Life, the Universe, and Einstein

Mr. Universe: Einstein, here by Warhol © Andy Warhol Foundation

It's not just that Einstein made the universe more mysterious, she says; he made it more alien. "We have always sought explanations for what we don't understand. In some ways, our explanations have become more precise, but as they've become more precise, they've also become more specialized"--or harder for the non-specialist to fathom.

Echoes of Einstein appear in modernist writers like Virginia Woolf. At least one critic has compared Mrs. Dalloway, built on a plot that has various characters arriving at the same here and now in London, with the convergence of rays of light, each beginning at a different point in space and time.

Wald says that Gertrude Stein was obsessed with time; in her work, characters go through major life transitions, without appearing to leave the present moment. Images and phrases appear in curious juxtapositions--as in a Cubist painting by Pablo Picasso, who was in Stein's intellectual circle, or, conceptually, as with light constituting both waves and particles. "Stein was really trying to unsettle people's belief in any kind of meaning," says Wald. "She was fascinated with time, and imagined time flowing in ways that were not sequential but shaped by multiple influences and in relationship with other realms, including space. Stein tries to go backward and forward at the same time, putting time and space together both as the subject of her poetics and as a kind of formal experiment."

Science fiction is strongly suffused with Einstein's theories, Wald says. Mathematician Arlie Petters considers science fiction, which he has embraced since childhood, a major cultural force in embedding Einstein in popular consciousness. "Star Trek is one of my favorite science-fiction shows, and it has quite a bit of relativity," he says. In his undergraduate relativity class, he touches on designing futuristic spaceships that travel near the speed of light. "There is always some devoted Star Trek fan who instantly proclaims that one must use a fuel consisting of matter and anti-matter. It will produce high-energy radiation that ejects out of the warp-drive engine at the speed of light, causing the spaceship to move near the speed of light." The warp-drive idea, he says, is driven by the Theory of Special Relativity.

But science works its way into popular culture beyond literary experiments and science-fiction speculations. The experimental art of the early twentieth century, and its tendency to re-envision the conventions of representation, might seem akin to Einstein's toppling of long-held notions of physical reality. Picasso and the other Cubists were launching an attack on artistic tradition and at the same time on the forms and traditions of the larger society. As the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire put it, they were looking to "re-order the universe."

In her book Cubism and Culture (co-authored with Duke art historian Mark Antliff), Patricia Leighten, chair of art and art history at Duke, writes about the world of ideas that gave rise to Cubism--the same world of ideas that helped inspire Einstein. Leighten credits art historian Linda Henderson, of the University of Texas at Austin, with disproving a straight-line trajectory between relativity and Cubism; Einstein was dismissive of such a correlation, insisting that relativity doesn't rely on "a multiplicity of systems of coordinates," and so "is quite different [from] Picasso's painting." But the two paths to understanding the universe, scientific and artistic, had similar intellectual origins.

Both Einstein and the Cubists were influenced by the philosopher Henri Bergson and the mathematician Henri PoincarÈ, who argued that the human experiences of time and space were not objective and rational--that they were not uniform for everybody. Such celebrations of subjective experience resulted in three interrelated artistic innovations, Leighten says: the "deformation" of objects in terms of size, shape, and scale; a rejection of Renaissance perspective in favor of "multiple views" and the use of all the senses in apprehending the world; and the conjunction of disparate images in a single composition.

A theorized black hole in space © CORBIS

Cubism is important, Leighten says, for enshrining subjective perspective in twentieth-century art--much as Einstein validated the importance of the observer in science. Artists like Picasso and Georges Braque tried to "depict their simultaneous experiences of different views of an object or different aspects of prior knowledge about an object," she says. That is, they incorporated multiple frames of reference, along with materials taken from multiple sources, into a single work. Cubist collage might be the ultimate achievement of the Cubist movement, and it is powerfully "reflective of a world undergoing radical change," she says. The idea of cutting, pasting, assembling, and reassembling a picture of the world from fragments is "an act of liberation" from the conventional notion of naturalistic painting, she says.

Einstein was never comfortable with the physics of probability; he never quite reconciled himself to a probabilistic universe--even as he provided the platform for science to take the leap into quantum physics. Similarly, says Leighten, Picasso helped launch art into the age of abstraction, though pure abstraction, or non-objectivity, was never his aim. An artist like Kazimir Malevich, who reduced painting to white geometric shapes, or Piet Mondrian, whose canvases are laid out as bold lines and colors trapped within those lines, would have been unthinkable without Picasso and the other Cubists. Still, Picasso sought a certain anchoring in subjects and themes, just as Einstein sought the guiding order of a universe that runs according to rules. Picasso's personal collection of art included Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Braque--all of whom were revolutionary in their ideas about color and composition, but none of whom quite crossed the border into pure abstraction.

Crossing the border as it does between visual art and movement through space, dance, of all the arts, may have the most tantalizingly close ties to relativity. For the Einstein centennial year, the Institute of Physics in Britain commissioned a dance company to produce a new work based on Einstein's theories. Merce Cunningham, the choreographer, has quoted Einstein's observation that "there are no fixed points in space." He goes on to express fascination with stage space that lacks any fixed points so that "wherever you are...could be a center."

Barbara Dickinson, director of the Dance Program at Duke, sees Cunningham's choreography as linked with the frame-of-reference issues that interested Einstein. Before Cunningham, she says, many choreographers were presenting "a very defined idea that they wanted the audience to get. Cunningham steps way back from this. His stated creed is that there need not be meaning in movement; it is purely movement in space and time."

