Science and Me

by Jayant Deshpande

first appeared in

New Quest (No.160, April-June 2005)

Innocent Equation

I see an equation, and I wonder

Is the world so simple?

I see other symbols crowding those unknowns

I imagine tiny growths around them

With so much in the fray

Will things go the equation’s way?

I wonder

Einstein was the (in)famous author of the equation E=mc², which was the scientific principle underlying the development of the atomic bomb.

The nuclear age has been with us for more than half a century. It all began with the rise of Hitler in Germany, followed by the Manhattan Project in America during WW2 that culminated in the first atomic explosion in 1945. Hitler’s diabolical plan had to be stopped. Ironically, the bomb was used against Japan.

My awareness of the atomic bomb has been tinged with both fear and fascination since my teen years. Yet my real interest lay in the bold ideas that Einstein threw up.

Einstein first entered my consciousness when I was about ten or eleven. Everyone mentioned his name with awe and reverence, though hardly anyone around me knew anything about his work. It wasn’t until my mid-teens that his ideas began to take hold in my mind. I remember this well. During the summer of 1968 I found myself in a public library in Sarnia, Ontario (Canada)—home of the Chemical Valley, where I would spend some time in the early 80s plying my trade in the pungent atmosphere of petrochemical odors—and came across Lincoln Barnett’s The Universe and Dr. Einstein.

The book made a deep impression on me. In particular, its simple exposition of the Principle of Equivalence, which is at the heart of the General Theory of Relativity: Einstein offered the insight that the feeling a person gets when being pulled to the Earth by gravity is identical in nature to that which he gets while accelerating, say, in a car, in an elevator as it rises up, or in an airplane as it takes off. Or even in a spacecraft accelerating in gravity-free space. Since gravity and acceleration seem the same, they are the same—both phenomena lead to the same observation.

Till then I hadn’t made up my mind about anything in particular. But I decided then and there that I would pursue science in college and beyond. And perhaps even philosophy. The experience was that ground-breaking for me. I was hooked. Where would it lead?

The high school I attended during the 60s was like many others in Canada or America—it had an excellent library. What caught my eye were out-of-the-ordinary books on science. I ran into Banesh Hoffman’s The Strange Story of the Quantum, a biography of Newton in a Dover Classics edition, and some back issues of Annalen der Physik, the German journal that published Einstein’s original scientific papers. The latter contained those three classic papers by Einstein in 1905 that would establish his reputation as the foremost scientist of our age—they would revolutionize our thinking.

At the time I could barely follow these highly technical papers, but they began my romance with 20^th century science, which continues to this day even though I’ve traveled far beyond its confines. Science and technology still seduce me in ways not too different from those that fired my imagination four decades ago.

Einstein’s three seminal papers, published in 1905 while he was a patent clerk in Berne, Switzerland, gave us the Special Theory of Relativity, Brownian Motion (the electrodynamics of moving bodies) and the Photoelectric Effect. The General Theory emerged in 1915.

The 1920s ushered in the era of Quantum Mechanics.

And this was followed in the 1940s by the theory of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), developed by Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga, which dealt with events occurring at the atomic and subatomic level when light interacts with matter.

Einstein expressed a deep concern, saying "God does not play dice" in connection with the chancy aspect of quantum mechanics, which posits an uncertainty with respect to matter at the microcosmic level. Why indeed should the universe and all that's in it be a kind of crapshoot? A universe that's not quite tangible. There's an analogy here: the Creationists, who believe that God created our world, would concur. Not believing that biological evolution à la Darwin resulted in man, they could well say that "God does not play genes". For them man is too perfect a creature to be subject to the vagaries of gene mutation, leading to evolution by natural selection, as in all other species. In a Darwinian world man’s evolution is also a matter of chance—he’s hardly special. This indeterminacy jars those who believe in perfection.

Relativity (Einstein), Incompleteness (Gödel) and Uncertainty (Heisenberg) may be thought of as the 'Holy' Trinity of 20^th century science. They challenged our assumptions and heralded a kind of postmodern science, if anything. Relativity challenged Newton's Laws by focusing on accelerated frames of reference, speeds approaching that of light, and how gravity determines the nature of space-time. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem showed that in any set of axioms in mathematics there will be statements that are true but cannot be proved from those axioms—intuitively, this means that any system of knowledge about the world is, and must remain, fundamentally incomplete, forever subject to revision. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle pointed out that in the quantum world we cannot precisely determine the behavior of very small particles—the very act of measurement alters the physical reality. To him, "The idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively is impossible."

General Relativity (a theory of gravity) is still at odds with quantum theory, though Einstein tried to discover a unified theory of all the basic forces that govern the natural world. He failed but the search for a 'Theory of Everything' continues. And I continue to be curious about that quest.

But I share the astronomer, Martin Rees’ view that "our everyday world presents intellectual challenges just as daunting as those of the cosmos and the quantum. We need the kind of perspective that Einstein himself espoused—global, humanistic and long term."

April 30, 2005