Einstein – Wisdom from Wonder

Einstein – Wisdom from Wonder

by Anonymous

“We all appear here involuntarily and uninvited for a short stay without knowing why. To me it's enough to wonder at the secrets.” Albert Einstein. At the moment of our birth we know nothing, and it feels as if our consciousness arose of itself, or possibly as a reaction to our first physical sensation. However it began, it is our inborn curiosity that develops our mind and leads us to knowledge. As we build our mind with thoughts, and an early attraction to shiny things, we approach a stage in life where our speech can express our thoughts. We’ve all seen the young child incessantly asking his or her mother, “What’s that?” “What’s that?” “How?” “Why?” It is in our nature that we question what we do not know. It’s like an itch we must scratch. God doesn’t bring us into life and say, “Here’s life, and this is how it works.” We can’t even all agree if there is a God or not. But for all of us, life is a learning process from the very beginning. We question everything until we understand it. However, with so much to think about in life, many of us abandon our early questions in search of answers to others, or we simply get caught up in the seemingly infinite stream of distractions. While our attention leads elsewhere, we stockpile the mysterious riddles of life like “What am I?” “Why am I?” and “What is this experience?” somewhere in the back of our minds. Perhaps because we’ve concluded that finding an answer seems so out of our reach. Or perhaps because we’ve convinced ourselves that a “good enough for now” answer is really good enough. Yet some of us aren’t satisfied with good enough. We challenge inadequate answers by thinking deeper, longer, harder, and facing life’s mysterious questions with such contempt for distraction that our focus becomes strained as if searching for light in a black hole. Our efforts may be futile, but we know that if we don’t look, we won’t find. If we rely on chance and good fortune alone to bring us the answers while we focus on something else, it’s quite possible we will not get our answers. But wonder goes with wisdom in the same way that search goes with find. We look because we know it’s the best way to see. And just by questioning the very nature of existence we are engaging ourselves in the search for truth. One person, who understood the value of questioning perhaps more whole-heartedly than most of us, was Albert Einstein. One of the greatest scientific and philosophical minds we’ve ever known was an expert in wonder. The very reasons he found so many truths hidden deep under the skin of this world was that he wondered, he questioned, he exercised his imagination, and he would never abandon the child in him that lies inside all of us and asks “What’s that?” “What’s that?” “How?” and “Why?”

