More Than Meets the Eye

by Richard Swenson

  Actually, there were two major occasions when Einstein published on what has come to be known as relativity: special relativity in 1905 (easier to understand), and general relativity in 1915 (much harder to understand). Aspects of these theories are technical and mathematically sophisticated, yet we can summarize his findings in understandable language yielding startling truths about our world and the God who designed it.

  Special relativity (1905)— This theory was the first of his two landmark relativity publications. In brief, this theory deals with the speed of light. Special here is used in the sense of “special, restricted case,” and relativity refers to measuring phenomena relative to one another rather than measuring them absolutely. It should be noted that this theory produced perhaps the most famous equation in the world, E = mc2.

  In brief, special relativity holds—either directly or by implication—that:

  The speed of light is always the same for all observers.

  Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

  Time between two events is relative.

  Space-time is a continuum.

  Energy and mass are interchangeable according to the formula E = mc2.

  The fundamental postulate in this theory is that the speed of light is always the same for all observers. If a beam of light is directed at you, it travels 670 million mph. If you ran away from that light at 600 million mph, one would think that from your perspective the light beam would only appear to travel a speed of 70 million mph (670 - 600 = 70). Likewise, if you ran toward the light beam at 600 million mph, one would think that the light beam would appear to approach you at 1,270 million mph (670 + 600 = 1,270). Einstein, however, proved that the speed of light always remains the same regardless of how fast you travel toward it or away from it.

  This is counterintuitive. But it holds true not only in the complicated mathematics involved but also by virtue of experimental measurements. For example, if I ran toward you at half the speed of light, during the time your watch elapses one second, my watch would elapse 1.1547 seconds.5 This might seem a small difference. But as the speeds approach the speed of light, the effect of the difference approaches infinity.

  General relativity (1915)— Einstein’s second relativity theory, published ten years later, took the earlier more specialized postulates (special relativity) and generalized them (general relativity). In brief, this theory is about the geometry of space, and establishes a new perspective on gravity.

  Special relativity dealt with velocity. General relativity goes beyond this to deal with acceleration. The proof involved is so difficult that it is beyond even the abilities of most highly trained scientists. Einstein asserted that gravity results from a curvature of space-time, thus launching the motto: “Matter makes space bend. Space tells matter how to move.” In addition, general relativity also makes precise predictions about how gravity bends light.

  The implications of relativity are confusing to normal thought and are abstractions to our usual dimensions of life. Yet the implications are indispensable for understanding the rules that govern the very large and very fast phenomena of the universe— especially light and gravity.

  Many counterintuitive associations follow from Einstein’s remarkable work, such as: energy and matter are different forms of the same thing; space and time are not separate entities but a single whole appropriately called space-time; light is both a wave and a particle.

  Einstein was noted for his wit and humility. Not surprisingly, this aspect of his personality extended even to his discussions of relativity. “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it’s only a minute,” he famously quipped. “But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.” He was not only able to penetrate physics brilliantly, but his insights often ranged into philosophy and politics as well. In one instance, while at the Sorbonne in Paris, he predicted: “If my theory of relativity is proven correct, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.”6

  When he first returned to Germany in 1914 to teach in Berlin, he reassumed his German citizenship. The rise of Nazism, however, offended both his pacifist views and his Jewish identity. While away visiting England and the U. S. in 1933, the Nazi government seized all his belongings. This prompted his relocation to New Jersey where he lived in a humble home and worked at Princeton’s new Institute for Advanced Study, a scholarly retreat largely created around him. He became an American citizen in 1940, and was instrumental in prompting President Roosevelt to begin a nuclear weapons program to counter the rising threat of Nazi weapons. Although offered the presidency of the fledgling state of Israel in 1952, he declined as unworthy of the honor. Albert Einstein died in Princeton in 1955.

  Many of the implications of relativity seem almost spiritual in their essence—certainly mystical at the least. Understanding space-time as a continuum, for example, means that we can never locate the center of the universe (of course our cat knows otherwise).7 What does God mean by that? Why is light such a central concept in physics? Does this at all tie in with God calling Himself light?8 Why is there a “light barrier” at the speed of light? If an object were accelerated to the speed of light, its dimension would go to zero, its mass to infinity, and time would stand still. How in the world did God ever dream that up? How does this newfound relativity of time apply to our temporal existence versus the eternity to follow? Is God in time or outside of time? Did God invent time for our age or will there be time in heaven? If not, will there at least be sequence? Did God create time when He created matter and energy? How can energy and matter be two aspects of the same thing? How can space and time be a continuum? Are there other equivalencies that we don’t yet know about?

