Was Einstein a victim of theocratic autocracy?
Physics is a point of view for understanding the totality of man and his universe. John J. Hopfield (2024_12_08): Nobel Lecture: Physics is a point of view
Science feeds on physical contact. Theology must see and feel god if it is to be a science. Jeffrey Nicholls (2025): Cognitive Cosmogenesis: A systematic integration of Physics and Theology
For me one of the saddest stories in science is the career of Albert Einstein. He started brilliantly in 1905 with a series of papers which revolutionized physics: special relativity, E = mc2 , and important contributions to quantum mechanics inclusing the light quantum for which he won a Nobel prize nearly twenty years later. In 1915 he produced the general theory of relativity. This work established his reputation forever and opened the way for us to understand the universe as a whole.
As time went by, however, he became doubtful about quantum mechanics. He produced some trenchant critiques which forced the proponents of the new theory to think deeply. One of these, the EPR paper, brought our attention to spooky action at a distance, entanglement, which suggests that quantum mechanics lies deep in the foundation of the world before the advent of space and time. Einstein, Podolsky & Rosen (1935): Can the Quantum Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?"
In 1933 he gave the Herbert Spencer Lecture at the University of Oxford. This lecture marks a definitive break with quantum theory. Speaking of the work of de Broglie, Schrödinger, Dirac and Born he said:
I cannot help confessing that I myself accord to this interpretation no more than a transitory significance. I still believe in the possibility of giving a model of reality, a theory, that is to say, which shall represent events themselves and not merely the probability of their occurrence.
This was not to be. Quantum mechanics does in fact define linear hermitian operators which serve as models of reality, but these operators are usually multi-dimensional and describe a probabilistically distributed spectrum of results for any interaction. His principal problem was that quantum mechanics deals in these probabilities and he stated his objection in pithy statement:
Die Quantenmechanik ist sehr achtung-gebietend. Aber eine innere Stimme sagt mir, daß das doch nicht der wahre Jakob ist. Die Theorie liefert viel, aber dem Geheimnis des Alten bringt sie uns kaum näher. Jedenfalls bin ich überzeugt, daß der nicht würfelt.Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the "old one." I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice. Albert Einstein (1926): God does not throw dice
He was in other words a determinist, a follower of Laplace’s demon. Laplace wrote in his Philosophical Essay on Probabilities:
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. Laplace's demon - Wikipedia
This is an ancient belief. The omniscient and omnipotent God of Christianity, for instance has immediate providence over everything. Every event is known to God and ‘meant to be’. Aquinas, Summa, I, 22, 3: Does God have immediate providence over everything?
Charles Darwin was not the first to think of evolution, but he recognized that the essential component of evolutionary creativity is variation. He studied it in detail. Living in a rural community, he saw how the deliberate selection of breeding stock enabled farmers to gradually move their livestock in particular directions, toward faster horses, sweeter apples or finer wool. Charles Darwin (1875): The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication
A deterministic process cannot be creative. A reliable computer presented with a particular problem gives the same answer every time. This concept is embodied in the software engineering mantra garbage in garbage out which has become newly relevant with the artificially intelligent machines that trawl the internet for guidance. Without the probabilistic feature of quantum mechanics, it does not seem possible for the Universe to have evolved from a structureless, eternal, omnipotent initial singularity to its present state.
One of the special features of quantum mechanics is that it is symmetrical with respect to complexity. Once we have understood what goes on in a two dimensional quantum mechanical space (a two dimensional Hilbert space) there is not a lot more to be learned as we work our way up to an infinite dimensional Hilbert space which we might imagine to be capable of describing the whole universe, or even a small component of the universe, like the United States of America.
I am an inhabitant of Australia, a little offshore island in the middle of the vast Southern Ocean whose mother country used to be Great Britain. Although we have yet to fully extricated ourselves from the British Empire, our new imperial hegemon and potential defender is (or perhaps was) the US. We have contributed heavily to the purchase of US weapons.
Now, it seems, we are in trouble. Instead of looking after us, the the new US administration appears to be retreating into a solipsistic shell, shutting down its empire and loading all its old allies with heavyweight tariffs. An upsetting feature of this policy is that the presiding presidential genius does not seem to understand that putting a steep tariff on trading partners is precisely equivalent to increasing taxes on their own population.
There is of course a certain method in this madness, probably well understood by wealthier presidential advisors. By increasing taxes on the general population, the government can solidify the loyalty of the governing priesthood by giving them tax breaks.
How, you might wonder, does this have anything to do with the disastrous end to Einstein’s intellectual life. We come back god, determinism and monarchy.
Jesus of Nazareth was by all reports a good man. He attacked the ruling priesthood: You brood of vipers! How can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks (Matthew 12:34). The priests, naturally enough, had Jesus murdered. Blasphemy, however it is defined, is still a capital offence in many present day theocratic autocracies.
