Einstein

I decided to answer a Quora about why Einstein is the greatest scientist:

‘There have been a handful of people who changed how the world is seen. The wrong word in the question is ‘scientist’ because Albert was a great scientist but the category includes every great observer and experimenter, so how do you differentiate between Copernicus and James Clerk Maxwell? If you add in mathematicians, who are scientists, then how do you differentiate between Couchy and Humphrey Davy? It’s as a thinker that Einstein stands above nearly all the rest. Newton takes grief – undeservedly – because his great idea is still undervalued: everything falls. The story of the apple is intentional and deep and Newton almost directly confirms this is how he experienced it: not as an object falling on his head or near him but as an apple, the fruit of knowledge in our association from the Garden of Eden, the fruit of knowing, and he connected in his head the fallen state of an apple on the ground, with the state of it hanging on a tree – and through its development over a summer and back through the history of each tree – with the state of all things, and he took the religious idea, which he was loathe to admit he took, and he saw that all things are indeed ‘fallen’ and that means they literally fall, and that connected to the motion of the planets around the sun, which he saw in an instant explained Kepler. That people still don’t get the profundity of that idea shocks me: everything falls. Absolutely everything falls. So what did Albert do? He didn’t ‘prove Newton wrong’: he in fact proved that Newtonian mechanics in fact works perfectly well except at edges which no one in the 17thC could ever have seen existed. Example: the absurdity of ‘Vulcan’ – not Spock but a presumed planet that would explain the wiggle in the orbit of Mercury. People in the early 20thC actually thought there could be and must be a planet stuck in there though they could never actually see it because they could not comprehend any other explanation except something physical stuck between Mercury and the sun. People have limited imaginations.

Before I talk about Albert, let me mention another form of imagination, that exemplified by Richard Feynman (and I’d say Maxwell and others). That imagination is more, as Richard would often say, the application of the tools you have in your head to a problem and then accepting that what the tools say is true must be true. That is the essence of his silly little drawings: each one represents something that either is or that is happening, a state or a process, and each one can be assigned a value because we’ve measured that existence or that process. He then kept applying that tool so it developed depth: if this happens then that means these other things could have existed and happened and he’d make little drawings of all those possibilities. This builds into layers – it’s important to think of those as layers going within or into existence as though what occurs is made up of multi-layered existences and processes. He couldn’t explain this. He made not being able to explain this a substantial part of his public and teaching persona.

Albert is one of the rare explainers in history. There have been great labelers. My favorite is whoever – in India, I expect – came up with the notation for 0 because that symbol realizes the complexity inherent in the notions of starting and stopping and absence of things. As in, you have 3 cookies and eat 3 cookies so you have 0 cookies. You don’t have 0 everything, just 0 cookies, which implies that not only are you a pig for eating all the cookies but that you’re likely pretty full of cookies and that you had 3 cookies, and so on. Extraordinarily deep concept rendered in a symbol.

What did Albert explain? In his own words: everything is relative. People barely get the meaning of that and it’s been over a century. Albert absolutely believed that everything is relative. He wrote that in his letters. It infuses all his work. Since this comes up often, he takes undeserved grief for not accepting certain essences of quantum mechanics because he could not conceive of a mechanism by which entanglement over distance, meaning beyond the limits of the radiative frame, could occur. Again, people get wrong what he was doing: he wasn’t so much arguing that quantum entanglement could not exist as arguing that if it exists then we need to be extremely careful in describing how and why it can exist so we can then figure out the mechanism by which it does. (As an aside, look up Bell’s Inequality for a really good, simple demonstration.) He was probing for the holes in his own thoughts: if everything is relative, then how do relative changes occur essentially outside the constraints of space-time, outside the limits of radiative existence? I keep saying radiative existence or frame. Again, the importance of this is generally missed: what Albert did by taking c as given was organize the events and processes within any frame so they all have definable pasts, presents and futures. These fit together within a frame. They relate to each other across frames, thus an accelerated frame becomes special relativity and the existence of multiple frames becomes general relativity. Relativity just means relationship of frames. You are riding on a train and you share that frame with the people in your carriage and you go past people who are not in your frame. We all know that. Albert extended this just like Newton did to the limits of existence: everything falls becomes everything falls relative to something else. I’ll explain a bit.

To apply the apple and its religious connotations, relativity is a quintessentially Jewish statement: as some things fall, other things rise because a fall in one direction is a rise in another. This is Jewish because in Judaism the conception of God is the abstraction of all names and labels and concepts of all the Gods and all the good and harm that occurs through any conception of God – and in the Jewish world the name for God is literally ‘the Name’ because no name suffices. I assume Albert was highly influenced by the imagery of Jacob’s Ladder because that metaphor describes the process by which the layers of creation relate, through a ladder of rungs, meaning frames connected in a line. I sometimes think he spent his life rearranging the rungs of the ladder, imagining he was climbing up it or sliding down really fast. What that means when taken to the physical extreme is everything from the Big Bang – including the TV show – and stuff like black holes, but what it also means is that some things climb except they tend to be really ‘light’ – like the angels using Jacob’s Ladder. If Isaac saw directionality in the influence of one object on another, Albert saw bidirectionality in the relationship of one object to another. As an aside, I would have loved to hear what Albert and Kurt Gödel said to each other about this. Kurt was obsessed with the potential rise of evil: they had both witnessed this. One story is that Albert kept Kurt on track in his citizenship process because Kurt would spin into ways in which the US Constitution could be perverted to allow the rise of a Nazi-like state. Nuts yes, but that nuttiness reflected Kurt’s extraordinarily deep understanding of logical process – so deep he could become untethered from physical limits of logical process – and they both believed that evil was a thing that rose when goodness fell. Think of Yeats and the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem. The connection between religious concepts – as opposed to religious practice – is very deep.

I guess I should mention the current sad state. Albert would be depressed. Why? Because the current generalized belief is that no explanation is possible. I noted that Albert kept questioning but now the idea is that questioning is useless because the answer is no answer is possible. The sad thing is people don’t grasp this is the most prideful thing humans can do: to presume this is the answer just because they can’t imagine one is hubris. It’s worse than the idea that Vulcan must exist because the only explanation is a physical object between Mercury and the sun. I hate to say this but the tinkerer mindset has filtered into the general imagination: we don’t have the tools to figure out an answer, no way to see how we can develop those tools, so therefore the tools don’t exist and the answer therefore doesn’t exist.’