  The theory of relativity yielded important answers to the subtle workings of the universe. But it also spawned an entire new set of questions—many of which will be addressed more fully in Chapter 11. For those of us who always see God lurking in the shadows, the twinkle in His eye is unmistakable. What surprises will He have for inquisitive physicists next? Read on.

  QUANTUM MECHANICS

  As if Einstein’s theories of relativity were not abstract, provocative, and counterintuitive enough, at the same time quantum mechanics made its debut. Also called quantum physics, this entirely new way of looking at the subatomic world was devised between 1900 and 1930 primarily by six men: Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg.9 The word quantum comes from the discovery in 1900 by Planck that energy exists in small discrete bundles called quanta rather than in a continuous spectrum of arbitrary possibilities.

  In essence, quantum mechanics deals with the world of the very small. If relativity is strange, quantum mechanics is thoroughly weird. When we enter the quantum world, reality literally alters beyond recognition. “Few if any people ever grasp quantum mechanics at a ‘soulful’ level,” explains Columbia University’s quantum field theorist Brian Greene. “The only thing we know with certainty is that quantum mechanics absolutely and unequivocally shows us that a number of basic concepts essential to our understanding of the familiar everyday world fail to have any meaning when our focus narrows to the microscopic realm.”10

  “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics,” stated the late physicist Richard Feynman. “Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will go down the drain into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.”11

  John Polkinghorne, who had a distinguished career as a particle physicist at Cambridge University before becoming an Anglican priest in 1982, tells us that there were two great discoveries in physics in the twentieth century—special relativity and quantum mechanics. Of the two, Polkinghorne believes that the more revolutionary was quantum
mechanics.12 In comparing quantum theories to relativity, Feynman—who was one of the world’s most noted practitioners of quantum mechanics—wrote, “There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in one way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”13

  It is tempting to believe that as we extend our thinking down to the quantum world of subatomic size we will find everything similar to our visible world, only smaller. In other words, the only difference would be one of dimension. Such, however, is not the case—not even close. Instead, as we descend into the quantum realm we find a completely different reality awaiting us. The dimensions are different, to be sure. But so is the very essence of particle behavior.

  The first thing, therefore, that we must do is suspend the prejudice of our macro-perspective. Easier said than done. Even if we are willing to open up our thinking to a new reality, we still don’t know exactly how to do it. And we are completely unprepared for just how much stretching the quantum world will subject us to. “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it,” observed Danish physicist Niels Bohr.

  “It is clear by now that all interpretations of quantum mechanics are to some extent crazy,”14 explains cognitive scientist and consciousness expert David J. Chalmers. “Quantum mechanics gives us a remarkably successful calculus for predicting the results of empirical observations, but it is extraordinarily difficult to make sense of the picture of the world that it delivers. How could our world be the way it has to be, in order for the predictions of quantum mechanics to succeed? There is nothing even approaching a consensus on the answer to this question. Just as with consciousness, it often seems that no solution to the problem of quantum mechanics can be satisfactory.”15 Finally, Chalmers yields to an empiric approach: “Perhaps the dominant view among working physicists is that one simply should not ask what is going on in the real world, behind the quantum mechanical calculus. The calculus works, and that is that.”16

  What is it about quantum mechanics that elicits such unsettled responses from the scientific community, and that caused even Einstein himself to rebel against it? If summed up in a word, perhaps that word would be indeterminism. Let me attempt to illustrate. In our macro-world, a chair is a chair and a rock is a rock. If you put the chair or the rock in a certain place, it would stay there. You could sit on them, and they would be solid. You could come back tomorrow and they would be the same as today.

  But that chair and rock are made up of atoms and subatomic particles … and the atoms and subatomic particles do not behave themselves. This is, in essence, the problem. Atoms and subatomic particles are unpredictable. They will not stay put. If you come back tomorrow, you have no way of knowing where you will find them. If you tried to sit on them, you would discover they are a cloud of probabilities. If you tried to measure them, you would encounter uncertainty. “Every quantum bit has the potentiality to be here and there, now and then, a multiple capacity to act on the world,” explain Oxford Brookes’ Ian Marshall and Danah Zohar.17 These particles are therefore not reliably at any one place at any given time. “The quantum world,” explains science writer Ian Stewart, “is a swirling fog of probabilities, in which chance is a fundamental feature of existence, and where matter has a degree of fuzziness so that it may be doing several different things at the same time.”18

  Rarely can we say anything useful about the future behavior of a single quantum event. Therefore the words unpredictability, indeterminism, chance, randomness, and uncertainty all show up with significant frequency in the discussion of quantum mechanics. It is important to understand just how much these words represented heresy to classical physics. On a macroscopic scale where quantum effects are usually not noticeable, nature seems to conform to deterministic laws. But on an atomic level, uncertainty is indeed inherent in quantum systems.