What we seem to be seeing in the US is a retreat to solipsistic monarchy motivated by a deep fear of uncertainty and variety. The US has for a long time tried to embrace contraries. On the one hand it prides itself as a democracy and the land of the free. On the other hand it claims to be a Christian nation, “In God we Trust”.
The democratic side of the country has elected a president with one foot in each camp. Most of us a see him as a toddler, a terrible two. The moment he was elected he emitted a flurry of executive orders which from an administrative point of view are really only memoranda of intent. Since then he has been slipping back. Threatened tariffs have not eventuated. The prices he was going to control on Day One have continued to rise and there is really nothing a US president can do about them.
Jesus preached “love god, love your enemies”. His ideas spread rapidly through the Roman Empire, probably because Christians supported a compassionate approach in contrast to the pagan notion that in life it is everyone for themselves. Christianity also promised eternal life and an excellent post mortem existence for true believers.
We see what happened. Three hundred years after Jesus was killed the emperor Constantine organized a council of bishops at Nicea who developed the Nicene creed, a succinct statement the imperial structure of Church in service of Empire. Christian compassion is nowhere to be seen in the Nicene Creed any more that it is to be found in the new US administration.
The Catholic Church went on to become a military-theological complex which became involved endless wars from the Crusades through the European wars of religion up to the current Holy War supported by the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church against the people of Ukraine, and the endless battle of the Christian US against Islam. The Roman Catholic Papacy has become an infallible model for the theocratic autocracy which is currently overtaking democracy throughout the world.
Trump’s embrace of Christianity in its current form is a mistake. The answer, it seems, would be to let nature take its course since the natural tendency of organized religion is to support determinism and the right side of politics.
So let us ditch all our weird religious beliefs and strange gods and face the fact that the universe itself is divine. It creates itself, and if we could interpret our knowledge of physics properly we would arrive at a credible scientific theology. All our problems have long since been solved during the evolution of the universe and we just have to learn the tricks that did it. Here is a quick recipe for cooking up a universe.
The idea is that the world has natural intelligence far in excess of any artificial intelligence that we have yet to discover. Among its most complex and amazing creations we find all forms of life from bacteria through forests to our own bodies. Each of us is a cooperative community of some 50 trillion independent cells.
Our cells all work together on a common plan to nurture and protect one another. They build, own and operate each one of us. If we can understand how this happens, organizing world peace for a mere ten billion independent people will be a pushover. At the foundation of all lies quantum mechanics, the outstanding creative social and political model that underlies the whole system.
The Universe begins from an initial singularity similar, perhaps, to a black hole. A black hole forms when gravitation becomes so powerful that it collapses the local quantum mechanical structure of spacetime.
Hawking and Ellis then model the growth of the Universe as a time reversed black hole, creating rather than destroying spacetime. Toward the end of his life, Hawking discovered that black holes may evaporate, but the process is extremely slow, nothing like a big bang. Hawking & Ellis (1975): The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time
We can imagine an alternative model which begins with naked gravitation. Naked gravitation is an eternal, structureless omnipotent entity very similar to the God that Aquinas developed from Aristotle’s unmoved mover. Feynman and others speculate that the total energy of the universe is zero. Naked gravitation therefore has no energy, and because it is no structure it has no way to represent information. It cannot be omniscient like the tradition god.
Let us then imagine that Hilbert space and quantum mechanics emerge in naked gravitation. Because it has no structure the Hilbert space that appears must be random. Quantum mechanics, by its natural process of superposition, identifies stationary states within this space. These states induce naked gravitation to decay into the two forms of energy, potential and kinetic, which we identify in the world. The kinetic energy attaches to stationary quantum states to make them into real particles. The potential energy enables these particles to interact with each other and form more complex structures.
We now have something like a black hole, running backwards. Three more steps. First, let us imagine that, as particle experiments show, all the elementary particles fall into one of two categories, bosons and fermions. The bosons are messengers, like photons and gluons that carry signals between fermions. The fermions are massive sources, particles like electrons and quarks. Between them, these two categories of particle make all the structures, like our own bodies, that we observe in the world.
The second step is the the formation of classical Minkowski space, the space of Einstein’s special relativity. This space has a special feature, null geodesics, that accomodate massless bosons travelling at the speed of light. It also has a three dimensional section, a Euclidean space which enables the free movement of fermions, which are subject to the exclusion principle.
Finally, as Einstein discovered, we can assemble the Minkowski space generated by bosons and fermions into the the field equations of gravitation, general relativity, which gives us the overall structure of the Universe
In the final paragraph of his paper, Einstein writes:
However, the postulate of general relativity cannot reveal to us anything new and different about the essence of the various processes in nature than what the special theory of relativity taught us already. Albert Einstein (1915): The Field Equations of Gravitation
The uncertainty in quantum mechanics lays the random foundation necessary for the evolution. The intelligence of quantum mechanics, able to select stationary states from random variation of Hilbert space, lays the foundation for the creation of particles. The whole system, constructed as an analogy of the Christian god, is the physical mind of the divine universe.
