World of Science at AEASC

The primacy of young Albert’s First Paradise came to an abrupt end. As he put it early in his “Autobiographical Notes,” through reading popular science books he came to doubt the stories of the Bible. Thus he passed first through what he colorfully described as a “positively fanatic indulgence in free thinking.”1 But then he found new enchantments. First, at age twelve, he read a little book on Euclidean plane geometry – he called it “holy,” a veritable “Wunder.” Then, still as a boy, he became entranced by the contemplation of that huge external, extra-personal world of science, which presented itself to him “like a great, eternal riddle.” To that study one could devote oneself, finding thereby “inner freedom and security.” He believed that choosing the “road to this Paradise,” although quite antithetical to the first one and less alluring, did prove itself trustworthy. Indeed, by age sixteen, he had his father declare him to the authorities as “without confession,” and for the rest of his life he tried to dissociate himself from organized religious activities and associations, inventing his own form of religiousness, just as he was creating his own physics.

These two realms appeared to him eventually not as separate as numerous biographers would suggest. On the contrary, my task here is to demonstrate that at the heart of Einstein’s mature identity there developed a fusion of his First and his Second Paradise – into a Third Paradise, where the meaning of a life of brilliant scientific activity drew on the remnants of his fervent first feelings of youthful religiosity.

For this purpose, we shall have to make what may seem like an excursus, but one that will in the end throw light on his overwhelming passion, throughout his scientific and personal life, to bring about the joining of these and other seemingly incommensurate aspects, whether in nature or society. In 1918 he gave a glimpse of it in a speech (”Prinzipien der Forschung”) honoring the sixtieth birthday of his friend and colleague Max Planck, to whose rather metaphysical conception about the purpose of science Einstein had drifted while moving away from the quite opposite, positivistic one of an early intellectual mentor, Ernst Mach. As Einstein put it in that speech, the search for one “simplified and lucid image of the world” not only was the supreme task for a scientist, but also corresponded to a psychological need: to flee from personal, everyday life, with all its dreary disappointments, and escape into the world of objective perception and thought. Into the formation of such a world picture the scientist could place the “center of gravity of his emotional life [Gefühlsleben].” And in a sentence with special significance, he added that persevering on the most difficult scientific problems requires “a state of feeling [Gefühlszustand] similar to that of a religious person or a lover.”