  Werner Heisenberg, a German physicist and patriarch of quantum theory, became famous by clarifying and quantifying one aspect of this indeterminism. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle explains that in the world of subatomic behavior, many of our measurements cannot be precisely known. Things we take for granted in our visible world simply do not hold in the quantum world. To the casual observer this might not seem to matter much. But for the classical physicist, this was awkward in the extreme.

  In particular, uncertainty deals with paired sets of parameters known as conjugate variables— such as position and momentum, or energy and time. Basically the principle asserts that we cannot know each value of the pair precisely. Once we increase precision in one value, we force greater imprecision on the other value. This is not just a problem with our instruments; it is a reality within the quantum world itself. But in order to predict what is going to happen with these particles in the future it is essential to know both values precisely.

  Let’s take the case of the electron, perhaps the most used illustration for the uncertainty principle. We cannot know simultaneously both the electron’s location and its velocity (more formally, its position and its momentum). The more we try to pin down the electron’s location, the less we can know about its velocity. And the more we try to pin down its velocity, the less we can know about its location.

  If we were to trap an electron in a box and then try to increasingly constrict its space until we could pinpoint both its velocity and location, we would find the electron getting more and more frantic, explains Greene, “bouncing off of the walls of the box with increasingly frenetic and unpredictable speed. Nature does not allow its constituents to be cornered.”19 We are therefore forced by nature into making a decision: which do we want to know precisely—the location or the velocity? We must choose, because it is impossible for us to know both precisely. “A certain amount of ignorance for the human observer is fundamentally built into the sub-microscopic world of quantum mechanics,” explains astrophysicist Hugh Ross.20

  As a consequence of this principle we can deduce that the universe is a very hyperactive place when examined on smaller and smaller distances and shorter and shorter time scales. “The uncertainty principle ensures that nothing is ever perfectly at rest,” explains Greene. “All objects undergo quantum jitter, for if they didn’t we would know where they were and how fast they were moving with complete precision, in violation of Heisenberg’s dictum.”21 Such “quantum jitter” means that all borders are fuzzy. In lieu of precision, the best we can do under these new circumstances is construct probabilities.

  Classical physics, however, preferred precision over probabilities. Actually, classical physics insisted on precision. It turns out that the universe was not listening, for despite objections the universe proved to be indeterministic at its most basic level. Newton’s dream of a universal clockwork machine morphs in quantum physics to a universal roulette wheel or a game of dice.22 Einstein, for one, was appalled. His initial unwillingness to accept this finding led to the well-known quip that God does not play dice with the universe. (To which his friend Niels Bohr retorted: “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”23) In disgust, he said he would “rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gambling house, than a physicist” if strict causality had to be abandoned.24

  In the 1920s and 1930s spiritually minded people found the postulates of quantum mechanics theologically threatening. Today, however, almost all observers view the findings as instead theologically interesting. Quantum mechanics occupies the interface where physics and metaphysics meet. There are proven absolute limits on human knowledge, on our ability to measure, and on our ability to predict the future. The uncertainty associated with quantum functioning gives God an opportunity to intervene in history without blatantly revealing
His activity. This allows new possibilities for the phenomena of miracles and answered prayer—possibilities that scientists can neither prove nor refute. It also opens a metaphysical door for the broader spiritual vistas of creation, providence, and free will.

  Max Planck, one of the primary originators of quantum theory, was not spiritually shaken by its implications. Instead he maintained that both science and religion wage a “tireless battle against skepticism and dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition,” with the goal: “toward God!”25

  SUPERSTRINGS

  Relativity and quantum mechanics both appeared in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Both were unsettling in their implications. Both required an entire recalibration of the scientific paradigm. Both were measurable and provable. Yet both, it seemed, could not be true. The theories collided with one another, appearing to be mutually exclusive.

  This problem persisted for half a century until a possible reconciliation occurred with the arrival of superstrings. Within the theory of superstrings, general relativity and quantum mechanics not only tolerated each other, but they actually required each other. The irreconcilable conflict between quantum mechanics and general relativity’s gravity was solved when superstrings not only supported quantum mechanics, but in doing so actually predicted gravity in a serendipitous unprecedented finding. For the first time, the world of the very small and the world of the very large could be conceptually merged.

  Foremost string theorist Edward Witten of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study (Einstein’s abode) likes to call string theory a piece of twenty-first-century physics that dropped into the twentieth century by mistake. In its infant form, the theory was first postulated by Italian physicist Gabriele Veneziano in 1968. The theory then experienced only a low-level research interest among some scientists for over a decade until it enjoyed a resurgence of popularity from 1984 to 1986 (a period known as the “first superstring revolution”) with the publication of more than a thousand research papers worldwide.