Einstein’s scientific curiosity about life began in his youth with an experience that forced him to revise the way he thought about the world. When Albert was 5 years old his father gave him a compass. And as he turned the compass he noticed the needle always moved to point in one direction. This was very mysterious to the young Einstein who had previously thought that in order for something to move, something else had to touch it. But with this compass needle, there was something invisible doing the work and that sparked the idea in his head that everything may not be as it seems. Einstein wondered, he thought, he experimented and even nurtured his young mind by exploring Euclid’s great book on Geometry, Elements. As his intellect grew, his passion for thought and wonder stuck with him. At the age of 16 he found himself asking what he would see if he were to ride a beam of light. This profound yet simple question eludes most of us, but Einstein didn’t take the “everyday” for granted. Why should he pass over a subject clouded in such mystery simply because it wasn’t commonly contemplated? This unique focus and early curiosity about light launched him into a perpetual state of wonder which eventually lead him to some of his greatest scientific discoveries as a man. One such discovery came from the common knowledge that the speed of light was constant. With this understanding and a few simple “thought experiments” Einstein was able to uncover the fact that there was not a single speed of time throughout the entire universe, but that the speed of time itself actually changes depending upon the position and motion of each observer. Einstein continuously postulated, conducted thought experiments and with a childlike stubbornness, he never gave up on one of his questions just because of consistent failures. Einstein was aware of his childlike nature and not only embraced it but believed it was an undeniable part of all humans as he noted, “People do not grow old no matter how long we live. We never cease to stand like curious children before the great Mystery into which we were born.” It was this ageless wonder in Einstein that always kept him humbly in awe. He never lost the child inside him because he never wanted to. He knew that the secret was to grow with this child and let it be his guiding light in a dim world of hidden truths and adults who were far too busy to lose themselves into a world of wonder.
Einstein’s wonder began in his childhood, and as a man he remained constantly lost in thought. He loved going for walks and sailing on his small boat as these activities provided him perfect environments for contemplation. He took great pleasure in being able to think about things which were truly important to him. He preferred science so much that he didn’t even bother to remember trivial things like his own phone number so he could save as much of his memory as possible for his science. At one stage in his life Einstein wanted to be a teacher, but not for typical reasons, his main interest was using the school’s facilities to further his own scientific studies. Einstein loved studying and living in a state of wonder, not only because both provided him an “escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, [and] from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires,” but also because they were satisfying in themselves. He also knew they were both essential to making discoveries. Another legend of science, Isaac Newton, had described the effects and workings of gravity, but he never really knew exactly what gravity was. When Einstein put forth his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, it was a “special” case because gravity wasn’t included in the theory. He wondered, he thought, and racked his brain about gravity so much over the next 10 years that the end result left him with severe stomach pains and an exhausted mind and body. But in 1915 his wonder had also brought him to the wisdom of how gravity works. In 1915 he submitted his new theory called the General Theory of Relativity which now included gravity. Einstein realized that in order to understand gravity, you must first attribute some physical properties to space-time similar to the properties of a stretchable fabric. (Space-time is not an actual fabric, but it helps our understanding to think of it as one rather than some kind of empty and featureless void.) With all space-time being connected as a single “fabric,” matter warps the space around it similar to the way a weight can warp a taut fabric when placed at its center. And as Albert himself explained, “An object marks its place in the fabric of space-time with a dent, a pocket, into which other objects that pass within its sphere must fall.” No doubt that over those 10 years of straining his brain trying to understand gravity, Einstein must have brushed up against failure and frustration more times than most people can imagine. But his wonder was relentless, his focus was uncanny, and his questioning never ceased until it brought his imagination the answer for which it was searching. As he himself once explained, “It’s not that I’m not so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” And he truly did. After ten years of hard labor and sticking to a question like a comb might stick to his hair, he had finally solved the age old mystery of gravity. And while this was one of the greatest mental victories any human had ever won against the unknown, it did little to silence the persistent wonder that dwelled eternally in the mind of Einstein.
At an age when Einstein was a well established scientist, his wonder stood by his side as consistently as his shadow. When Albert’s Special and General Theories of Relativity were well known and scientifically accepted, when he had won a noble prize for proving that atoms actually exist, when he spawned and rejected the idea of quantum mechanics, he still remained a wonderer. Einstein was always searching for truth and he was always questioning reality. He had a feeling of wonder in his bones, a questioning of nature which was enticed by a certain religious feeling. He explains, “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernable laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.” Einstein knew there was something behind life, some explanation or thing behind it all. He wanted to know what it was. Occasionally he referred to it as God, as when he said he wanted to “know God’s thoughts.” And there was one of “God’s thoughts” that Einstein was particularly interested in. Most likely influenced by the well known relationship of cause-and-effect, he believed that all the laws and theories of the universe must have come from one initial idea or principal. In the sense of God as the Creator, Einstein wanted to know what God used as His general principal from which every other theory, law, and condition in the universe arose. He felt if he could find this base principal, everything else in the universe would connect and make more sense. It would be the source from which everything arose, and by understanding this source, he could better understand all that came out of it. He knew he might never find this foundation of reality, but that wouldn’t stop him from trying. His wonder motivated this search for this truth in what has been called “The Unification of Physics” or “The Theory of Everything”. His General Theory of Relativity explained how large bodies such as people and planets behaved in the universe, but it said almost nothing about the behavior of energy at an atomic level such as protons and electrons. Einstein’s gut instinct was that nature preferred simplicity over complexity, and that meant it was more likely that a single theory would explain both the big and the small, rather than each having its own separate theory. James Clerk Maxwell before him had combined the forces of electricity and magnetism, with a mathematical explanation, into one force called “electromagnetism”. With this as his inspiration, Einstein wondered if he could likewise combine gravity with electromagnetism and uncover the fact that they are really just different ways of seeing one unified super-force. That is to say, all forces in nature are really are just one force, but our limited understanding separates them into different forces because we do not yet see the underlying connection. Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life hammering out equation after equation in an attempt to unify physics, in an attempt to draw out the greatest wisdom from the noble wonder that had shed light on so many treasures of his intellectual past. Innumerable failures over thirty years would not suppress his wonder or his determination. And when he’d get discouraged, he’d take comfort in the old proverb he once quoted, “The search for truth is more precious than its possession.” He knew he could be happy even if he never solved his puzzle. There is a joy that comes from the effort one puts into their journey as well as an exciting energy that arises from the uncertainty of the outcome. It is the state of being to which the Taoists referred when they claimed, “The journey is the reward.” Perhaps that’s why when Einstein was in a hospital bed with stomach ailments at the end of his life, knowing he would not survive the night, he asked the nurse for his pen and pad. Einstein was fully aware that after 30 years of effort, he would not stumble upon the final equations which would unify physics in his last night on Earth. Yet on his final note pad, with his final scribbled and unfinished equations, his legacy was not to bring us to the promise-land, but to let us know that the real beauty in life lies in our attempt to understand and in our will to exercise our imagination. He wanted to show that one of the best ways to improve one’s intellect, as well as connect with pure joy, is to dance with an unanswered question in the wondrous realm of infinite possibilities.
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” Einstein embraced the mysterious. Rather than overlooking the mysteries of life, he indulged in them. He was an artist of science. With his constant violin playing, he was a musician. And with his ponderings on existence, he was a philosopher. Yet throughout all his life, he was first and foremost a child. A young boy who was never afraid to ask “Why?” or “How?” A juvenile spirit that time couldn’t conceal with its usual tricks. The wrinkles in his face and whiteness in his hair did little to mask the youthful wonder which radiated from his eyes, the twinkle his eyes shared with the stars, and the deep beauty they shared with the ocean. The curiosity in his thoughts was insatiable and his quest for wisdom was nothing less than astounding. Albert Einstein was more than a man, he was eternally a boy. A boy who wondered, a boy excited to learn, and a boy whose stubborn persistence brought him success and wisdom time and again. His path to wisdom always came first and that goal would never be intimidated or silenced by friends, fellow scientists, governments or media. He was a lone traveler on a quest for truth and he believed we should all face the world “as free beings, admiring, asking and observing” because he knew, “Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the life-long attempt to acquire it.” Einstein is widely known as a scientific and mathematical genius, but those labels are purely the product of the philosopher in him, the child who marveled at the unknown. It was this curious nature in him that led him to wisdom. It was his wonder that opened his eyes to worlds that very few humans have ever seen. It was the twinkle in his eyes that shed light on the darkest places in the universe. If we learn one thing from Albert Einstein, we should learn to not silence our inner child and regard its questions as “childish” or arbitrary, but we should graciously give this child a microphone and allow it to scream its questions at the world and indulge in the delicious mysteries of existence. Because while we may make excuses for ourselves by saying, “I’m no Einstein” or “He had certain genetics or a unique position in life that I don’t” we should always keep in mind Einstein’s own explanation for his genius, “I have no particular talent. I am only inquisitive.” It was this attitude that brought him wisdom and for him, it was all quite natural. “One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.” “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reasons for existing.”