The Koan That Is Albert Einstein

“I’m not much with people, and I’m not a family man. I want my peace.
I want to know how God created this world.
I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element.
I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.”

That’s the physicist Albert Einstein speaking. His birthday was March 14. He was born in Ulm, Germany in 1879.

Dipping back into Walter Isaacson’s highly readable biography of Albert on his birthday, I realized that though the the most likely answer to “Name a famous scientist” is Einstein, there is quite a bit of myth and misunderstanding about him. In particular, his thoughts and comments on God are still debated.

Look up Albert Einstein on Amazon.com and you’ll find books he wrote, books about him and his work, dolls, posters, games, Einstein t-shirts and costumes and lots of other things.

poster with one of the few equations most people know – even if they don’t know what it means

You often hear that he was a terrible student, perhaps even with a learning disability. Actually, he was a good student, and always a top student at math and physics. The problem he had in school was his attitude. Never a way to win over a teacher, he felt that many of them knew less than he did and was not afraid to say so.

After he graduated from Zurich Polytechnic, none of his professors wanted to write him a recommendation. Again, not because he wasn’t smart, but because they didn’t like him. He needed that recommendation to get a good job in academia or an advanced degree. He ended up out of higher education and took a job as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern.

He didn’t hate the job because his days were spent as a “technical expert third class,” and in the evenings he worked on his scientific ideas.

He was 26 in1905 and the year is called his annus mirabilis (year of miracles) because he published four important scientific papers in just a few months. Two of his groundbreaking observations were in those papers. He felt the scientific community was wrong in its assumption that light was a continuous wave and that it was made up of distinct particles. He also first proposed his theory of special relativity with its famous equation e=mc2.

The science community did not immediately embrace these ideas. Although e=mc2 is famous now, at the time it didn’t make much of a difference in his reputation and he still couldn’t even get a low-level teaching job at a university. By 1909, he was able to quit his job at the patent office and became an adjunct professor of theoretical physics in Zurich. In 1914, he moved to a teaching post in Berlin and worked on a “General Theory of Relativity,” which he published in 1916.

In 1919, two astronomers in different parts of the world observed a total solar eclipse and verified one of Einstein’s theories in his General Theory of Relativity. The findings were announced in November in London, during a joint meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society and the president of the Royal Society declared: “This is the most important result related to the theory of gravitation since the days of Newton. … This result is among the greatest achievements of human thinking.” He appeared in articles all over the world and suddenly Einstein was famous.

“With fame, I become more and more stupid,
which of course is a very common phenomenon.” – Einstein, 1919

Einstein came to America for the first time for a lecture tour and got off the boat in Battery Park in Manhattan on April 2nd, 1921. Thousands of people had waited for hours to welcome Einstein. Some enthusiastic Jewish spectators sang both “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Hatikvah,” a Zionist anthem. He was paraded through the streets of New York in a motorcade that lasted all afternoon and all evening, and he didn’t make it to his hotel until 11:30 that night.

About his first impressions of the United States, he said: “What first strikes the visitor with amazement is the superiority of this country in matters of technology and organization. Objects of everyday use are more solid than in Europe, houses much more practically designed. […] The second thing that strikes the visitor is the joyous, positive attitude to life. The smile on the faces of the people in photographs is symbolical of one of the greatest assets of the American. He is friendly, self confident, optimistic — and without envy.”

At the conclusion of his tour, in an interview with a Dutch newspaper, he had a different take on the USA: “The vast enthusiasm for me in America appears to be typically American, though, and as far as I can judge I rather understand it: the people are so uncommonly bored, yes honestly much more so than is the case with us. And there is so little for them there anyhow. […] So folks are happy when they are given something to play with and which they can revere, and that they then do with exceptional intensity. Most of all it is the women, by the way, who dominate all of American life. The men are interested in nothing at all; they work, work as I haven’t seen anyone anywhere else. For the rest, they are toy dogs for their wives, who spend the money in the most excessive fashion and who shroud themselves in a veil of extravagance. They will do anything that’s in vogue and in fashion, and, as it happens, have thrown themselves among the throngs of the ‘Einstein-craze,’ Does it make an outlandish impression upon me, the crowd’s excitement here and there about my beliefs and theories, about which it doesn’t understand anything? I find it amusing and also interesting to watch them. I certainly believe that it is the magic of non-comprehension that attracts them.”

