PSI
Blog 20181226 Einstein the agnostic
Here
is a comment from George Coyne, Director of the Vancouver, B.C. Office:
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
Hi
Glenn
This
article refers to Einstein's anti-religious, realist, deterministic views:
[GB:
This article nicely sums up Einstein’s religious views. I conclude that he
really was not an atheist, but an agnostic (which is reflected in his erroneous
theories). Like some other agnostics, Einstein devolved into a pantheist: One
who believes that the universe is
god. I imagine folks who don’t quite understand "Infinite Universe
Theory" will have the same fate. The author clarifies Einstein’s position
on the famous relativity vs. quantum mechanics debate. He clearly objected to
the acausality being voiced by the QM guys. Of course, both sides were
afflicted with the finity assumption and no
resolution could be possible. Because the universe is infinitely subdividable
and all those portions are constantly in motion, there is no way to get the
exact same result whenever we repeat an experiment. This says nothing about a “god
playing dice.” It is just the way the infinite universe behaves. Once we
realize causality is infinite and that we cannot know everything about even one
cause, then we can view uncertainty as a matter of
ignorance. We can use probability to calculate what we know and what we do not
know. That says nothing about unperceived objects being nonexistent.]
Here
is the entire article:
What
Einstein meant by ‘God does not play dice’
By Jim Baggott [1] / Aeon [2]
November
24, 2018, 6:45 AM GMT
‘The theory produces a good deal but hardly
brings us closer to the secret of the Old One,’ wrote Albert Einstein in
December 1926. ‘I am at all events convinced that He does not
play dice.’
Einstein
was responding to a letter from the German physicist Max Born. The heart of the
new theory of quantum mechanics, Born had argued, beats randomly and
uncertainly, as though suffering from arrhythmia. Whereas physics before the
quantum had always been about doing this and getting that,
the new quantum mechanics appeared to say that when we do this, we
get that only with a certain probability. And in some
circumstances we might get the other.
Einstein
was having none of it, and his insistence that God does not play dice with the
Universe has echoed [3] down the
decades, as familiar and yet as elusive in its meaning as E = mc2. What did
Einstein mean by it? And how did Einstein conceive of God?
Hermann
and Pauline Einstein were nonobservant Ashkenazi Jews. Despite his parents’
secularism, the nine-year-old Albert discovered and embraced Judaism with some
considerable passion, and for a time he was a dutiful, observant Jew. Following
Jewish custom, his parents would invite a poor scholar to share a meal with
them each week, and from the impoverished medical student Max Talmud (later
Talmey) the young and impressionable Einstein learned about mathematics and
science. He consumed all 21 volumes of Aaron Bernstein’s joyful Popular
Books on Natural Science (1880). Talmud then steered him in the
direction of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781),
from which he migrated to the philosophy of David Hume. From Hume [4], it was a
relatively short step to the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, whose stridently
empiricist, seeing-is-believing brand of philosophy demanded a complete
rejection of metaphysics, including notions of absolute space and time, and the
existence of atoms.
But
this intellectual journey had mercilessly exposed the conflict between science
and scripture. The now 12-year-old Einstein rebelled. He developed a deep
aversion to the dogma of organised religion that would last for his lifetime,
an aversion that extended to all forms of authoritarianism, including any kind
of dogmatic atheism.
This
youthful, heavy diet of empiricist philosophy would serve Einstein well some 14
years later. Mach’s rejection of absolute space and time helped to shape
Einstein’s special theory of relativity (including the iconic equation E =
mc2), which he formulated in 1905 while working as a ‘technical expert, third
class’ at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. Ten years later, Einstein would
complete the transformation of our understanding of space and time with the
formulation of his general theory of relativity, in which the force of gravity
is replaced by curved spacetime. But as he grew older (and wiser), he came to
reject Mach’s aggressive empiricism, and once declared that ‘Mach was as good
at mechanics as he was wretched at philosophy.’
Over
time, Einstein evolved a much more realist position. He preferred to accept the
content of a scientific theory realistically, as a contingently ‘true’
representation of an objective physical reality. And, although he wanted no
part of religion, the belief in God that he had carried with him from his brief
flirtation with Judaism became the foundation on which he constructed his
philosophy. When asked about the basis for his realist stance, he explained: ‘I
have no better expression than the term “religious” for this trust in the
rational character of reality and in its being accessible, at least to some
extent, to human reason.’
But
Einstein’s was a God of philosophy, not religion. When asked many years later
whether he believed in God, he replied: ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God, who
reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who
concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.’ Baruch Spinoza, a contemporary
of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, had conceived of God as identical with
nature. For this, he was considered a dangerous heretic [5], and was
excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam.
Einstein’s
God is infinitely superior but impersonal and intangible, subtle but not
malicious. He is also firmly determinist. As far as Einstein was concerned,
God’s ‘lawful harmony’ is established throughout the cosmos by strict adherence
to the physical principles of cause and effect. Thus, there is no room in
Einstein’s philosophy for free will: ‘Everything is determined, the beginning
as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control … we all dance to a
mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.’
The
special and general theories of relativity provided a radical new way of
conceiving of space and time and their active interactions with matter and
energy. These theories are entirely consistent with the ‘lawful harmony’
established by Einstein’s God. But the new theory of quantum mechanics, which
Einstein had also helped to found in 1905, was telling a different story.
Quantum mechanics is about interactions involving matter and radiation, at the
scale of atoms and molecules, set against a passive background of space and
time.
Earlier
in 1926, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger had radically transformed the
theory by formulating it in terms of rather obscure ‘wavefunctions’.
Schrödinger himself preferred to interpret these realistically, as descriptive
of ‘matter waves’. But a consensus was growing, strongly promoted by the Danish
physicist Niels Bohr and the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, that the new
quantum representation shouldn’t be taken too literally.
In
essence, Bohr and Heisenberg argued that science had finally caught up with the
conceptual problems involved in the description of reality that philosophers
had been warning of for centuries. Bohr is quoted as saying: ‘There is no
quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is
wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is.
Physics concerns what we can say about nature.’ This vaguely
positivist statement was echoed by Heisenberg: ‘[W]e have to remember that what
we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of
questioning.’ Their broadly antirealist ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ – denying
that the wavefunction represents the real physical state of a quantum system –
quickly became the dominant way of thinking about quantum mechanics. More
recent variations of such antirealist interpretations suggest that the
wavefunction is simply a way of ‘coding’ our experience, or our subjective beliefs
derived from our experience of the physics, allowing us to use what we’ve
learned in the past to predict the future.
But
this was utterly inconsistent with Einstein’s philosophy. Einstein could not
accept an interpretation in which the principal object of the representation –
the wavefunction – is not ‘real’. He could not accept that his God would allow
the ‘lawful harmony’ to unravel so completely at the atomic scale, bringing
lawless indeterminism and uncertainty, with effects that can’t be entirely and
unambiguously predicted from their causes.
The
stage was thus set for one of the most remarkable debates in the entire history
of science, as Bohr and Einstein went head-to-head on the interpretation of
quantum mechanics. It was a clash of two philosophies, two conflicting sets of
metaphysical preconceptions about the nature of reality and what we might
expect from a scientific representation of this. The debate began in 1927, and
although the protagonists are no longer with us, the debate is still very much
alive.
And
unresolved.
I
don’t think Einstein would have been particularly surprised by this. In
February 1954, just 14 months before he died, he wrote in a letter to the
American physicist David Bohm: ‘If God created the world, his primary concern
was certainly not to make its understanding easy for us.’
Jim
Baggott
This
article was originally published at Aeon [6] and has been
republished under Creative Commons.
