomical works have never been attacked by the Papal courts, but, on the contrary, have been much encouraged by them down to the present day. This is abundantly clear from the fact that we can set up a whole list of Brothers of Orders, particularly Jesuits, who have made eminent discoveries in natural science. From my personal knowledge of you, I foresee that you will one day sketch a fantastic trial, in which the new world-system will have to defend itself against the Sanctum Officium.

M.: This would be a very grateful task, judged from the literary point of view. What a splendid colouring could be obtained by bringing these two worlds of thought into conflict with one another, the Relative against the Absolute, which has been established in tradition and dogma. But we need not even call the historical fancy into action, for, actually, the theory of the structure of the world is even now still at variance with traditional ideas, that act with dogmatic violence. There is no need to deny the fact that every person of education, who makes the acquaintance of Lorentz's, Minkowski's, Einstein's ideas for the first time, feels excited to offer contradictions, and becomes involved in a tumult of pros and cons, and each one experiences in himself the excitement of an inquisitorial tribunal. The triumph of the new theory passes over the corpses of conceptions that lie at the cross-roads of thought and, long after, retain a ghostly existence. Only very few of us are aware of the further inner revolution that awaits us along the line of development of Einsteinian ideas; we have only vague presentiments that whisper to us that the end of forms of thought once considered as irrefragable is drawing nigh. When once the principle of causality has been set on a relative base, and all "properties" have been resolved into occurrence, and all that is three-dimensional has come to be recognized as an abstraction from the four-dimensional world that is alone valid, then the time will have come to arrange for, the death procession of all the philosophies that once served as the main pillars of thought.

A retrospect of the trials of Giordano Bruno and of Galileo Galilei offers certain parallels other than those usually discovered by scholars. And if, to-day, we proclaim Einstein as the Galilei of the twentieth century, it must be added that in character he is fortunately a Bruno and not a Galilei. For it is not true that the latter came out of the persecution as a moral victor with an eppur si muove, rather, in spite of the protection of influential prelates and dignitaries, even of the entourage of the Pope, he lacked courage and bowed his head, betraying his science and denying himself as well as Copernicus. Are we to picture how Einstein would have acted under similar circumstances, even if they cannot recur again?

Whoever has even an inkling of his character will entertain no doubts. At that time, three hundred years ago, the materials for a magnificent scene, "one world versus the other," lay ready. Only one condition was wanting, the moral courage of the hero. The lack of this one factor spoilt the final act for the history of that time. The fine ethical feelings of later generations have had to be propitiated by improvising a legend iridescent with beautiful colours.