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Gerald Holton

Einstein’s Third Paradise

Historians of modern science have

good reason to be grateful to Paul Arthur
Schilpp, professor of philosophy and
Methodist clergyman but better known
as the editor of a series of volumes on
“Living Philosophers,” which included
several volumes on scientist-philoso-
phers. His motto was: “The asking of
questions about a philosopher’s mean-
ing while he is alive.” And to his ever-
lasting credit, he persuaded Albert Ein-
stein to do what he had resisted all his

Gerald Holton is Mallinckrodt Research Professor
of Physics and Research Professor of History of
Science at Harvard University. A Fellow of the
American Academy since 1956, he served the
Academy for several decades in a variety of of-
½ces. Soon after his election as Editor, he founded
“Dædalus” as the quarterly journal of the Acade-
my, with its ½rst issue appearing in the winter of
1958. At the request of the Albert Einstein estate,
he initiated and for several years supervised the
conversion of the collection of Einstein’s largely
unpublished correspondence and manuscripts into
an archive suitable for scholarly study. Among his
recent books are “Einstein, History, and Other
Passions” (2000), “Physics, the Human Adven-
ture” (with S. G. Brush, 2001), and “Ivory
Bridges: Connecting Science and Society” (con
G. Sonnert, 2002).

Dædalus Fall 2003

years: to sit down to write, In 1946 at age
sixty-seven, an extensive autobiography
–forty-½ve pages long in print.

To be sure, Einstein excluded there
most of what he called “the merely per-
sonal.” But on the very ½rst page he
shared a memory that will guide us to
the main conclusion of this essay. Lui
wrote that when still very young, he
had searched for an escape from the
seemingly hopeless and demoralizing
chase after one’s desires and strivings.
That escape offered itself ½rst in reli-
gion. Although brought up as the son of
“entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents,"
through the teaching in his Catholic pri-
mary school, mixed with his private in-
struction in elements of the Jewish reli-
gion, Einstein found within himself a
“deep religiosity”–indeed, “the reli-
gious paradise of youth.”

The accuracy of this memorable expe-

rience is documented in other sources,
including the biographical account of
Einstein’s sister, Maja. There she makes
a plausible extrapolation: that Einstein’s
“religious feeling” found expression in
later years in his deep interest and ac-
tions to ameliorate the dif½culties to
which fellow Jews were being subjected,
actions ranging from his ½ghts against
anti-Semitism to his embrace of Zionism
(in the hope, as he put it in one of his

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Einstein’s
Third
Paradise

speeches [April 20, 1935], that it would
include a “peaceable and friendly coop-
eration with the Arab people”). As we
shall see, Maja’s extrapolation of the
reach of her brother’s early religious
feelings might well have gone much fur-
ther.

The primacy of young Albert’s First

Paradise came to an abrupt end. As
he put it early in his “Autobiographical
Notes,” through reading popular science
books he came to doubt the stories of
the Bible. Thus he passed ½rst through
what he colorfully described as a “posi-
tively fanatic indulgence in free think-
ing.”1 But then he found new enchant-
menti. Primo, at age twelve, he read a lit-
tle book on Euclidean plane geometry–
he called it “holy,” a veritable “Wun-
der.” Then, still as a boy, he became en-
tranced by the contemplation of that
huge external, extra-personal world of
science, which presented itself to him
“like a great, eternal riddle.” To that
study one could devote oneself, ½nding
thereby “inner freedom and security.”
He believed that choosing the “road to
this Paradise,” although quite antitheti-
cal to the ½rst one and less alluring, did
prove itself trustworthy. Infatti, by age
sixteen, he had his father declare him to
the authorities as “without confession,"
and for the rest of his life he tried to dis-
sociate himself from organized religious
activities and associations, inventing his
own form of religiousness, just as he
was creating his own physics.

