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Einstein Letter Goes on Sale
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu May 15, 2008 04:10 AM
from the read-what-a-smart-guy-says dept.
from the read-what-a-smart-guy-says dept.
ErkDemon writes "For any Slashdotters who want a piece of frameable Einstein memorabilia, a letter from A.E. to Eric Gutkind goes on sale at Bloomsbury Auctions today (May 15th). The content of the letter mostly deals with Einstein's views on religion. (Einstein pronounces himself rather unimpressed by the whole idea and rejects it as "childish.") The Guardian has printed a translated excerpt from the letter."
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Relics of Science History For Sale At Christie's 142 comments
circletimessquare writes "Dennis Overbye at the New York Times has some ruminations on some of the historical totems of science going up for auction at Christie's next week. There is the 1543 copy of 'De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium' by Copernicus, which you can have for $900,000 to $1.2 million. If you have some cash left over, maybe you can pick up an original work by Galileo, Darwin, Descartes, Newton, Freud, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, or Malthus. And then there is the 1878 copy of the world's first phone book: 'a shock of recognition — that people were already talking on the phone a year before Einstein was born. In fact, just two years later Einstein's father went into the nascent business himself. Einstein grew up among the rudiments of phones and other electrical devices like magnets and coils, from which he drew part of the inspiration for relativity. It would not be until 1897, after people had already made fortunes exploiting electricity, that the English scientist J. J. Thomson discovered what it actually was ...'"
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Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading it, you'd think this would stop the theists from repeatedly dragging the man unwillingly into their camp; but since this well-known remark...
Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
Certainly theists trying to ascribe some form of theism to Einstein are mistaken. However, the atheists can be just as bad. I have already seen in Internet forums that atheists are using this newly found statement of Einstein to boost their cause, arguing along the lines of "Einstein was a genius, and he didn't believe in God, so clearly rejecting the existence of God is the smart thing to do." Einstein, though a brilliant physicist, was not trained in the philosophy of religion. It's a pity that when atheists could refer to eminent philosophers of religion like Mackie in his The Miracle of Theism [amazon.com] (Oxford University Press, 1983) or (pre-conversion) Flew as examples of how to argue well against theism, they instead use completely inappropriate figures like Einstein.
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
In case (a) we have some guy telling a story of how Jesus walked on water. In case (b) we have some guy telling a story of how Caesar conquered Gaul, plus coins found throughout France showing Caesar's image, plus Roman and Gaulish weapons of the period found throughout France, plus centuries of evidence in writing and in artefacts of continuous Roman occupation of Gaul which coincidentally begin at the time of Caesar.
And that's before we discuss the relative plausibility of the two written accounts we began with. One describes a man doing something exotically impossible, while the other describes a man doing something we know perfectly well that men do from time to time. Does that not make one far more likely to be a fiction than the other?
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Iesu ben Iussuf, a carpenter's son from Nazareth who became a radical rabbi, probably existed. There's no contemporary documentary evidence, but there is plenty of evidence of radical Jewish religious movements about the same time and the later emergence of Christianity is reasonable corroboration. However, whether or not Iesu ben Iussuf existed casts precisely no light whatever on whether God exists.
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Funny)
That would explain why the live-size Julius Caesar brass bust recently discovered in the south of France was underwater.
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
What science cannot disprove is a story that is redefined every time it is questioned, and fobs most stuff of to 'the mystery'. But anyone who can conduct some honest self questioning does not need science to prove/disprove it.
*I saw a study of it somewhere previously, but can't find the link, so don't take my word for it, check it out if you want to repeat it
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Repeat after me: Correlation != causation.
It is equally likely, if not more likely, that the people for whom more prayers were said were more seriously ill or injured to begin with. You don't generally get hundreds of people praying for someone who had an appendectomy, but when somebody is in a car wreck or has pancreatic cancer, a lot of people are praying for that person. Unless the study focuses on a single cause of hospitalization within a single age group, etc., there are too many other variables that would have more of an impact.