Einstein was a good self-promoter, a natural speaker, liked to be photographed, and was known to stick out his tongue or ride on a bicycle for a photo. His “mad scientist” hair and vagabond grandpa image was appealing.

In the quote at the top of this essay, he mentions God. But he didn’t believe in the creator or in fostering the idea of the God of the Bible. He expressed skepticism regarding the existence of an anthropomorphic god, such as the God of Abrahamic religions. He described this view as being “naïve and childlike.”

“The divine reveals itself in the physical world.”
“My God created laws… His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking but by immutable laws.”

He preferred “Spinoza’s God.” Baruch Spinoza, a 17th-century Dutch thinker, believed that “God” reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists. That harmony is created by the physical laws of the universe.

Einstein wrote that the word God is “nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness,” and that the Bible is a collection of “honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish”.

But his concept of God is difficult for most of us to understand. He famously said “God does not play dice with the universe.” * He also wrote “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind”. They are almost Zen koans. )Albert Einstein said: “Buddhism is not a religion; it is rather the science of human mind.”)

Trying to explain all this, Stephen Hawking wrote: “He seemed to have felt that the uncertainty was only provisional: but that there was an underlying reality, in which particles would have well-defined positions and speeds, and would evolve according to deterministic laws, in the spirit of Laplace. This reality might be known to God, but the quantum nature of light would prevent us seeing it, except through a glass darkly.”

Was Einstein an atheist? According to Richard Dawkins, he was an atheist. “Einstein sometimes invoked the name of God, and he is not the only atheistic scientist to do so, inviting misunderstanding by supernaturalists eager to misunderstand and claim the illustrious thinker as their own.”

What is an atheist according to Dawkins? He says it is believing that there is “nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe.”

And yet, Einstein also had profound respect for what he called “religious geniuses” who revealed moral conduct to humanity.

Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, said that Einstein was “the greatest Jew alive”. After Weizmann died in 1952, the Embassy of Israel sent a letter to Einstein offering him the presidency. It wasn’t because he was a religious person, but because Israeli presidents perform mostly ceremonial duties, so the role constitutes more of an honor than a position of power. He turned down the offer.
Einstein was anti-nationalist, but he also believed at time that Jews should have a home where they would be free from persecution. Then again, in a 1938 speech, Einstein said, “I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state.”

I admire Einstein for a number of things, but I was very disappointed to discover that is was a lousy husband and father. Hans Einstein, his elder son, said that his father gave up on his second son, Eduardo, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and later died in an asylum. He began cheating on his first wife, Mileva, almost immediately after they married in 1903 and later married his cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, who had supported him when his marriage to Mileva ended.

A newly released set of Einstein’s personal correspondence shows that he was open about his love affairs to his wife, lost much of his prize money in bad investments and was a much more devoted father than previously thought. The new letters shatter some myths that the great scientist was always cold towards his family.

His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck many others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals.

Albert and a young, healthy Stephen enjoying a cup of tea in a kind of afterlife that neither one of them believed existed. Maybe it’s in an alternate and parallel universe.

* In response to Einstein’s quote, physicist Stephen Hawking said, in an equally confusing way, “…it seems that even God is bound by the Uncertainty Principle, and can not know both the position, and the speed, of a particle. So God does play dice with the universe. All the evidence points to him being an inveterate gambler, who throws the dice on every possible occasion…Thus it seems Einstein was doubly wrong when he said, God does not play dice. Not only does God definitely play dice, but He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can’t be seen.”