A Theory of Everything (That Matters) by Alister McGrath

Author:Alister McGrath
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: RELIGION / Religion & Science, RELIGION / Christian Theology / Apologetics
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2019-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

Einstein’s Failed Quest for Theoretical Unity

Einstein’s achievements were remarkable, from his decisive 1905 contribution to the formation of quantum mechanics to his development of the theory of general relativity in 1915. Yet Einstein saw his work as incomplete. Why? Because his quest for die Einheitlichkeit—the fundamental unity of all phenomena—remained unfulfilled. Einstein’s writings of the 1910s show how he was driven by this quest. In a letter of November 1916 to the Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter, Einstein remarked on his almost compulsive desire to find a unified view of reality: “I am driven by my yearning to generalize.”[109]

His 1918 Berlin lecture to mark the sixtieth birthday of the great German physicist Max Planck is especially revealing here. For Einstein, the quest for a single “simplified and clear image of the world” was not merely the ultimate objective of science but also corresponded to a deep human psychological need to escape from the banality of everyday life into a purer world of objective perception and thought. The scientist’s committed engagement to the study of the natural world thus required a “state of feeling” similar to that of a religious believer.

It is widely agreed that general relativity is at present the best generalized theory of gravitation and space-time structure. Yet although it can account for a remarkably wide range of phenomena, it is incomplete in that it ignores the quantum effects that govern the subatomic world. Most physicists adopt a pragmatic work-around to this problem, using general relativity to describe the large-scale phenomena of astronomy and cosmology and using quantum mechanics to account for the behavior of atoms and elementary particles. As these two realms are generally far removed from each other, this strategy works quite well in practice. But it is a theoretical fudge.

This approach is clearly unsatisfactory from a conceptual perspective. It is a work-around, not a solution. For a start, these two theoretical frameworks are quite different. General relativity has geometric precision and is deterministic; the world of quantum physics is shaped by uncertainties and is probabilistic—a feature that caused Einstein to have serious misgivings concerning its viability and that led to his famous (and often misunderstood) remark to the effect that God “does not play dice” with the universe.[110] More fundamentally, Einstein believed that there had to be a grander and more complete theory that enfolds both general relativity and quantum physics as special or limiting cases. Finding that grand theory that would embrace the “totality of empirical facts” was Einstein’s life goal.

Einstein hoped to achieve a complete and coherent account of reality—a goal that some might see as philosophical rather than scientific.[111] Yet Einstein failed in this quest. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where Einstein spent the final two decades of his career, suggested that Einstein’s attempts to formulate such a unified theory were “a complete failure.” Einstein was just “wasting his time.”[112] Others, however, were more generous. The physicist Brian Greene believes that Einstein was simply ahead of his time.

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