Further, there were studies done that have shown pretty conclusively that religious patients under the care of doctors who were dismissive of religion or ignored it entirely tended to fare worse than patients whose doctors and other care providers were willing to pray with them. Whether this is the power of prayer or the power of self suggestion is, of course, more a matter of philosophical debate rather than scientific debate.
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Re:Absolutely not. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Absolutely not. (Score:4, Interesting)
Basically I don't believe the universe exists independent of the observer. And if you somehow do believe the universe can exist independent on the observer then the burden is on you to prove something can exist without being observed by anything in the universe.
Quoting Wikipedia, Bertrand Russell wrote: -- B. Russel, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits.
I don't mean to discredit any other way or thinking, but no other way of thinking seems to be as reasonable. The other ways of thinking seem to rely on faith, we are supposed to believe that "stuff" can exist outside of our minds, which to me doesn't seem any more reasonable than believing in a God who lives in the sky who we can't see, or aliens in space, or angels, or the devil.
Sure it's all possible, but I'm more likely to believe that it' all in our minds. The main different between what I'm saying and Solipsism is that Solipsism says that the individual mind "mine" is the only mind I know to exist, while I'm saying "our" as in the universal mind is the only thing I know to exist.
Btw what are some of those philosophical problems with Solipsism? And why exactly is it impossible to psychologically believe? Why should you believe anything exists outside of reality?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, is that what they teach you at school ? To start with bland empty made up statements ?
(not impressed)
Re:Absolutely not. (Score:5, Insightful)
In your response please do keep in mind that unicorns are pretty and they can do anything they want.
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Re:Absolutely not. (Score:5, Funny)
Please, sir! It is well accepted that Philosophers are permitted a certain amount of hand waving. This one appears to be waving only his right hand, curled into a tubular shape, vigorously about his nether regions.
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Re:Absolutely not. (Score:4, Insightful)
1. God is self awareness.
What is the basis for your core assumption ?
This means, life is real if it's aware of itself. Humans and most mammals are real.
Most mammals ? Which ones are unlucky enough not to make the cut ? Who decides ?
Where do reptiles and fish fit into your scheme ? Or, aren't they cute enough to have feelings ? Do the poor old insects get a raw deal as well ?
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Re:Absolutely not. (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, you believe in magic. But we can easily experimentally verify this state of affairs.
I put you inside a dark room, completely and utterly dark, so that most of your perception is disabled. What you don't know is that there is a hole in the floor of the room : but no worries, nobody is aware of the hole, and it isn't aware of itself : so you won't fall through it.
Obviously if you do fall through : your "philosophy" is worthless and untrue : it failed a prediction.
Your philosophy is different in nothing from any ancient belief that you would call utterly stupid. They believed something that could be trivially disproven and "the world is only what you think about it".
Obviously it's not. The world exists independantly of you.
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
So to be clear here, what you are saying is that you have to be trained in religion to have an opinion on it? Surely this rules out 99% of theists out there today, pretty odd that they can't have a view.
The flip side of this is that no-one (theist or atheist) should have an opinion on science unless correctly trained. That no-one can have an opinion on the Law unless fully trained in the law and become a politician unless trained in politics.
Its a bit childish to refer to Einstein and saying "yeah see, proves it" but using his arguments (that religion is not rational for instance) certainly shouldn't be ruled out just because he was only a Nobel Prize winning physicist who revolutionised mankind's view of the universe. Philosophy of religion is the study of only a limited domain and it is a domain that has been reduced over the centuries by science, the best way to understand why religion is bunk is to read science books because they explain the universe much more effectively than "man with beard did it".
Enlightenment is the antidote to religion, and you don't get much more enlightened than Einstein.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you are going to be cited as an authority, it helps to be someone who has thought long and hard about one's position, and who is aware of common arguments for and against.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
To imply that Einstein didn't think about his position and wasn't well read on the subject certainly appears to go against both his education and background as well as the writings and arguments he made on the topic.
