This sermon has been a long time gestating. The day before I had my kidney-stone attack last spring, I went out and bought Walter Isaacson’s 600-page biography of Albert Einstein. I’m really glad I did, because over the next four months I was able to wade through it, and it was a wonderful reminder of things that I’d sort of lost touch with—reasons I became a Unitarian-Universalist. In fact, it reminded me as well that in an earlier sabbatical I had spent four months reading about a hundred books on the relationship of science and religion, and that delicious melding of the two that can, frankly, sometimes happen only in our sanctuaries. So I loved it, and Einstein became a very important figure in the last four months, for me. I felt also that I got to understand him in a whole new way, and even to really get in touch with my own spirituality in a whole new way.
I realize that this is somewhat of an unusual sermon; I’m well aware of that. I’m also aware that science can be a bit off-putting to people. Is there a physicist in the room? Please raise your hand. There are a few in our sanctuary. Nigel is here, a wonderful photographer of constellations and galaxies. I know that we have someone from MIT; Pete Sherman, Ruth’s husband, is a good MIT guy. So we have scientists among us, and we treasure them; but few of us really are very conversant with modern science, and actually that’s a problem, because spirituality does come into the territory, as I think you’ll see. There’s also an old joke of a young Jewish boy whose family had come over from Eastern Europe. He was the first to go to college, and he signed up, and he became a physics major. When he came home, his old grandfather, who had not even a high school education, was saying, “Tell me, who is this Einstein? Why is he a great Jew?” “Grandpa, he has redefined the cosmos! With the special and general theory of relativity, he has essentially cast everything in a whole new light. We don’t understand truth the way we did before. Everything is new, and everything is different.” The old man said, “So tell it to me. Explain it to me.” The boy rolled his eyes, and wondered what he could possibly say about the theory of relativity to this old man. He said, “Well, Grandpa, it’s like this. If you’re with a pretty girl, an hour can seem like a minute; but if you sit on a hot stove, a second can seem like an hour.” The old man paused and thought, and he said, “For this we send you to college?”
By total coincidence, Ruth referred to what some people call the miracle year, even among scientists who actually don’t believe in miracles. One man, a low-level bureaucrat in the Swiss patent office named Albert Einstein, produced four papers. He actually did so in less than a year. The first paper revealed that light can be seen both as a particle and as a wave. Now, maybe that doesn’t mean much to you; but for a scientist, it has produced an unbelievable quandary. Is it one or the other, or is it both? It turns out, as we shall see as the sermon goes on, that what it is, is usually determined by the consciousness that has framed the experiment and observed it, and snaps it into being one or the other. Einstein himself, although he came up with the idea, fought against it for the rest of his career. The second paper actually proved the size of atoms, and the third paper proved that atoms and molecules actually existed, which was an active point of dispute at the time. The fourth was truly a mind-boggling achievement; it was the special theory of relativity. He actually produced even a fifth paper, almost as a footnote to the fourth, which revealed that most famous equation of all time, E=mc2 — the end result being a step forward into a unified theory of reality, that time and space were one. Well, this is wonderful; this is fabulous; this is an explosion of insight; but as I think you will come to see, it was much, much more than scientific progress.
How did he work? He worked through something he called thought-experiments. When he was a young boy of sixteen, he wondered what it would be like to be riding on a light beam. What would it be like to move at the actual speed of light? This is the way he thought. He wasn’t as bad at math as the legends say, but he didn’t work that way. He worked through his thought-experiments; he said he rarely thought in words at all, and he rarely thought in math at all. What he did was something that all of us can do, which is to imagine ourselves in a situation and then take it to the nth degree—if you will, to ride the light beam as far as it goes. Then, ten years after that miracle year, that burst of creativity, he revealed his general theory of relativity. This actually produced a truly cosmic revolution in thought, where gravity was revealed as the warping of space and time, and it was an elegant and beautiful interplay of matter, motion, and energy. These thought-experiments—these mental pictures—had taken him there, and had revolutionized the war. He imagined what if, and what then, and nothing was the same. He said imagination is more important than knowledge, and that’s step number one for us today: Imagination is more important than knowledge.
