Einstein, the searcher

by Alexander Moszkowski

If, however, we let our fancy roam in the opposite direction, that is, if, instead of compressing the duration of human life, we expand it enormously, what a different picture of the world would present itself! If, for example, the pulse-beat, and hence the rate of perception, were to be made a thousand times slower, so that the average human life would be spread out over, say, 80,000 years, and that we should experience in one whole year only as much as we now experience in a third of a day, then, in every four hours winter or any other season would pass by, vegetation would spring up and as rapidly die. Many a growth would not be perceptible, on account of its relative rapidity compared with the rate of the pulse-beat. For example, a mushroom would suddenly come into existence, like a newly formed spring. Day and night would alternate as a light and a dark minute; and the sun would appear to fly over the heavens like a fiery projectile. If we were again to make the duration of human life a thousand times longer still, and hence the rate of life a thousand times slower still, we should, during the whole of an ordinary year, be able to have only 190 distinct perceptions, so that the difference between day and night would vanish entirely, and the sun's path would be a glowing circular band in the heavens, and all changes of form that seem to us to happen quietly and regularly, and to preserve a certain permanency, would melt together in the wild stream of happening, engulfed in its onward rush.

Are we justified in opposing to this relative perception of time "our own" time, which is something specific and dependent on our constitution as human beings? Should we not rather adopt the view that this specific time, adapted to our particular pulse-beat, gives only a very limited picture of the world, which is conditioned and determined by the limitations of our own definite intelligence? Is it, perhaps, only a distorted picture, a caricature, of actual occurrences?

An intelligence infinitely superior to our own would no longer be dependent on the separate sensations such as are presented to us with the rhythm of the pulse. For such a mind there would be no metronomic foundation in the sequence of occurrences, beyond what represents itself as time to our understanding. He would be situated outside of time in what Thomas Aquinas called the nunc stans, in the stationary present, without a retrospect of the past and without expectation of a future. Without the Before and the After, the occurrences of the world would acquire the clearest and simplest meaning, like that given by an equation of identity. What presents itself to us as a "succession" of events would merge together into one whole, just as a succession of numerical calculations become summarized in a rule of calculation, or as a series of logical operations resolves into a logical self-evident truth. If the mind conceived by Laplace actually existed, it would stand above the necessity of introducing time as a quantity into its world-equations, for time is a purely anthropomorphic quantity, produced by our perception, and regulated by our own characteristic pulses. Accordingly, the conception of causality, too, which is indissolubly connected with time, must be regarded as anthropomorphic, as something that we read into, and not out of Nature. We should at least have to recognize that if there is a causality outside ourselves, then we can learn only a minimum about it, and even this only in a world displaced or distorted by the accidental rate of our pulse-beat.

Let us now repeat Einstein's assertion "that the laws of Nature, the processes of Nature, exhibit a much higher degree of uniformity of connexion than is contained in our time-causality! It is possible that what belongs to a definite cross-section of time may in itself be entirely devoid of structure, that is, it might contain everything that is physically conceivable, even such things as, in our ordinary physical thought, we consider impossible of realization, for example, iron of any arbitrary specific gravity." It seems to me that the non-physicist will, perhaps, gain a clearer insight into these highly significant words of Einstein, now that he has received the assistance of these physiological considerations. It must be granted that the philosophic grounds of Einstein are quite different and lie much deeper than those of von Baer, who starts from organic functions and ends by arriving at a mysterious relativity that is yet consistent in itself. Nevertheless, there is one point of contact, inasmuch as in each case possibilities that lie apparently extra naturam are suggested.

Einstein says: "Hitherto we have regarded physical laws only from the point of view of causality, inasmuch as we always start from a condition known at a definite cross-section of time, as, for example, a section corresponding to the present moment." At our own risk an easy paraphrase of his words will be attempted:

The time-section of the present contains for us the sum of all previous experiences, out of which the necessary course of our thought sifts out the category of causality.

What is not present in experience cannot appear in our causality. Let us consider for a moment Hume's example of the Indian who has never known ice. Without being told, and if he is dependent only on his own sensations, he would never learn that water freezes in cold climates. The influence of cold on water is not gradual, corresponding to an increase of cold, and not one that may be anticipated in all its consequences, but at the freezing-point water, which a moment before was a very mobile liquid, passes into a very rigid solid. The causality of the Indian cannot account for this. If we tell him of this phenomenon, he has two courses open to him. Either he refuses to believe it—and this would be quite natural, since rigid water is to him as meaningless as is a square circle to us. Or else he believes the story, and then his list of categories incurs a break, passing through the middle of causality. He has then to reconcile himself to the assumption that something that is meaningless to him and that stands outside the connexion of cause and effect is possible of realization. Up to that moment, in his time-section of the present, there was no room for it in his causality. To Torricelli the conception of liquid air, which we have been able to prepare only since 1883, would have appeared impossible and incompatible with his causality.

So there is no room in our causality for the idea of iron with the specific gravity of air, or with one several times that of gold. For, reasoning along the lines of our causality, we should conclude that a substance that is so light or so heavy may, indeed, exhibit chemical relationship with iron, but it would not itself be sufficiently defined by the term iron.

Now Einstein also said: "Real Nature is much more limited (or bound) than our laws imply." A sceptic might be disposed to take these statements separately in order to construe a contradiction out of them. For, if there are limiting conditions in Nature, which are foreign to the views expressed in our laws, how would it then be possible for phenomena, which cannot be imagined, to become realized? If Nature can do this, surely she must have more liberty than we seek to impose on her. This apparent contradiction vanishes if we treat the conception of structural design or uniformity as something distinct from the measure of all experience up to the present. This would give us the following interpretation:

Out of the manifold of occurrences that are possible in mechanical Nature, real Nature selects a very closely defined manifold. Thus the true laws imply a much greater degree of limitation than those known to us. For example, the laws known to us at present would not be affected if we should discover electrons of arbitrary size or iron of arbitrary specific weight. But Nature realizes only electrons of a quite definite size and iron of a definite specific weight.