If I want to know what is wrong with me, I ask a doctor not someone who studies the philosophy of illness, if I want to know what governs the universe then I'll ask a scientist over people who study the philosophy of religion. Einstein is an authority on what makes the universe tick, much more so than people who study religion.
So maybe the question is what authority do philosophers of religion have when talking about what created and governs the universe?
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The mind of God (Score:3, Insightful)
And yet 50+ yrs after his death, religious philosophers, fellow scientists, and popular writers are all trying to understand what he meant by the phrase "The mind of God". So I hardly think "http://www.einstein-website.de/z_biography/credo.html">the personal philosophy of one of the great thinkers of the 20th century can be dismissed as inappropriate.
However I do agree with the rest of your post it's more entert
Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, that, and does anyone want to date these quotes? It seems very likely that his beliefs changed; after all, how many of us were born or raised atheist? It seems mostly something that you come to on your own -- having once believed, you start to have doubts, which eventually turn into disbelief.
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sorry, and I'm not buying it. You don't call the sane people "dis-paranoid", or "un-shizophrenic".
We don't "doubt". I "doubt" the christian god about as much as I "doubt" the flying spagetti monster, invisible pink elephants and moon-cheese. It's not a matter of "doubt", which is a negatively-loaded word and implies that there is some truth that could be believed. But in fact there's only a load of made-up bullshit. Not believing every shit someone came up with while on drugs isn't properly expressed with the word "doubt", and using that word indicates a tendency already.
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Spinoza didn't believe in a personal God either. In Ethica, his philosophical masterpiece, Spinoza says that God is "immanent" in nature, not some supernatural entity beyond the world, interfering or having feelings.
Spinoza's concept of Deus sive natura (the God from nature) does not fit in the concept that most people mean when they speak of God. Schopenhauer wrote that because Spinoza called the substance God, he created his own problem of people misunderstanding him. Schopenhauer thinks Spinoza used the term God to make his ideas less objectionable. If only Spinoza choose to call his God-concept by any other name, his ideas would be understood more frequently for what they are: atheism in awe for the Beauty of Nature and the Universe; not theism, or pantheism, etc.
Einstein has the same problem: he stated many times not to believe in a personal God; the quote from this letter is just one quote among many others, many times equally clear as in this letter. But because Einstein, like Spinoza, did use the term God (for instance in the dice comment), even if it meant something that falls outside of most people's definition of God, theists like to talk about him as if he were one of their own.
In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins explains why Einstein's God-quotes do not contradict his unbelief.
This is a quote from Albert Einstein, which summarises his position best (in my opinion):
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Er... all of us were born atheist. Many of us were later taught theism, and then some of us still later rejected that. Nobody is born believing in God, any more than they are born believing in Father Christmas.
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Re:He just does not believe in the Christian God. (Score:5, Informative)
He never said self-aware, nor did he suggest anything about how it was created. That's more Hawking's department, anyway.
However, the fact that he recognized a symmetry in the Universe in no way suggests that he believed in a creator, or that the "God" he believed in was even sentient. He claimed to believe in Spinoza's God. [wikipedia.org] Quoting that Wikipedia article:
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
E = mc^2 != (mass == energy) (Score:5, Informative)
It does not state that matter and energy are the same thing.
It states that mass has energy, and inversely, energy has mass. [wikipedia.org]
A body travelling at enormous speeds gains mass because of the mass of its kinetic energy, which is the quantity described by E=mc^2. The body does not gain any matter (it's particle count remains constant).
The constituents of a nuclear fission reaction neither lose or gain mass. No mass is converted to energy. The energy released is the spare binding energy that the larger nuclei required but the more stable products do not. Products like photons with no intrinsic mass of their own carry away the mass of the energy they embody. No mass is destroyed or "converted to energy".
Even in a matter-antimatter annihilation, the products carry energy equivalent to the combined rest mass of the reagents and thus mass and energy are conserved.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
What a disgraceful slander.
