This op-ed in today’s NY Times is much longer than most NYT op-eds. Yet its focus has little to do with the "pressing issues of the day," the stuff of NYT most op-eds. Rather, it is about Albert Einstein’s four groundbreaking papers from 1905, and the lingering effects of one of them. Einstein is probably best known among non-scientists for discovering special relativity (the fact that distance and time behave differently depending on how fast you are moving), and the world’s most famous equation, E=mc2, both of which are from his 1905 papers. But, as the op-ed points out, his most important 1905 paper was probably the one on the photoelectric effect, which led inexorably to the discovery of quantum mechanics with all of its attendant, and deeply unsettling, notions of uncertainty. (The op-ed concludes by describing quantum mechanics as "humankind’s most supreme assault on the idea that reality is what we think it is.")
Why is this op-ed in today’s paper? In part, I suppose, because 1905 was 100 years ago. But there is also, I think, an important lesson in Einstein’s story for issues that are indeed raging around us at this very moment. As everyone knows, religiously-based objections to the teaching of evolution are on the rise, and they are now often accompanied by a "theory" called "intelligent design." The idea behind "intelligent design" is that someone or something (proponents never say who or what, but the only reasonable candidates seem to be God or aliens) actually designed the mechanisms that make up life on earth. And what makes this idea attractive, I think, is that some of these mechanisms are so incredibly complicated, and many of them work so unbelievably well, that it just "seems impossible" that they "evolved" from a bunch of chemicals bumping into each other in some primordial soup. (There is a very good collection of pro- and con- articles on intelligent design here.)
This is where Einstein comes in. Here is a man who was undeniably one of the most brilliant human beings ever to walk the planet. Moreover, he himself started the revolution in scientific thinking that led to quantum mechanics. And yet, he couldn’t accept it. His own ideas about how the universe worked, whether they came from his religious beliefs (about which I know nothing) or somewhere else, were not compatible with what the quantum theorists had discovered. And yet, rather than change his beliefs, he stuck to his guns and wound up (in the op-ed’s words) "losing touch with mainstream physics" and becoming "a wizened old man of science who was widely viewed as a revolutionary thinker of a bygone era."
No human being can perceive the effects of special relativity in the course of ordinary life (because we never travel near the speed of light which is where the effects become really pronounced). Yet Einstein proved that it is true, thereby proving that what is real does not necessarily correspond to what we perceive to be real. And Einstein himself could not accept quantum mechanics, even though every experiment seemed to prove it right, because it did not align with his understanding of how the universe "should" work. Both of these should act as cautionary tales to anyone who is attracted to intelligent design: first, the mere fact that a theory doesn’t match your understanding (religious or otherwise) of how the universe "should" work, or even your everyday observations of how it does work, does not prove the theory wrong. And second, if you find yourself unable to accept evolution because you cannot imagine that some complicated mechanism "evolved," remind yourself that even Albert Einstein couldn’t accept quantum mechanics because he couldn’t imagine that that was how the universe really operated – but he was wrong. And then ask yourself: are you smarter than Einstein?
charley-on-the-mta says
Yup. This is the error of personal incredulity: “It seems impossible that such things could have evolved …” etc.
bob-neer says
You can take this argument the other way, and reason that even though it seems quite hard for a rational person to imagine that everything around us was created by God a few thousand years ago (as some argue the Bible says), that may in fact be true.