Einstein and Philosophy#
Johannes Siedersleben, Oxford, June 2022
“God does not play dice”. This, along with the enigmatic formula E = mc2, is probably the best-known quotation from Einstein, from which some have concluded that Einstein believed in God and didn’t believe in quantum mechanics. Both conclusions are wrong, as we are going to show. Einstein wrote a great deal on physics but little on philosophy and other non-technical topics. He left us the booklet On Cosmic Religion, and three short non-technical papers included in a celebrated collection, the Readings in the Philosophy of Science. Let us see what these writings tell us.
Remark 1: The quotation is from a letter to Max Born from 26 December 1926. The original reads: “At any rate, I am convinced that He doesn’t play dice”.
Remark 2: Setting c = 1 (which is as mundane as replacing miles with kilometres), the formula boils down to E = m: mass is a form of energy as the atomic bomb shows.
Cosmic Religion and the Beauty of Physics#
Einstein embraces what he calls cosmic religion. This has little in common with religions in the ordinary sense: there is no anthropomorphic idea of God, no reward and no punishment, there are no dogmas, no priests, no prayers. But what is there, then? “There is the nobility and marvellous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought“, Einstein says, and goes on: “The most important function of art and science is to keep alive this feeling in those who are receptive.” This is the gist of Einstein’s thinking: the beauty of science, the beauty of his own findings and that of his fellow researchers overwhelmed him. But an eminent contemporary didn’t agree. According to Martin Heidegger, “there is no beauty at all in science, and the least perhaps in philosophy” ([Heidegger, 1925], GA 20, p. 204). Who is right?
Einstein’s stance relies on the extraordinary gems of clarity and brilliance of modern physics such as Newton’s theory, Maxwell’s equations and his own theory of relativity. Einstein was less happy with quantum mechanics which wasn’t quite up to his standards of nobility and marvellous order. In Fundamentals of Theoretical Physics he conceded that “it is probably out of the question that any future knowledge can compel physics again to relinquish our present statistical foundation in favour of a deterministic one which would deal directly with physical reality” but hoped, albeit with little confidence, that quantum mechanics would not remain the last word when he said: “Some physicists among them myself cannot accept the view that events in nature are analogous to a game of chance.“ At any rate, he never doubted the soundness of quantum mechanics, always endorsed it as a useful theory, and indeed contributed to it. The famous EPR paper questions the completeness of quantum mechanics rather than its soundness.
Einstein’s picture of ideal physics, where everything is beauty and symmetry has been spoiled by the standard model of elementary particles (see e.g., [Wilczek, 2021]). This highly successful model presents itself as a mess of 20 or so elementary particles, with no convincing structure and a lot of seeming arbitrariness. And a world theory unifying general relativity theory and quantum mechanics seems to be hard to come by (I am referring to loop quantum theory and string theory).
Realizing that the beauty of physics, as claimed by Einstein and denied by Heidegger, can at times be compelling, at others blatantly absent, we must conclude that Einstein and Heidegger are both wrong. Wrong at least for the time being, because a crucial question hovers above our heads: Is any lack of beauty in existing theories just a temporary defect, due to our insufficient knowledge and insight? Is there a higher beauty, invisible to us, visible only to geniuses not yet born, to artificial intelligences not yet conceived, or to alien intelligences out there? Or is it just megalomania to ask for nature to satisfy criteria of beauty some humans happen to share? The quest for beauty can be misleading: the Greek thought that planets cannot travel anywhere but on perfect spheres. Einstein’s religion resembles Spinoza’s pantheism in which God is represented by nature, including science and art. Einstein finds sources of the cosmic element in Buddhism and, to some extent, in the Psalms of David and in the Prophets, but otherwise considers religion and science as irreconcilable antagonists. He says, again in his Cosmic Religion: “A God who rewards and punishes is unthinkable” and: “For anyone who accepts the assumption of causality, the idea of a Being who interferes with a sequence of events in the world is impossible.”
Philosophy of Physics#
Here is the one, big question: How true are the laws of physics? Can we trust them? What does truth mean in physics? In his Geometry and Experience, Einstein only touches on the subject, using geometry, which means earth-measuring, as a sandbox-example of physics. The following few excerpts of his line of thought deal only with a tiny aspect of the towering problem of truth in physics.