So how did he work? By being a rebel, an iconoclast; by taking nothing as received, and taking nothing for granted, and working always from the ground up. He said, “Long live impudence. It has been my guardian angel in this world.” He said, “Blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” How did he work? By treasuring the power of the individual. He said it over and over again: You must stand alone; you must think free; you should take nothing for granted. Think it through. That is the way to truth. He said, “It is important to foster individuality, for only the individual can produce new ideas.”
How did he work? Through an inner reverence for simplicity, and beauty, and elegance. The more simple something was, the more he suspected that was a conduit, the path into truth. He had a deep and abiding faith—and it was a faith; it was a deep kind of gut, primal intuition—that this simplicity and beauty were going to take him home. That was the way to ride the light beam. That’s why it was revolutionary to its core, and also, in a strange kind of way, which we’ll talk about today, deeply reverent. He was a nonconformist who believed that our universe made sense in powerfully disguised ways. He said in the end (and we always had this image of him holding a violin), “Music, Nature, and God are intertwined as a complex of feeling in me, a moral unity.”
So we’re moving along here. Be a rebel. Think it through. Get an image in your mind and pursue it all the way through. Pay attention to simplicity and beauty whenever you find it. And how did he think? Through this intuition, this wonder, is something which he called awe. The intermingling fields of energy and time and matter—we may think here, sitting in the pews today, what does any of it mean to me? I’m not Einstein. And we’re not; but we, too, may ride the light beam. In the end, he maintained to his last breath a childlike wonder, and he identified this as being so. He said the advantage of being somewhat slow as a young man was that he just didn’t accept the norms of the time; and as he came at things later in life, as he developed a little more slowly than his compatriots, he was able to look at things almost as a child would. He said,
:
People like you and me can never grow old. We can never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.
This is a spiritual stance as well as a very good scientific stance.
And how did he think? Although he could be, at times, oblivious and oddly impersonal to close familial ties, people found him, through the years, to be loving, gentle, and above all, extraordinarily kind. He believed in peace, and in a world that could be kinder. The paradox of his life is that all of his years of work for pacifism would be conflated later with his image, which was the fifth time he was on the cover of Time magazine, as the mushroom cloud. He was identified, really, as the father and progenitor of the atomic bomb. He consistently and constantly warned us against the power of our ability to annihilate ourselves, and yet his letter to President Roosevelt was the thing that kicked it off. He was dealing with this abiding paradox in his own life—the astonishing power of the atom, along with the primitive power of nations to think through their responsibility to one another, and to a shared future together—and in the end he was forced back into a thought experiment: What would it be like if human beings could just simply stop killing one another? It was another thought experiment, in essence of the deep simplicity that was possible. He said, “I believe love is a better teacher than a sense of duty, or at least it has been for me.”
This man, who grew up in the world of Newton, where all physical action was like billiard balls hitting one another—cause and effect, strict determinism and causality—turned everything around, even at times to his own active discomfort. Through his originality, his creativity, and his cussedness, his iconoclastic essence, came a new way of seeing our world, and seeing ourselves and where we stand in an expanding, curving, limitless cosmos. Not only were time and space relative to one another. Light could be both a wave and a particle, depending on the experimenter. Mass was energy, and energy could be mass. It took the world quite a while to catch up to this massive reorienting of reality. As a matter of fact, in 1908, after the publication of his paper on special relativity, Einstein applied to be a teacher at a local high school, and was turned down for the job. It took the world a while to catch up; but eventually people began to wake up to the fact that there was a hero in their midst, not simply because of the way he thought, but because of how he affected the way that people allowed themselves to think; through peace, and justice, and being a Jew in Germany before the Second World War, a pariah and eventual exile in America.
In the end, he said of his great work, principally done when he was a young man, “Appearances are against it, but the Almighty seems to have managed the trick.” When his theories were proved correct in 1919, by the bending of light observed in photographs of eclipses, he was brought the information, and he was quite calm. Imagine if there was an experiment that was going to prove whether your life’s work was correct or not! He was very calm, and he simply put the telegram down. They said, “But what if it had revealed that you were wrong?” He answered, “Well, I would have felt sorry for the dear old God, because the theory is correct.”
