 
                        20070528.01

     Some years ago, a friend gave me a copy of the book
"Einstein's Dreams", and I disappointed him by not sharing
his enthusiasm.  As I have said before, I must assume that
my lack of sympathy for the author's fantasies reflects on
me rather than on the book.  Since I am now in Konnarock,
and "Einstein's Dreams" are in Belmont, I cannot
immediately correlate my memory with the text.  Perhaps
that is just as well.  There should be time enough for
(self)critical rereading later.

     As I remember, what troubled me was that the author
seemed to accept Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity as
revealed truth in a way in which I did not; and then again
by indulging himself and his readers in fantasy, seemed to
make light of the terribly serious and important
intellectual dilemmas which come to a focus in Einstein's
theories.

     I cannot claim to be an historian of science. It is
surely an oversimplification that Aristotle was recognized,
venerated and ultimately worshipped as the dominant
scientific intellect in our tradition for more than a
thousand years, until the end of the Middle Ages. Truth was
true because Aristotle had spoken it: "Autos ephe". At
least in physics, Newton replaced Aristotle in the 17th
18th and 19th centuries for perhaps 250 years.  You have
heard Alexander Pope's couplet eulogizing Newton:

       "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night.
        God said, Let Newton be, and all was light."

     Given its magnitude, Aristotle's achievement would
have been awkward, per haps impossible to contest, until
the scientists of the Renaissance discovered new
standpoints and described new perspectives. Then, suddenly
Aristotle seemed to be disgraced and the recognition of his
achievement came to be politically incorrect, as it still
is.  The contemporary rejection of Newton is not quite so
blatant.  But implicit in the veneration of Einstein is the
assumption that the "truth" which Einstein "discovered" is
somehow more valid than Newton's "truth", just as Newton's
"truth" was deemed much superior to Aristotle's.  My
reservation about the author of "Einstein's Dreams" is that
I deemed him insufficiently critical of Einstein's thought,
that albeit very poetic and imaginative, Alan Lightman is
just another one of Einstein's worshippers.

     And why not? Why shouldn't Einstein be worshipped? I
am poignantly reminded of Nietzsche's words: "Wenn es
Goetter gaebe, wie hielte ich es aus kein Gott zu sein.
Also gibt es keine Goetter." (If gods existed, how could I
abide not to be a god? Therefore gods don't exist) and I
ask myself whether it is jealousy or envy that makes me
unwilling to be found in a crowd of Einstein worshippers.
That is a question which I cannot answer.

     I claim that I don't worship Einstein, because such
worship is irrelevant to my understanding the phenomena
which Einstein described and analysed. To the extent that
the worship is serious, it interferes with the
understanding. To the extent that the worship is frivolous,
it's not worth my while.

     Writing now without any books at hand to which to
refer, I ask myself: What concept of time would I entertain
in the absence of clocks and calenders?  The movement of
the sun across the heavens, the alternation between day and
night, the changes of the seasons, the flood and ebb of the
tide, the rhythm of the heart beat and of respiration the
life cycles of plants and animals.  What happens to these
experiences when I start to count and calibrate the pulse,
the respiration the tides, the setting of the sun, the
coming of spring and the onset of winter?

     What concept of space would I entertain if I relied
solely only unaided vision and on the space that I can
describe with my limbs?

     Is there a naive, simple experience that leads me to
separate space and time? Or is there a simple experience
that leads me to conjoin them?  It is interesting to
reflect on the simple equation of time and space in the
German concept of Morgen, as in "ein Morgen Land", where
the spatial dimensions of a piece of land are defined by a
fixed length of time (ein Morgen) Clearly when time is
measured, its quality changes.  A day spent without a watch
is a different day.  So is a month spent without a
calender.  The same is true of space, especially in very
large and in very small dimensions.  The space revealed by
telescope and microscope is intuitively (existentially)
different from the space of the rooms in which I live and
the garden in which my flowers grow.  I conclude that
perceptions are created and molded by what one is and by
what one experiences, be it the "simple" rising and the
setting of the sun or the most complex of physics
experiments.  Mathematics is the projection of the
complexity of the human mind onto a social frame of
reference which makes it to appear objective.  in
elucidating and defining experience.

     I see a stark contrast between the assertion of
unchanging and everlasting identity: "I am that I am,"
which is eminently characteristic of the psyche of the
human being who cannot imagine his non-existence; who
cannot imagine himself different than he is, and the so
very obvious adaptability, the inescapable plasticity of
the human character which where it does not take on the
characteristics of that to which it is exposed, is
nonetheless profoundly altered by it.  The well recognized
phenomenon that one learns to interpret what one sees only
by seeing; that if a child's eye is occluded in early
childhood, vision fails to develop.  If one does not learn
a language in ones childhood, one will never be able to
speak it without an accent.

     The chief value of discovery, of"new" knowledge, is
that it puts into perspective the significance of the
knowledge which it displaces or replaces, and by
implication, the significance of all knowledge. The chief
hazard of new knowledge is that it will appear conclusive
and will be believed to be absolute and unchanging.


                     * * * * *
Copyright 2007, Ernst Jochen Meyer
