Einstein: His Life and Universe

for someone.”⁴⁵

The Ripples from Relativity

For nearly three centuries, the mechanical universe of Isaac Newton, based on absolute certainties and laws, had formed the psychological foundation of the Enlightenment and the social order, with a belief in causes and effects, order, even duty. Now came a view of the universe, known as relativity, in which space and time were dependent on frames of reference. This apparent dismissal of certainties, an abandonment of faith in the absolute, seemed vaguely heretical to some people, perhaps even godless. “It formed a knife,” historian Paul Johnson wrote in his sweeping history of the twentieth century, Modern Times, “to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings.”⁴⁶

The horrors of the great war, the breakdown of social hierarchies, the advent of relativity and its apparent undermining of classical physics all seemed to combine to produce uncertainty. “For some years past, the entire world has been in a state of unrest, mental as well as physical,” a Columbia University astronomer, Charles Poor, told the New York Times the week after the confirmation of Einstein’s theory was announced. “It may well be that the physical aspects of the unrest, the war, the strikes, the Bolshevist uprisings, are in reality the visible objects of some underlying deeper disturbance, worldwide in character. This same spirit of unrest has invaded science.”⁴⁷

Indirectly, driven by popular misunderstandings rather than a fealty to Einstein’s thinking, relativity became associated with a new relativism in morality and art and politics. There was less faith in absolutes, not only of time and space, but also of truth and morality. In a December 1919 editorial about Einstein’s relativity theory, titled “Assaulting the Absolute,” the New York Times fretted that “the foundations of all human thought have been undermined.”⁴⁸

Einstein would have been, and later was, appalled at the conflation of relativity with relativism. As noted, he had considered calling his theory “invariance,” because the physical laws of combined spacetime, according to his theory, were indeed invariant rather than relative.

Moreover, he was not a relativist in his own morality or even in his taste. “The word relativity has been widely misinterpreted as relativism, the denial of, or doubt about, the objectivity of truth or moral values,” the philosopher Isaiah Berlin later lamented. “This was the opposite of what Einstein believed. He was a man of simple and absolute moral convictions, which were expressed in all he was and did.”⁴⁹

In both his science and his moral philosophy, Einstein was driven by a quest for certainty and deterministic laws. If his theory of relativity produced ripples that unsettled the realms of morality and culture, this was caused not by what Einstein believed but by how he was popularly interpreted.

One of those popular interpreters, for example, was the British statesman Lord Haldane, who fancied himself a philosopher and scientific scholar. In 1921, he published a book called The Reign of Relativity, which enlisted Einstein’s theory to support his own political views on the need to avoid dogmatism in order to have a dynamic society. “Einstein’s principle of the relativity of our measurements of space and time cannot be taken in isolation,” he wrote. “When its import is considered it may well be found to have its counterpart in other domains of nature and of knowledge generally.”⁵⁰

Relativity theory would have profound consequences for theology, Haldane warned the archbishop of Canterbury, who immediately tried to comprehend the theory with only modest success. “The Archbishop,” one minister reported to the dean of English science, J. J. Thomson, “can make neither head nor tail of Einstein, and protests that the more he listens to Haldane, and the more newspaper articles he reads on the subject, the less he understands.”

Haldane persuaded Einstein to come to England in 1921. He and Elsa stayed at Haldane’s grand London townhouse, where they found themselves completely intimidated by their assigned footman and butler. The dinner that Haldane hosted in Einstein’s honor convened a pride of English intellectuals leonine enough to awe an Oxford senior common room. Among those present were George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Eddington, J. J. Thomson, Harold Laski, and of course the baffled archbishop of Canterbury, who got a personal briefing from Thomson in preparation.

Haldane seated the archbishop next to Einstein, so he got to pose his burning question directly to the source. What ramifications, His Grace inquired, did the theory of relativity have for religion?

The answer probably disappointed both the archbishop and their host. “None,” Einstein said. “Relativity is a purely scientific matter and has nothing to do with religion.”⁵¹

That was no doubt true. However, there was a more complex relationship between Einstein’s theories and the whole witch’s brew of ideas and emotions in the early twentieth century that bubbled up from the highly charged cauldron of modernism. In his novel Balthazar, Lawrence Durrell had his character declare, “The Relativity proposition was directly responsible for abstract painting, atonal music, and formless literature.”

The relativity proposition, of course, was not directly responsible for any of this. Instead, its relationship with modernism was more mysteriously interactive. There are historical moments when an alignment of forces causes a shift in human outlook. It happened to art and philosophy and science at the beginning of the Renaissance, and again at the beginning of the Enlightenment. Now, in the early twentieth century, modernism was born by the breaking of the old strictures and verities. A spontaneous combustion occurred that included the works of Einstein, Picasso, Matisse, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Joyce, Eliot, Proust, Diaghilev, Freud, Wittgenstein, and dozens of other path-breakers who seemed to break the bonds of classical thinking.⁵²

In his book Einstein, Picasso: Space,Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc, the historian of science and philosophy Arthur I. Miller explored the common wellsprings that produced, for example, the 1905 special theory of relativity and Picasso’s 1907 modernist masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Miller noted that both were men of great charm “yet who preferred emotional detachment.” Each in his own way felt that something was amiss in the strictures that defined his field, and they were both intrigued by discussions of simultaneity, space, time, and specifically the writings of Poincare.⁵³

Einstein served as a source of inspiration for many of the modernist artists and thinkers, even when they did not understand him. This was especially true when artists celebrated such concepts as being “free from the order of time,” as Proust put it in the closing of Remembrance of Things Past. “How I would love to speak to you about Einstein,” Proust wrote to a physicist friend in 1921. “I do not understand a single word of his theories, not knowing algebra. [Nevertheless] it seems we have analogous ways of deforming Time.”⁵⁴

A pinnacle of the modernist revolution came in 1922, the year Einstein’s Nobel Prize was announced. James Joyce’s Ulysses was published that year, as was T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. There was a midnight dinner party in May at the Majestic Hotel in Paris for the opening of Renard, composed by Stravinsky and performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets