World of Science at AEASC

Much has been written about the response of Einstein’s contemporaries to his Spinozistic cosmic religion. For example, the physicist Arnold Sommerfeld recorded in Schilpp’s volume that he often felt “that Einstein stands in a particularly intimate relation to the God of Spinoza.” But what finally most interests us here is to what degree Einstein, having reached his Third Paradise, in which his yearnings for science and religion are joined, may even have found in his own research in physics fruitful ideas emerging from that union. In fact there are at least some tantalizing parallels between passages in Spinoza’s Ethics and Einstein’s publications in cosmology – parallels that the physicist and philosopher Max Jammer, in his book Einstein and Religion (1999), considers as amounting to intimate connections. For example, in Part I of Ethics (”Concerning God”), Proposition 29 begins: “In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things are determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and act in a certain manner.” Here is at least a discernible overlap with Einstein’s tenacious devotion to determinism and strict causality at the fundamental level, despite all the proofs from quantum mechanics of the reign of probabilism, at least in the subatomic realm.

There are other such parallels throughout. But what is considered by some as the most telling relationship between Spinoza’s Propositions and Einstein’s physics comes from passages such as Corollary 2 of Proposition 20: “It follows that God is immutable or, which is the same thing, all His attributes are immutable.” In a letter of September 3, 1915, to Else (his cousin and later his wife), Einstein, having read Spinoza’s Ethics again, wrote, “I think the Ethics will have a permanent students with autism effect on me.”

Two years later, when he expanded his general relativity to include “cosmological considerations,” Einstein found to his dismay that his system of equations did “not allow the hypothesis of a spatially closed-ness of the world [raeumliche Geschlossenheit].” How did Einstein cure this flaw? By something he had done very rarely: making an ad hoc addition, purely for convenience: “We can add, on the left side of the field equation a – for the time being – unknown universal constant, – lambda['lambda'].” In fact, it seems that not much harm is done thereby. It does not change the covariance; it still corresponds with the observation of motions in the solar system (”as long as lambdais small”), and so forth. Moreover, the proposed new universal constant lambdaalso determines the average density of the universe with which it can remain in equilibrium, and provides the radius and volume of a presumed spherical universe.

Altogether a beautiful, immutable universe – one an immutable God could be identified with. But in 1922, Alexander Friedmann showed that the equations of general relativity did allow expansion or contraction. And in 1929 Edwin Hubble found by astronomical observations the fact that the universe does expand. Thus Einstein – at least according to the physicist George Gamow – remarked that “inserting lambdawas the biggest blunder of my life.”

Max Jammer and the physicist John Wheeler, both of whom knew Einstein, traced his unusual ad hoc insertion of lambda, nailing down that “spatially closed-ness of the world,” to a relationship between Einstein’s thoughts and Spinoza’s Propositions. They also pointed to another possible reason for it: In Spinoza’s writings, one finds the concept that God would not have made an empty world. But in an expanding universe, in the infinity of time, the density of matter would be diluted to zero in the limit. Space itself would disappear, since, as Einstein put it in 1952, “On the basis of the general theory of relativity . . . space as opposed to ‘what fills space’ . . . had no separate existence.”

Even if all of these suggestive indications of an intellectual, emotional, and perhaps even spiritual resonance between Einstein’s and Spinoza’s writings were left entirely aside, there still remains Einstein’s attachment to his “cosmic religion.” That was the end point of his own troublesome pilgrimage in religiosity – from his early vision of his First Paradise, through his disillusionments, to his dedication to find fundamental unity within natural science, and at last to his recognition of science as the devotion, in his words, of “a deeply religious unbeliever” – his final embrace of seeming incommensurables in his Third Paradise.

I believe we can guess at the first time Einstein read Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics (Ethica Ordinae Geometrico Demonstrata), a system constructed on the Euclidean model of deductions from propositions. Soon after getting his first real job at the patent office, Einstein joined with two friends to form a discussion circle, meeting once or twice a week in what they called, with gallows humor, the Akademie Olympia. We know the list of books they read and discussed. High among them, reportedly at Einstein’s suggestion, was Spinoza’s Ethics, which he read afterwards several times more. Even when his sister Maja joined him in Princeton in later life and was confined to bed by an illness, he thought that reading a good book to her would help, and chose Spinoza’s Ethics for that purpose.

By that time Spinoza’s work and life had long been important to Einstein. He had written an introduction to a biography of Spinoza (by his son-in-law, Rudolf Kayser, 1946); he had contributed to the Spinoza Dictionary (1951); he had referred to Spinoza in many of his letters; and he even had composed a poem in Spinoza’s honor. He admired Spinoza for his independence of mind, his deterministic philosophical outlook, his skepticism about organized religion and orthodoxy – which had resulted in his excommunication from his synagogue in 1656 – and even for his ascetic preference, which compelled him to remain in poverty and solitude to live in a sort of spiritual ecstasy, instead of accepting a professorship at the University of Heidelberg. Originally neglected, Spinoza’s Ethics, published only posthumously, profoundly influenced other thinkers, such as Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Goethe (who called him “our common saint”), Albert Schweitzer, and Romain Rolland (who, on reading Ethics, confessed, “I deciphered not what he said, but what he meant to say”). For Spinoza, God and nature were one (deus sive natura). True religion was based not on dogma but on a feeling for the rationality and the unity underlying all finite and temporal things, on a feeling of wonder and awe that generates the idea of God, but a God which lacks any anthropomorphic conception. As Spinoza wrote in Proposition 15 in Ethics, he opposed assigning to God “body and soul and being subject to passions.” Hence, “God is incorporeal” – as had been said by others, from Maimonides on, to whom God was knowable indirectly through His creation, through nature. In other pages of Ethics, Einstein could read Spinoza’s opposition to the idea of cosmic purpose, and that he favored the primacy of the law of cause and effect – an all-pervasive determinism that governs nature and life – rather than “playing at dice,” in Einstein’s famous remark. And as if he were merely paraphrasing Spinoza, Einstein wrote in 1929 that the perception in the universe of “profound reason and beauty constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this sense alone, I am a deeply religious man.”