Einstein's Fate

Talk by Ptolemy to be delivered 11 a.m. Saturday, June 26, 2010, at the Hour of Music and Reflection at the Family Farm at Woodside, California:

EINSTEIN'S FATE

FIRST SEGMENT:

INTRODUCTION:

My topic this morning concerns the issue of free will – does mankind have it or not? Are we free men or not? “Let freedom ring?” Maybe? Maybe not. The issue of free will has been debated for uncountable centuries. So where are we today?

Free will is about freedom. It is about personal responsibility. What is freedom, anyway, and why does it matter? How is man impacted by fate? Are his actions predetermined? How does fate, if there is such a thing, affect our individual decision-making? And, what does this mean to us?

DECISIONS:

It has always been important to man that he be able to make decisions rather than have decisions happen to him. We all want to be in control. Having said that, we hardly ever bother to ask these questions. The work-a-day decisions of every day life dominate our lives – What to have for dinner? Should I buy an iPad? Should my wife and I have another child? Common sense tells us that we have the power to make these decisions that will affect the future, and we will either enjoy or suffer the consequences.

There is a nagging issue in all of this, however. We think of ourselves as rational, educated people. We want our thinking to conform to the world in general, and science in particular. And science has been telling us, from the time of the ancient Greeks, through Isaac Newton all the way to quantum physics, that the physical phenomena of the world, and that includes us as physical beings, are subject to causation. If so, then every physical event that happens today is the inevitable result of everything that has happened in the past. And if that is true, then the decisions we think we are making today are illusory. We are automatons.

Let’s go back in time together. Imagine that you are Albert Einstein. The year is 1939. You are famous and pre-eminent in your field. You read the papers. You are aware that militaristic regimes are rising in Europe and Asia. You know what they are doing to people and you are dismayed and frightened. Most of your fellow physicists are imploring you to throw your weight behind the development of a horrific new weapon that will insure defeat of those who will surely be our enemies. President Roosevelt has been on the fence regarding that project. You know that your influence will likely make the difference. But others of your colleagues are afraid and horrified about what science might develop. You are a moral man. As a scientist you are distraught and frightened what might result if atomic fission succeeds. You know that the weapon can cause millions of deaths.

We know that Einstein agonized over his decision for weeks and months and that finally, on August 2, 1939, Einstein wrote the President a fateful letter.

The letter was terse. He said in essence that we are on the verge of being able to convert uranium into a weapon. Mr. President, please support this project. The fate of mankind hangs on it.

Einstein’s decision to send this letter was made with fear and trembling.
Without Einstein’s endorsement, it is believed that Roosevelt would not have ordered the Manhattan Project which led ultimately to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In later years, Einstein described his decision to send the letter as the worst decision he ever made in his life. Was his decision predetermined by the weight of events, or was it his free will deciding? Did Einstein’s letter cause Roosevelt to exercise his free will to pursue the atomic bomb? Free Will or causation? Could either man have acted otherwise than to make these decisions? Is it possible that these decisions were predetermined?

WHY DO WE CARE? WHAT IS AT STAKE?

Everything we consider to be important - in the moral and ethical sphere, the social and legal sphere and in the arts and civilization itself -revolves around the issue of freedom.

Everything we call ethics and morality, and especially our criminal laws, are founded on our belief that an individual has the power to make a decision and to be responsible for the consequences of that decision. Freedom and personal responsibility are the keystones of our laws. If I rob a bank and it turns out that the genes I was born with caused my brain to secrete a “go rob something” hormone, did I commit an immoral and unethical act? Should my robbery be a crime? If I hear voices that tell me to kill someone, did I know right from wrong when I succumbed to those voices? Is that the right test? Who is the “I” that decided, if I decided. How should I be punished?

Finally, creativity – the heart and soul of our Family - creativity of all kinds is at stake. If all were determined in advance, might then art, music, literature, history, everything we call civilization, remain static. Would we have Stravinsky and atonal music, or would we be destined to repeat Mozart and Haydn forever and ever?

I wonder how men of the past would have answered these questions?






SECOND SEGMENT:

OUR ANCESTORS – WHAT DID THEY THINK?

Let us now go back some 3000 years and join up with another fellow who was a pretty smart guy, namely Odysseus of Ithaka, the Homeric hero.

A bit of a review:

When Helen of Troy was abducted to Troy, King Agamemnon summoned the Greeks to attack Troy to avenge the honor of the Greeks and get Helen back. They soon found, however, that the Olympic gods – Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo, Aphrodite and a host of others – had their own rivalries and would not hesitate to interfere in the affairs of the human actors.

The entire epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey can be read as enormously complex demonstrations of human intentionality and how decisions are made and succeed or fail. That the gods could influence, ever supersede, the will of individuals was simply accepted.

All you have to know about the Greek gods is that they are just like people, with all of the desires, sensibilities and good and bad traits – mostly bad – that afflict humankind. They can come in and out of human guise, and they can affect and literally move human beings. But they are immortal.

So we have Odysseus fighting in Troy for nine years and ultimately crafting the victory of the Greeks through his infamous Trojan horse strategy. He then “decides” to return to his home and his wife, Penelope, on the island of Ithaka.

Arriving in Ithaka, Odysseus finds his house occupied by dozens of greedy suitors, who are dining and drinking every night on his fare. Odysseus vows to kill them all. He soon discovers that the goddess Athena will assist him, just as she did during the siege of Troy.

At the beginning of the battle with the suitors, the odds turn against Odysseus’ greatly outnumbered small band. Odysseus loses heart. Athena, in the form of a friend of Odysseus, Mentor, a disguise that Odysseus has seen through the but suitors have not, sees Odysseus buckling under the taunts of the suitors and blisters him with this speech:

“Where’s it gone, Odysseus – your power, your fighting heart?
That great soldier who fought for the famous white-armed Helen,
battling Trojans nine long years – nonstop, no mercy,
mowing their armies down in grueling battle –
you who seized the broad streets of Troy
with your fine strategic stroke! How can you -
now you’ve returned to your own house, your own wealth –
bewail the loss of your combat strength in a war with suitors?”

A curious example of free will not thwarted but strengthened. Shamed into action, Odysseus rallies and counterattacks. As the suitors throw six javelins to kill Odysseus, all of them right on the mark, Athena deflects all of them, and the javelins fall harmlessly. So much for the free will of the dastardly suitors.



FREE WILL FROM THE THEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Theology tells us Man is created perfect at the outset, but retains the ability either to “persevere” in obedience to God, or to choose to distance himself from God through disobedience. John Milton, in his epic poem “Paradise Lost” determined that God demands praise from human beings, but the praise is meaningless unless freely given, so man must have free will to give genuine praise.

This theology, then, is replete with reference it man’s free will. We see this, for example, in Saint Augustine’s "Confessions." On the eve of his conversion to Catholicism, Augustine addresses God as follows:

“And all that you asked of me was to deny my own will and accept yours.”

The upshot, of course, is that if God asked Augustine to suppress his own will, he must have had one. The phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, “thy will be done”, means, please over-ride my will.

Of course, when things don’t go well, we follow the ancient Greeks in praying to God to intervene, to set things straight. I make the wrong decision with my free will and hope for mercy to be saved from my own folly. Free will with a “mulligan”.


THIRD SEGMENT:


SCIENCE AND DETERMINISM – OR NOT

So what does science tell us about free will?

In oversimplified terms, we can say that the passage through time of any object, including a human being, is described in classical physics as a “trajectory.” You’re born, you grow, you thrive, you die. Your whole life, let alone what you do today, is describable as a trajectory. Einstein and Roosevelt were on individual trajectories until those fateful days in 1939, when their trajectories collided – I think most of us would say purposely, freely and meaningfully, and the course of world history was changed forever.

Please accept for a moment the good news that in the minds of many scientists, this view of a world plodding along, with events causing new events ad infinitum, all as if written in a script, is changing. Newer sciences, such as “non-equilibrium physics” and chaos theory, have established the existence of phenomena that are irreversible processes. In other words these events have a beginning and an end. That is time in its essence as we experience it in our common sense world. OK so far, but dominating causation is still possible. In addition, however, we are told that in unstable systems, for example, gases heated to a high temperature or what goes on inside a star that is decaying, so-called “singular moments’ can occur. When this happens, change happens and the relentless chain of causation is broken, but it is inherently impossible to determine in advance which direction change will take. But be of good cheer, for the physical world is renewing and randomly re-creating itself as it goes along. Are we getting warm?

I have, however, come to the conclusion, that the scientists who are telling us that the world is making things up as it goes along are mostly throwing curve balls at us. What some scientists call free or random phenomena can’t necessarily be translated to the possibility of personal freedom in our terms.

It turns out that when a scientist looks inside a large container of hot gas or inside a star, individual trajectories of particles or molecules are not visible. The overall behavior of the container of gas or the star, or the behavior of an electron inside an atom, must be described in terms of probabilities. Now, probability is a mode of thinking about “populations” and not individuals. The “trajectory” of a particular molecule or individual might still be free or might still be “predetermined” even if the general population appears to be acting freely. So do probability theories get us any nearer to an answer to the free will problem? I think not.


CONCLUSION

It appears to me that we are left with just a binary choice on how to view the problem of our freedom. If we decide we have free will and say the heck with science, that puts us with most normal people who don’t go looking for trouble, and I believe society works better. If we decide that the world is pre-determined, then, even if it isn’t, we must remember that acting as though it is can stifle thought and action and leave us paralyzed. Imagine Roosevelt not making any decision in 1939, which in itself of course would have been a momentous decision.

My personal preference is to go with the traditional view from our religious heritage – that God made us beings with inherent powers of determining our own destinies – and then hope like heck that we either do right or we get forgiven if we don’t.

That may not be your preference. You can pursue another course. You can decide that the matter hasn’t really advanced much since the Greeks sat around with their wine goblets listening to bards recite the Iliad and the Odyssey. You could ally yourself with Odysseus and try your best, hoping that the gods are on your side. Or, instead, you could just go with the flow. And free will or not, we can hope like heck that our choices resolve favorably, and that we, like Odysseus, will get home safely.