"Intelligent design" is a sly relabeling of creationism. Einstein was above all a scientist. He would certainly not want to be associated with such intentionally deceptive pseudoscience.
Re:He just does not believe in the Christian God. (Score:5, Informative)
If I should ever encounter an entity with god-like powers I'll treat them with a sensible amount of respect, either to gain their favour or avoid their wrath. But god-like powers aren't proof of being creator of the universe. Quite simply I can't conceive of any kind of proof that would make this evident to anyone within the universe. It's an impossibility.
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Do people still write letters? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Do people still write letters? (Score:4, Insightful)
We already have a few historical emails about the creation of internet, spam, linux, and so on...
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Re:Do people still write letters? (Score:5, Insightful)
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So the point of this story is? (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, considering the off-kilter nature of genius as we know it, I wouldn't want to lay too much value on having some of the same ideals of other geniuses, or many other people for that matter.
Re:Views on Religion? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a good lesson here: Poetic/metaphoric language can get you in trouble when people take you too literally. The dice comment is regularly trotted out as "proof" of his religious convictions, but the later statements in which he unequivocally denies that he believes in God somehow get missed.
In any event, this is all a rather sad reverse ad hominem; whether or not Einstein believed in God has no bearing on whether or not God exists. But both theists and atheists try to "claim" Einstein, because having a genius on your side *seems* to add weight to your argument. It doesn't, but there you go.
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Actually, appeal to false authority (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Views on Religion? (Score:5, Insightful)
When person A comes to visit his neighbour and sees him lying in a pool of blood and shrieks "Oh my God!", does that mean that person A is religious, too?
The word is pretty deeply rooted in the language, so even if you completely dismiss the concept of God, you may find yourself using the word more or less frequently.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.
And also:
I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.
So in this case, he did not believe that the "lawful harmony of the world" could allow for randomness, or could itself be an emergent pattern from randomness.
Here's a question: Has he ever said anything about faith? Or about how God loves... anything? Or how God will do anything? That would be a clear mark of a man with religious convictions: "God will protect me," or even "In God we trust."
Instead, we get the equivalent of, really, "God bless you" when someone sneezes.
Metaphor, dude (Score:5, Insightful)
E.g., we may spew or quote stuff like "Mother Nature always sides with the hidden flaw" or "Mother Nature is a bitch", without actually believing that there is such a sentient entity. Or when Stalin said that "artillery is the god of war", chances are he didn't mean it literally.
E.g., you may have noticed quotes from Futurama's characters before on Slashdot. I'll take a wild guess that most of those people don't actually believe that Bender or Dr Zoidberg are real.
More importantly, look at the context in which he said that. There was _nothing_ theistic about it. Einstein's view of the world was based on the evidenced-based large-scale physics, where stuff is very deterministic. More importantly, there seemed to be no obvious way to reconcile relativity with quantum physics, so one or the other had to be false. Einstein obviously favoured his own relativity, and had plenty of experimental confirmation (at macro level) that it's correct.
If anything, it just shows that even really really smart people can be occasionally wrong, when talking about stuff outside their expertise domain.
But the crucial thing is that it was based on falsifiable evidence, not on some belief in a deity whose will is absolute and whose habits can be guessed. There was nothing inherently theistic about that belief.
Yes, he used the word "god". It was just a metaphor/anthropomorphisation of the universe. He could have just as well used "mother nature" or just personified the universe itself. It was just supposed to get the point across, not be some declaration of faith in a god.
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Re:Views on Religion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can an atheist use the expression "The devil is in the details?"
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Re:amused (Score:4, Insightful)
No? Einstein discovered some of the most important principles upon which the Universe is built; he revealed the strange nature of space and time and how the two are related, the equivalence of solid material things and abstract energy, the connection between the propagation of light and the principle of causality itself.
If there exists a creator, then Einstein's study of the creation has told us more about that creator than any prophet ever has.
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