These two realms appeared to him
eventually not as separate as numerous
biographers would suggest. On the con-
trary, my task here is to demonstrate
that at the heart of Einstein’s mature
identity there developed a fusion of his
First and his Second Paradise–into a

1 All translations from the original German are
this author’s, where necessary.

Third Paradise, where the meaning of a
life of brilliant scienti½c activity drew on
the remnants of his fervent ½rst feelings
of youthful religiosity.

For this purpose, we shall have to make

what may seem like an excursus, but one
that will in the end throw light on his
overwhelming passion, throughout his
scienti½c and personal life, to bring
about the joining of these and other
seemingly incommensurate aspects,
whether in nature or society. In 1918 he
gave a glimpse of it in a speech (“Prinzipi-
en der Forschung”) honoring the sixtieth
birthday of his friend and colleague Max
Planck, to whose rather metaphysical
conception about the purpose of science
Einstein had drifted while moving away
from the quite opposite, positivistic one
of an early intellectual mentor, Ernst
Mach. As Einstein put it in that speech,
the search for one “simpli½ed and lucid
image of the world” not only was the
supreme task for a scientist, but also cor-
responded to a psychological need: A
flee from personal, everyday life, with all
its dreary disappointments, and escape
into the world of objective perception
and thought. Into the formation of such
a world picture the scientist could place
the “center of gravity of his emotional
life [Gefühlsleben].” And in a sentence
with special signi½cance, he added that
persevering on the most dif½cult scien-
ti½c problems requires “a state of feeling
[Gefühlszustand] similar to that of a reli-
gious person or a lover.”

Throughout Einstein’s writings, one

can watch him searching for that world
picture, for a comprehensive Weltan-
schauung, one yielding a total conception
Quello, as he put it, would include every
empirical fact (Gesamtheit der Erfahrungs-
tatsachen)–not only of physical science,
but also of life.

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Gerald
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Einstein was of course not alone in
this pursuit. The German literature of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries contained a seemingly obses-
sive flood of books and essays on the
oneness of the world picture. They in-
cluded writings by both Ernst Mach and
Max Planck, E, for good measure, UN
1912 general manifesto appealing to
scholars in all ½elds of knowledge to
combine their efforts in order to “bring
forth a comprehensive Weltanschauung.”
The thirty-four signatories included
Ernst Mach, Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand
Tönnies, David Hilbert, Jacques Loeb–
and the then still little-known Albert
Einstein.

But while for most others this cultural-

ly profound longing for unity–already
embedded in the philosophical and liter-
ary works they all had studied–was
mostly the subject of an occasional op-
portunity for exhortation (nothing came
of the manifesto), for Einstein it was
different, a constant preoccupation re-
sponding to a persistent, deeply felt in-
tellectual and psychological need.

This fact can be most simply illustrat-
ed in Einstein’s scienti½c writings. As a
½rst example, I turn to one of my favor-
ite manuscripts in his archive. It is a
lengthy manuscript in his handwriting,
of around 1920, titled, in translation,
“Fundamental Ideas and Methods of
Relativity.” It contains the passage in
which Einstein revealed what in his
words was “the happiest thought of my
life [der gluecklichste Gedanke meines
Lebens]”–a thought experiment that
came to him in 1907: nothing less than
the de½nition of the equivalence princi-
ple, later developed in his general rela-
tivity theory. It occurred to Einstein–
thinking ½rst of all in visual terms, COME
was usual for him–that if a man were
falling from the roof of his house and
tried to let anything drop, it would only

move alongside him, thus indicating the
equivalence of acceleration and gravity.
In Einstein’s words, “the acceleration of
free fall with respect to the material is
therefore a mighty argument that the
postulate of relativity is to be extended
to coordinate systems that move non-
uniformly relative to one another . . . . "

