Quantum leap

(03/08/2012, The New York Times, by George Johnson)

It’s no wonder Nazis hated relativity. They lived in a world of absolutes. There was a master race with one true religion and one true language, with a music and literature that celebrated its glory. There was a true German empire, sliced up by the arbitrary boundaries of concoctions called nation-states. With absolute might the Fatherland would regain its proper position in space and time.



Now comes this Einstein. Without even the benefit of a proper German education, he was fiddling with numbers and symbols and through some kabbalistic magic conjuring a universe in which it was impossible to say where you were. You could only describe your position in relationship to something else — which could only describe its position in relationship to you.

In Einstein’s cockeyed scheme you couldn’t even say with authority what time it was. Again, your time was relative to their time and their time was relative to yours. This was from his Special Theory of Relativity. The sequel, General Relativity, was even weirder. Gravity is the curvature of some four-dimensional mind stuff called space-time. It was a trick of the Elders of Zion, some philosophical disease. “Scientific Dadaism,” a prominent German scientist called it.

This wasn’t just a fringe view. Philipp Lenard, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on cathode rays, wrote a four-­volume treatise on the one true science and called it “German Physics.” In the foreword he touched on “Japanese Physics,” “Arabian Physics” and “Negro Physics.” But he saved his wrath for the physics of the Jews. “The Jew wants to create contradictions everywhere and to separate relations, so that preferably, the poor naïve German can no longer make any sense of it whatsoever.” Einstein’s theories, he wrote, “never were even intended to be true.” Lenard just didn’t understand them.
“Jewish physics.” With Einstein’s theories now at the bedrock of modern science, the Nazi’s words have been justly forgotten. It seems almost perverse that Steven Gimbel, the chairman of the philosophy department at Gettysburg College, would want to bring back the old epithet and give it another spin. In his original new book, “Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion,” he considers the possibility that the Nazis were on to something. If you can look past the anti-Semitism, he proposes, “maybe relativity is ‘Jewish science’ after all.” What he means is that there might have been elements of Jewish thinking that gave rise to what is now recognized as one of the deepest insights of all time.

By casting Einstein as a philosophical anarchist, the Nazis missed the heart of his idea. Length contracts and time slows as an object speeds through space. But they have to in order to preserve what is truly absolute: the speed of light. Suppose Martians are watching us. Because light travels at a fixed velocity, what they are seeing from their perspective took place here about four minutes ago. If they could outrun the light beams bringing them the news, they could arrive before an event occurred — prevent the invasion of Poland, the attack on Pearl Harbor or the dropping of the atomic bomb. The theory Einstein discovered ensures that the world isn’t even crazier than it is.

Einstein, Gimbel argues, was especially well put to come upon such insights because he was a Jew. Gimbel is not saying that Einstein was deeply religious. When he talked about “the secrets of the Old One” or God playing dice, he was being a little ironic, using the idea of a deity he didn’t believe in as a metaphor for the laws of the universe. Nor does Gimbel find any particularly Jewish ideas in Einstein’s science or signs that, as the Nazis contended, it was politically motivated. I don’t think many will need convincing on those points. But Gimbel is an engaging writer. In demonstrating the obvious, he takes readers on enlightening excursions through the nature of Judaism, Hegelian philosophy, wherever his curiosity leads.


He dismisses Lenard’s argument that there was something characteristically Jewish about the way Einstein put together his theory. Instead of trekking through nature like a robust German scout, with magnifying glass and telescope in his rucksack, he sat alone in his room scribbling numbers like a shut-in. For an old-school physicist like Lenard, that wasn’t how science is done. Experiment and observation come first, providing the data that the theorists then seek to explain.

In fact, Lenard was falling behind the time. As the 20th century progressed, theory was often driving experiment — predicting from the logic of the equations phenomena for the experimenters to confirm. But there was nothing particularly Jewish about that. It was more Herr Professor Heisenberg’s style than Einstein’s. Einstein’s own ideas sprang from his intuitions about nature — insights that came from thought experiments. They were imaginary but in principle they could be done: trains flashing signals back and forth, an elevator hurtling down a shaft or floating through space.


What gives Einstein’s work a Jewish flavor, Gimbel believes, is an approach to the universe that reminds him of the way a Talmudic scholar seeks to understand God’s truth. It comes only in glimpses. “Thou shalt not steal” may seem clear enough. But is it stealing to keep a $100 bill you find on the ground? It depends. Did you see the person who might have dropped it? Was it found on a busy street or in a friend’s backyard? In a hotel lobby with a lost and found? Without the luxury of a God’s-eye view, we must reckon from different vantage points.

“The heart of the Talmudic view is that there is an absolute truth, but this truth is not directly and completely available to us,” Gimbel writes. “It turns out that exactly the same style of thinking occurs in the relativity theory and in some of Einstein’s other research.”

From our blinkered perspective we see qualities called space and time. But in relativity theory, the two can be combined mathematically into something more fundamental: a four-dimensional abstraction called the space-time interval. Time and space vary according to the motion of the observer. But from any vantage point, an object’s space-time interval would be the same — the higher truth that can be approached only from different angles. The same kind of thinking, Gimbel says, also led to Einstein’s thought experiments with the elevator showing that when we feel the pull of gravity from the Earth or the push of acceleration from the takeoff of a jet, we are experiencing the same under­lying phenomenon.

Gimbel isn’t saying that only a Jew could have discovered these things but that being Jewish just might have given Einstein an edge. In any case, someone like Lenard could not have made such leaps. His German physics, with its constipated view of science, was becoming as anachronistic as his politics.