The dance universe as Cunningham conceived it is full of chance encounters--he would sometimes hinge artistic decisions on rolls of the dice--and indeterminacy. "This element of indeterminacy is extremely difficult to do in performance," says Dickinson. "He would say to the dancers, okay, you can go out and face any direction you want, not necessarily paying attention to the audience out front. Or he'd give them leeway about when they entered the stage and how long they stayed out there." And his dances would accommodate multiple points of view. In one example, "Walkaround Time," choreographed in 1968, the dancers--not the audience members--are given an intermission. "At intermission, they stopped dancing and basically did whatever they wanted," says Dickinson. "Some lolled on stage, some disappeared for ten minutes, but the audience was watching, creating something from this found movement."

In Cunningham's work, then, the flow from movement to movement may be warped rather than linear, subject to quick changes and jerky shifts: By analogy, this is the quantum universe, the universe of random motion. And what is communicated is in large part determined by the observer: This is the universe of special relativity, where the passage of time is a function of factors unique to the observer.

Art: new theories Cubist Dubuffet: Jean Dubuffet, Tower of Lace, courtesy of the Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Collection With the passage of time since the 1905 miracle year, the Einstein legacy includes some interesting intersections between science and religion. He didn't just leave us more in awe of the universe, but he also left us in awe of the power of the human mind. More particularly, he left us in awe of the reach of the human imagination. After all, Einstein was less likely to perform computational miracles than to make great leaps of the imagination--envisioning himself, for example, riding on a beam of light. He was doing more than synthesizing empirical evidence. He was inventing analytical frameworks to apply to the most perplexing, if rarely acknowledged, problems. The universe of Galileo and Newton, which prevailed well into the nineteenth century, was built on the metaphor of a machine. God was seen as the Great Watchmaker. Then came the dramatic developments in theoretical physics, from Einstein and more recent cosmological thinkers, like the string theorists. "And the world becomes a much more mysterious place," observes Kalman Bland, a professor of religion at Duke. "We can know the position of a particle, but we can't know its velocity. Or if we know its velocity, we don't know where it is now. So it's a limit on our ability to know. And the same set of circumstances will not always yield the same consequences." Einstein had "faith in the intelligibility of the universe," says Bland. Like the seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza, whom he admired, Einstein equated the discovery of natural law and the discovery of the divine. "And that for him was the deepest religious impulse. He calls it cosmic religion. So the universe for him was a religious object, but it was religious because of its orderliness and its vulnerability to human understanding. If you're willing to concede that orderliness is itself a mysterious thing, then I think we could say, yes, he discovered the religious mystery of the universe. But I think it would be leading to semantic confusion to think that this is the same kind of mystery that religious people necessarily gravitate to. I think the underlying religious belief is in the limits of the human mind, and that the universe governed by God is not ultimately subject to human analysis. And Einstein believed in the power of the human mind to crack the mysteries." John Mayrose is working to crack some of the mysteries of music. Mayrose is a Duke graduate student in music composition. For his Ph.D., he is creating a work based on cosmological theories, including Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity. His adviser, Stephen Jaffe, professor of music, describes the work as "something like a concerto grosso, where several different ensembles compete, combine, and collide." Mayrose discusses the process of composing almost as a scientist would talk about the process of discovery. There's attention to detail and intense concentration, but lots of exercise of imagination and intuition. The work comprises five movements. For the middle movement, inspired by relativity, he says he thought of space in terms of musical notes and time in terms of musical rhythms. In a metaphorical bending of space and time, each of four groups of musical instruments "gradually bends the other groups to what they're doing, and then that group in turn will be bent into a new shape by the other groups." Surrounding relativity are movements inspired by Johannes Kepler, the seventeenth-century astronomer who discovered laws of planetary motion, which he called "harmony of the spheres"; the Uncertainty Principle; supersymmetry; and String Theory. Mayrose, who teaches courses that thematically blend music with technology and science, says he's read general-interest books on relativity and space-and-time concepts, including works by Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene. And he enjoys mathematics; in the realm of electronic music, he regularly constructs sounds by numbers. But he says it's risky for a generalist to be taking on such a high-powered theory as musical inspiration. Kepler wanted someone to write music based on his ideas, but no one took him up on it, Mayrose says. One of Mayrose's fascinations is with String Theory, the working title of his composition. String Theory is an effort to frame a unified field theory of physics, which would describe nature's forces within an all-encompassing framework. That was Einstein's ultimate quest. As its proponents see it, String Theory will meld Einstein's Theory of General Relativity and quantum mechanics--seemingly incompatible ways of describing something very large, deformations in spacetime, and something very small, microscopic objects that show the properties of particles in some circumstances and the properties of waves in others. Brian Greene, the Columbia University physicist and String Theory proponent, who has lectured occasionally at Duke, notes that such cosmological constructs pose enormous challenges to our way of seeing the universe. The emerging idea of the universe, he writes, imagines "loops of strings and oscillating globules, uniting all of creation into vibrational patterns that are meticulously executed in a universe with numerous hidden dimensions capable of undergoing extreme contortions in which their spatial fabric tears apart and then repairs itself." So Einstein's universe may become even more complicated, even stranger to contemplate. Douglas Adams anticipated that prospect--not without trepidation--in his sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, titled The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. "There is a theory which states that if anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable," he wrote. "There is another which states that this has already happened."