For the present purpose I want to draw

attention to another passage in that
manuscript. His essay begins in a largely
impersonal, pedagogic tone, similar to
that of his ½rst popular book on relativi-
ty, published in 1917. But in a surprising
modo, in the section titled “General Rel-
ativity Theory,” Einstein suddenly
switches to a personal account. He re-
ports that in the construction of the spe-
cial theory, the “thought concerning the
Faraday [experiment] on electromagnet-
ic induction played for me a leading
role.” He then describes that old experi-
ment, in words similar to the ½rst para-
graph of his 1905 relativity paper, con-
centrating on the well-known fact, dis-
covered by Faraday in 1831, that the in-
duced current is the same whether it is
the coil or the magnet that is in motion
relative to the other, whereas the “theo-
retical interpretation of the phenome-
non in these two cases is quite differ-
ent.” While other physicists, for many
decades, had been quite satis½ed with
that difference, here Einstein reveals a
central preoccupation at the depth of his
soul: “The thought that one is dealing
here with two fundamentally different
cases was for me unbearable [war mir
unertraeglich]. The difference between
these two cases could not be a real differ-
ence . . . . The phenomenon of the electro-
magnetic induction forced me to postu-
late the (special) relativity principle.”

Let us step back for a moment to con-

template that word “unbearable.” It is
reinforced by a passage in Einstein’s

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Einstein’s
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Paradise

“Autobiographical Notes”: “By and by I
despaired [verzweifelte ich] of discovering
the true laws by means of constructive
efforts based on known facts. The longer
and the more despairingly I tried, IL
more I came to the conviction that only
the discovery of a universal formal prin-
ciple could lead us to assured results.”
He might have added that the same pos-
tulational method had already been pio-
neered in their main works by two of his
heroes, Euclid and Newton.

Other physicists, for example Bohr
and Heisenberg, also reported that at
times they were brought to despair in
their research. Still other scientists were
evidently even brought to suicide by
such disappointment. For researchers
½ercely engaged at the very frontier, IL
psychological stakes can be enormous.
Einstein was able to resolve his discom-
fort by turning, as he did in his 1905 rela-
tivity paper, to the postulation of two for-
mal principles (the principle of relativity
throughout physics, and the constancy
of the velocity of light in vacuo), E
adopting such postulation as one of his
tools of thought.

Einstein also had a second method to

bridge the unbearable differences in a
theory: generalizing it, so that the appar-
ently differently grounded phenomena
are revealed to be coming from the same
base. We know from a letter to Max von
Laue of January 17, 1952, found in the
archive, that Einstein’s early concern
with the physics of fluctuation phenom-
ena was the common root of his three
great papers of 1905, on such different
topics as the quantum property of light,
Brownian movement, and relativity. Ma
even earlier, in a letter of April 14, 1901,
to his school friend Marcel Grossmann,
Einstein had revealed his generalizing
approach to physics while working on
his very ½rst published paper, on capil-

larity. There he tried to bring together in
one theory the opposing behaviors of
bodies: moving upward when a liquid is
in a capillary tube, but downward when
the liquid is released freely. In that letter,
he spelled out his interpenetrating emo-
tional and scienti½c needs in one sen-
tence: “It is a wonderful feeling [ein herr-
liches Gefühl] to recognize the unity of a
complex of appearances which, to direct
sense experiences, appear to be quite
separate things.”

The postulation of universal formal

principles, and the discovery among
phenomena of a unity, of Einheitlichkeit,
through the generalization of the basic
theory–those were two of Einstein’s
favorite weapons,2 as his letters and
manuscripts show. Writing to Willem de
Sitter on November 4, 1916, he con-
fessed: “I am driven by my need to gen-
eralize [mein Verallgemeinerungsbeduerf-
nis].” That need, that compulsion, era
also deeply entrenched in German cul-
ture and resonated with, and supported,
Einstein’s approach. Let me just note in
passing that while still a student at the
Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, in order
to get his certi½cate to be a high school
science teacher, Einstein took optional
courses on Immanuel Kant and Goethe,
whose central works he had studied
since his teenage years.