Axiomatic geometry introduces points and lines as abstract objects, linked by axioms (ex: Through two different points in space there always passes one and only one straight line), but purged of all extraneous elements. Theorems are derived from axioms by dint of defined rules, the truth of a theorem results from the proof, the correct application of logical rules. Practical geometry applies axiomatic geometry to the real world, assuming that abstract points and abstract straight lines correspond (or are sufficiently similar) to real points and real lines. This approach affords a new level of evidence: We not only prove a theorem formally (say the Pythagorean), but we convince ourselves of its truth by measuring the distance of dots on a sheet of paper, summits in the Alps or stars in heaven. The points introduced in axiomatic geometry appear to be an appropriate abstraction of dots, summits, and stars. What an achievement!
We are confronted with two types of truth: the abstract truth provided by proofs, and the tangible truth provided by measurement. Modern logic calls axiomatic geometry a theory, and practical geometry a model thereof. If theory and experiment agree, we can relax. But neither models nor measurements are ever a hundred percent accurate: in this world there are no points, no perfectly straight lines, no perfectly rigid bodies, and in no worldly right triangle c2 has ever been exactly a2 + b2. So, how can you tell a faulty theory from a faulty measurement? Here is how Einstein puts his sad conclusion: “As far as laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality”. I’m stopping here; this topic would lead us too far.
Philosophy of Ethics#
Einstein’s paper The Laws of Science and the Laws of Ethics is an attempt to applying the scientific approach to ethics: “Ethical directives can be made rational and coherent by logical thinking and empirical knowledge.” One could start from axioms such as “Human life shall be preserved”, or “Pain and sorrow shall be lessened as much as possible”. Are these axioms arbitrary? Yes, they are, and we decide on them. Unfortunately, an exact science seems to be impossible. Einstein was on the wrong track, but his conclusions were sound: He was a military pacifist and a fervent advocate of disarmament. His idea was that if, say, two percent of all conscripts refused to perform military service, the jails would be too small to hold all conscientious objectors and war would be impossible.
Was Philosophy of Central Importance for Einstein?#
Einstein liked Spinoza and Hume; he would have presumably liked Popper’s Open Society and its Enemies, namely Plato, Hegel, and Marx, and he disliked conventional religions. He had preferences and resentments like the rest of us. The little he wrote about philosophy wouldn’t be remembered were it not for his fame as the world’s leading physicist. Einstein was enthralled by the beauty of physics but largely uninfluenced by any branch of philosophy. So, philosophy doesn’t seem to have been of appreciable importance for his work, let alone of central importance.
Remark 3: The Open Society was first published in 1945. Einstein died in 1955, so he might have known the book.
Was Einstein of Central Importance for Philosophy?#
Yes, he definitely was and still is. He pulled the rug from under a large swath of philosophy; some of Kant’s assertions were refuted, epistemology was to be rebuilt, the work being still in progress. As Einstein had read Kant at the age of sixteen he knew what he was arguing against. The bitter lesson was that human perception and common sense have always been misleading. Aristotle’s physics is perfectly compatible with common sense but out-and-out wrong. Two thousand years later, Galileo came up with the law of inertia (aka Newton’s first law) which is counterintuitive and requires some getting used to. Three hundred years later, Einstein published his theory of relativity: The Lorentz transformation is formally proven by one tricky application of Pythagoras; time dilation and length contraction follow from it in a few lines of calculation and can be verified by experiment exactly as Pythagoras’ Theorem, albeit not on a sheet of paper. But they are completely unfathomable for the human mind, however many superfast trains travel through popular science textbooks. About ten years later, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, and other physicists came up with quantum mechanics, an even more blatant assault on common sense: replacing particles with probabilities shatters the very idea of physical reality. How many future revolutions of physics await us? Which cherished habits of thinking will they destroy? Which will remain, if any?
In the hall of fame of physicists who overcame parochial common sense, from Copernicus to Hawkins, Einstein is in a league of his own. He developed the two theories of relativity more or less single-handedly, with little support, little funding, few collaborators, and no laboratory. The insight he gave the world, the huge gap he transcended, is second to none in the history of science. But the world took about 20 years to appreciate this treasure: Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922 not for his theory of relativity, but for “his services to theoretical physics and especially for his discovery of the photoelectric effect.” The award text points out, however, “that this distinction is independent of the value that, after possible confirmation, may be attributed to the relativity and gravitation theory” ([Tegmark, 2014], p. 243). The theory of relativity has never been worthy of a Nobel Prize.