Roush+Week+8+assignment

The article “Einstein’s Third Paradise” shows something in Einstein’s life that seems to be a theme in the life of the most revolutionary and memorable scientists. Gerald Holton says in the article, “ T hroughout Einstein's writings, one can watch him searching for that world picture, for a comprehensive Weltanschauung, one yielding a total conception that, as he put it, would include every empirical fact…– not only of physical science, but also of life.” Holton argues that this pursuit had a religious element to it. Einstein, Holton argues, wanted to learn how God worked in the universe. This argument is similar to one made about Newton. It is argued that Newton’s scientific and alchemical pursuits were his way of finding out theological ideas. By learning more about the physical world, Newton thought that he could learn more about God and his relation to that physical world. The common thread between these two is that they had a specific purpose for doing their science. They had philosophical ideas that they thought could be proved through science, as scientific facts are, of course, the highest form of knowledge. Both of them, however, came across some ideas that contradicted their worldviews. For Einstein, it was the idea of a universe that is not spatially fixed. In Einstein’s ideal universe, space and time may be flexible, but they can only exist within the closed confines of the universe. When he worked out the mathematics of this hypothesis, he found it to not make sense. To try to fix this, Einstein inserted a constant which had no experimental or logical basis. The inclusion of this constant was proven wrong most absolutely by Edwin Hubble who measured the rate of expansion of the universe, and so Einstein accepted that this constant should be included in calculations. The common theme in revolutionary science that I referred to earlier is the fact that the scientists who do revolutionary science are seeking different answers than their contemporary scientists. They look at the world from a different perspective, and so they discover things that other people cannot. When people try to describe Einstein’s discoveries as the result of “pure intellect,” they are being incredibly naïve. Einstein thought about the universe in a different way, and that is how he made his remarkable discoveries. Intellect certainly had a contribution to the effort, but intellect alone can’t do anything. It is the ability to ask new questions like, “What would it be like to travel alongside a photon?” that makes a revolutionary scientist. In the case of both Newton and Einstein, this ability to ask new questions produced some of the most revolutionary and significant science ever.