That Verallgemeinerungsbeduerfnis was
clearly a driving force behind Einstein’s
career trajectory. Thus he generalized
from old experimental results, like Fara-
day’s, to arrive at special relativity, In
which he uni½ed space and time, electric
and magnetic forces, energy and mass,
and so resolved the whole long dispute

2 A third was his use of freely adopted (non-
Kantian) categorie, or thematic presupposi-
zioni. The prominent ones include unity or
uni½cation; logical parsimony and necessity;
symmetry; simplicity; causality; completeness
of explanation; continuum; E, Ovviamente,
constancy and invariance.

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Gerald
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science

among scientists between adherence to a
mechanistic versus an electromagnetic
world picture. Then he generalized the
special theory to produce what he ½rst
signi½cantly called, in an article of 1913,
not the general but the generalized relativity
theory. Paul Ehrenfest wrote him in puz-
zlement: “How far will this Verallge-
meinerung go on?” And, ½nally, Einstein
threw himself into the attempt of a
grand uni½cation of quantum physics
and of gravity: a uni½ed ½eld theory. È
an example of an intense and perhaps
unique, life-long, tenacious dedication,
despite Einstein’s failure at the very end
–which nevertheless, as a program, set
the stage for the ambition of some of
today’s best scientists, who have taken
over that search for the Holy Grail of
physics–a theory of everything.

So much for trying to get a glimpse of

the mind of Einstein as scientist. But at
this point, for anyone who has studied
this man’s work and life in detail, a new
thought urges itself forward. As in his
science, Einstein also lived under the
compulsion to unify–in his politics, In
his social ideals, even in his everyday
behavior. He abhorred all nationalisms,
and called himself, even while in Berlin
during World War I, a European. Later
he supported the One World movement,
dreamed of a uni½ed supernational form
of government, helped to initiate the in-
ternational Pugwash movement of sci-
entists during the Cold War, and was as
ready to befriend visiting high school
students as the Queen of the Belgians.
His instinctive penchant for democracy
and dislike of hierarchy and class differ-
ences must have cost him greatly in the
early days, as when he addressed his
chief professor at the Swiss Polytechnic
Institute, on whose recommendation his
entrance to any academic career would
depend, not by any title, but simply as

“Herr Weber.” And at the other end of
the spectrum, in his essay on ethics, Ein-
stein cited Moses, Jesus, and Buddha as
equally valid prophets.

No boundaries, no barriers; none in

life, as there are none in nature. Ein-
stein’s life and his work were so mutual-
ly resonant that we recognize both to
have been carried on together in the
service of one grand project–the fusion
into one coherency.

There were also no boundaries or barri-

ers between Einstein’s scienti½c and reli-
gious feelings. After having passed from
the youthful ½rst, religious paradise into
his second, immensely productive scien-
ti½c one, he found in his middle years a
fusion of those two motivations–his
Third Paradise.

We had a hint of this development in
his remark in 1918, where he observed
the parallel states of feeling of the scien-
tist and of the “religious person.” Other
hints come from the countless, BENE-
known quotations in which Einstein
referred to God–doing it so often that
Niels Bohr had to chide him. Karl Pop-
per remarked that in conversations with
Einstein, “I learned nothing . . . . he tend-
ed to express things in theological terms,
and this was often the only way to argue
with him. I found it ½nally quite uninter-
esting.”

But two other reports may point to the
more profound layer of Einstein’s deep-
est convictions. One is his remark to one
of his assistants, Ernst Straus: “What
really interests me is whether God had
any choice in the creation of the world.”
The second is Einstein’s reply to a curi-
ous telegram.