How did he believe? By age 12, he had decided that the biblical stories were not true. They were not logical; it didn’t make sense; to this young man, it didn’t even cohere into a reasonable structure of the way in which the Almighty might be working. He would be a freewheeling freethinker for the rest of his life; but at the same time, at the same age, he was given a compass; and he looked at how the compass, through fields of influence, always referred north. It fired his imagination that there were fields of influence that were invisible to our eye, and yet were magnificent in their constancy. Again, there is that sense of the beauty and elegance underlying this tragically thwarted world of ours. He decided to delve into the mystery, and he thought to himself that whatever reality and truth was, it was in the end beautiful and knowable. He called his vision of God the Old One. It was not a personal God; he didn’t believe in that biblical God; but he had such faith—a ground of reverence and awe that was almost like a field of magnetism itself. He longed and searched for harmony, and called the laws of the universe a peek into the very mind of God. He was suspicious of all religions, and their orthodoxies, but he was inextricably a man of faith. He said of himself as a Jew,
A Jew who abandons his faith is in a similar position to a snail that abandons his shell. He is still a snail.
Deep down, this love and devotion that he felt separated him. Although he had rejected the biblical God, he still had an intuition that there was something else going on, and that was knowable. He said,
:
What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.
He said that in the end that he couldn’t be an atheist, because they cannot hear the music of the spheres.
It’s pretty interesting. And the great mystery of all, the quantum physics to which he gave birth, and of which he was deeply suspicious all of his life, revealed what he called “spooky action at a distance.” He hated it, because he too (like all of us) was pretty comfortable in the Newtonian world that he had inherited as a child. But because light can be both a wave and a particle, suddenly the role of consciousness began to interplay with every experiment that has ever been put together. Probability and indeterminacy came into play, and he got very nervous about it. Recent experiments have demonstrated that if you separate two photons of light, and affect the rotation of one at a far distance from the other, then the other instantaneously changes its rotation as well. This is not supposed to be possible. This is a quantum quirk in the universe that opens up and has fantastic spiritual ramifications, because everything that is, is ultimately a product of the Big Bang (which his equations also gave us), and shares one origin and one event. He was so spooked by quantum physics that he said in his conversations with Neils Bohr, his great partner in quantum physics, that he knows it is true; he knows the experiments uphold it; but he just doesn’t know if he believes it or not, because “God does not play dice with the cosmos.” And Niels Bohr said, “Albert, not even you can tell God what to do.”
This deeply mysterious universe in which we live, what Einstein called the secrets of the Old One; the secret of life, that deep mystery that we are born into: We can’t expect to ever completely understand it; we simply cannot. But in the end, Einstein concluded that life is for its own sake. People who live in society, people looking into each other’s eyes, who share their troubles, who focus their efforts on what is important, and who find this joyful—these are the people who live a full life. Science was his joy, but his deepest influence really was on the politics of this world, of making this world, against all odds, a kinder and more peaceable place. He said that striving for justice is the most valuable thing to do in this life. The secret of life is not a secret; it’s staring us in the face in its simplicity, if you do the thought-experiment, if you ride the light beam to its conclusion deep within, its beauty and its elegance and its simplicity. In the end, when asked about his life, he said, “I simply enjoy giving more than receiving in every respect.”
In the last year of his life, at age 76, he said, “I am a deeply religious nonbeliever.” Boy, was I happy when I read that! I thought, “Oh my God! This is the Gospel.”
I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.
Indeed it is. What kind of faith is this? One that I am personally comfortable with, and one that I find liberating. I am so happy whenever I can find this intuition that I possess. I’m no Einstein; I’m no genius, and you’re not either; but something powerful is going on here. It’s something that’s really simple. He said,
I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.
If there’s one definition for Unitarian-Universalism, I believe it’s that. This is the secret, the secret of life, giving more than receiving in every respect. How strange, how simple, how beautiful! Amen.