In 1929, Boston’s Cardinal O’Connell
branded Einstein’s theory of relativity as
“befogged speculation producing uni-
versal doubt about God and His Cre-
ation,” and as implying “the ghastly

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Einstein’s
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Paradise

apparition of atheism.” In alarm, Nuovo
York’s Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein asked
Einstein by telegram: “Do you believe in
God? Stop. Answer paid 50 words.” In
his response, for which Einstein needed
but twenty-½ve (German) parole, he
stated his beliefs succinctly: “I believe in
Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in
the lawful harmony of the world, Non in
a God Who concerns Himself with the
fate and the doings of mankind.” The
rabbi cited this as evidence that Einstein
was not an atheist, and further declared
that “Einstein’s theory, if carried to its
logical conclusion, would bring to man-
kind a scienti½c formula for monothe-
ism.” Einstein wisely remained silent on
that point.

The good rabbi might have had in
mind the writings of the Religion of Sci-
ence movement, which had flourished in
Germany under the distinguished aus-
pices of Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Ost-
wald, and their circle (the Monisten-
bund), and also in America, chiefly in
Paul Carus’s books and journals, ad esempio
The Open Court, which carried the words
“Devoted to the Religion of Science” on
its masthead.

If Einstein had read Carus’s book, IL

Religion of Science (1893), he may have
agreed with one sentence in it: “Scien-
ti½c truth is not profane, it is sacred.”
Infatti, the charismatic view of science
in the lives of some scientists has been
the subject of much scholarly study, for
example in Joseph Ben-David’s Scienti½c
Growth (1991), and earlier in Robert K.
Merton’s magisterial book of 1938, Sci-
ence, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-
Century England. In the section entitled
“The Integration of Religion and Sci-
ence,” Merton notes that among the sci-
entists he studied, “the religious ethic,
considered as a social force, so conse-
crated science as to make it a highly re-

spected and laudable focus of attention.”
The social scientist Bernard H. Gustin
elaborated on this perception, writing
that science at the highest level is charis-
matic because scientists devoted to such
tasks are “thought to come into contact
with what is essential in the universe.” I
believe this is precisely why so many
who knew little about Einstein’s scien-
ti½c writing flocked to catch a glimpse of
him and to this day feel somehow uplift-
ed by contemplating his iconic image.

Starting in the late 1920s, Einstein be-

came more and more serious about clari-
fying the relationship between his tran-
scendental and his scienti½c impulses.
He wrote several essays on religiosity;
½ve of them, composed between 1930
and the early 1950s, are reproduced in
his book Ideas and Opinions. In those
chapters we can watch the result of a
struggle that had its origins in his school
years, as he developed, or rather invent-
ed, a religion that offered a union with
science.

In the evolution of religion, he re-

marked, there were three developmental
stages. At the ½rst, “with primitive man
it is above all fear that evokes religious
notions. This ‘religion of fear’. . . is in an
important degree stabilized by the for-
mation of a special priestly caste” that
colludes with secular authority to take
advantage of it for its own interest. IL
next step–“admirably illustrated in the
Jewish scriptures”–was a moral religion
embodying the ethical imperative, “a
development [Quello] continued in the
New Testament.” Yet it had a fatal flaw:
“the anthropomorphic character of the
concept of God,” easy to grasp by
“underdeveloped minds” of the masses
while freeing them of responsibility.
This flaw disappears at Einstein’s

third, mature stage of religion, to which
he believed mankind is now reaching

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and which the great spirits (he names
Democritus, St. Francis of Assisi, E
Spinoza) had already attained–namely,
the “cosmic religious feeling” that sheds
all anthropomorphic elements. In de-
scribing the driving motivation toward
that ½nal, highest stage, Einstein uses
the same ideas, even some of the same
frasi, with which he had celebrated
½rst his religious and then his scienti½c
paradise: “The individual feels the futili-
ty of human desires, and aims at the sub-
limity and marvelous order which reveal
themselves both in nature and in the
world of thought.” “Individual existence
impresses him as a sort of prison, and he
wants to experience the universe as a
single, signi½cant whole.” Of course!
Here as always, there has to be the intox-
icating experience of uni½cation. E così
Einstein goes on, “I maintain that the
cosmic religious feeling is the strongest
and noblest motive for scienti½c re-
search . . . . A contemporary has said not
unjustly that in this materialistic age of
ours the serious scienti½c workers are
the only profoundly religious people.”
In another of his essays on religion,
Einstein points to a plausible source for
his speci½c formulations: “Those indi-
viduals to whom we owe the great cre-
ative achievements of science were all
of them imbued with a truly religious
conviction that this universe of ours is
something perfect, and susceptible
through the rational striving for knowl-
edge. If this conviction had not been a
strongly emotional one, and if those
searching for knowledge had not been
inspired by Spinoza’s amor dei intellectu-
alis, they would hardly have been capa-
ble of that untiring devotion which
alone enables man to attain his greatest
achievements.”

I believe we can guess at the ½rst time

Einstein read Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics

(Ethica Ordinae Geometrico Demonstrata),
a system constructed on the Euclidean
model of deductions from propositions.
Soon after getting his ½rst real job at the
patent of½ce, Einstein joined with two
friends to form a discussion circle, meet-
ing once or twice a week in what they
called, with gallows humor, the Akade-
mie Olympia. We know the list of books
they read and discussed. High among
them, reportedly at Einstein’s sugges-
zione, was Spinoza’s Ethics, which he
read afterwards several times more.
Even when his sister Maja joined him in
Princeton in later life and was con½ned
to bed by an illness, he thought that
reading a good book to her would help,
and chose Spinoza’s Ethics for that pur-
pose.

By that time Spinoza’s work and life
had long been important to Einstein. Lui
had written an introduction to a biogra-
phy of Spinoza (by his son-in-law, Rud-
olf Kayser, 1946); he had contributed to
the Spinoza Dictionary (1951); he had re-
ferred to Spinoza in many of his letters;
and he had even composed a poem in
Spinoza’s honor. He admired Spinoza
for his independence of mind, his deter-
ministic philosophical outlook, his skep-
ticism about organized religion and or-
thodoxy–which had resulted in his ex-
communication from his synagogue in
1656–and even for his ascetic prefer-
ence, which compelled him to remain in
poverty and solitude to live in a sort of
spiritual ecstasy, instead of accepting a
professorship at the University of Hei-
delberg. Originally neglected, Spinoza’s
Ethics, published only posthumously,
profoundly influenced other thinkers,
such as Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich
Schleiermacher, Goethe (who called him
“our common saint”), Albert Schweit-
zer, and Romain Rolland (who, on read-
ing Ethics, confessed, “I deciphered not
what he said, but what he meant to
say”).

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Einstein’s
Third
Paradise

For Spinoza, God and nature were one
(deus sive natura). True religion was based
not on dogma but on a feeling for the ra-
tionality and the unity underlying all
½nite and temporal things, on a feeling
of wonder and awe that generates the idea
of God, but a God which lacks any an-
thropomorphic conception. As Spinoza
wrote in Proposition 15 in Ethics, he op-
posed assigning to God “body and soul
and being subject to passions.” Hence,
“God is incorporeal”–as had been said
by others, from Maimonides on, A
whom God was knowable indirectly
through His creation, through nature. In
other pages of Ethics, Einstein could read
Spinoza’s opposition to the idea of cos-
mic purpose, and that he favored the pri-
macy of the law of cause and effect–an
all-pervasive determinism that governs
nature and life–rather than “playing at
dice,” in Einstein’s famous remark. E
as if he were merely paraphrasing Spin-
oza, Einstein wrote in 1929 that the per-
ception in the universe of “profound rea-
son and beauty constitute true religiosi-
ty; in this sense, and in this sense alone,
I am a deeply religious man.”

Much has been written about the re-

sponse of Einstein’s contemporaries
to his Spinozistic cosmic religion. For
esempio, the physicist Arnold Sommer-
feld recorded in Schilpp’s volume that he
often felt “that Einstein stands in a par-
ticularly intimate relation to the God of
Spinoza.” But what ½nally most interests
us here is to what degree Einstein, hav-
ing reached his Third Paradise, in which
his yearnings for science and religion are
joined, may even have found in his own
research in physics fruitful ideas emerg-
ing from that union. In fact there are at
least some tantalizing parallels between
passages in Spinoza’s Ethics and Ein-
stein’s publications in cosmology–par-
allels that the physicist and philosopher

Max Jammer, in his book Einstein and
Religion (1999), considers as amounting
to intimate connections. Per esempio, In
Part I of Ethics (“Concerning God”),
Proposition 29 begins: “In nature there
is nothing contingent, but all things are
determined from the necessity of the
divine nature to exist and act in a certain
manner.” Here is at least a discernible
overlap with Einstein’s tenacious devo-
tion to determinism and strict causality
at the fundamental level, despite all the
proofs from quantum mechanics of the
reign of probabilism, at least in the sub-
atomic realm.

There are other such parallels through-

fuori. But what is considered by some as
the most telling relationship between
Spinoza’s Propositions and Einstein’s
physics comes from passages such as
Corollary 2 of Proposition 20: “It follows
that God is immutable or, which is the
same thing, all His attributes are immu-
table.” In a letter of September 3, 1915, A
Else (his cousin and later his wife), Ein-
stein, having read Spinoza’s Ethics again,
wrote, “I think the Ethics will have a per-
manent effect on me.”

Two years later, when he expanded his
general relativity to include “cosmologi-
cal considerations,” Einstein found to
his dismay that his system of equations
did “not allow the hypothesis of a spa-
tially closed-ness of the world [raeum-
liche Geschlossenheit].” How did Einstein
cure this flaw? By something he had
done very rarely: making an ad hoc addi-
zione, purely for convenience: “We can
add, on the left side of the ½eld equation
a–for the time being–unknown uni-
versal constant, – λ.” In fact, it seems
that not much harm is done thereby. It
does not change the covariance; it still
corresponds with the observation of
motions in the solar system (“as long as
λ is small”), and so forth. Inoltre, IL
proposed new universal constant λ also

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damental unity within natural science,
and at last to his recognition of science
as the devotion, in his words, of “a
deeply religious unbeliever”–his ½nal
embrace of seeming incommensurables
in his Third Paradise.

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Gerald
Holton
SU
science

determines the average density of the
universe with which it can remain in
equilibrium, and provides the radius
and volume of a presumed spherical
universe.

Altogether a beautiful, immutable uni-

verse–one an immutable God could be
identi½ed with. But in 1922, Alexander
Friedmann showed that the equations of
general relativity did allow expansion or
contraction. And in 1929 Edwin Hubble
found by astronomical observations the
fact that the universe does expand. Così
Einstein–at least according to the physi-
cist George Gamow–remarked that “in-
serting λ was the biggest blunder of my
life.”

Max Jammer and the physicist John
Wheeler, both of whom knew Einstein,
traced his unusual ad hoc insertion of λ,
nailing down that “spatially closed-ness
of the world,” to a relationship between
Einstein’s thoughts and Spinoza’s Prop-
ositions. They also pointed to another
possible reason for it: In Spinoza’s writ-
ing, one ½nds the concept that God
would not have made an empty world.
But in an expanding universe, in the
in½nity of time, the density of matter
would be diluted to zero in the limit.
Space itself would disappear, since, COME
Einstein put it in 1952, “On the basis of
the general theory of relativity . . . spazio
as opposed to ‘what ½lls space’ . . . had no
separate existence.”

Even if all of these suggestive indica-

tions of an intellectual, emotional, E
perhaps even spiritual resonance be-
tween Einstein’s and Spinoza’s writings
were left entirely aside, there still
remains Einstein’s attachment to his
“cosmic religion.” That was the end
point of his own troublesome pilgrimage
in religiosity–from his early vision of
his First Paradise, through his disillu-
sionments, to his dedication to ½nd fun-

Dædalus Fall 2003
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