Relativity and LifeAuthor(s): BetaSource: The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Feb., 1926), pp. 170-172Published by: American Association for the Advancement of ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/7447 .

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RELATIVITY AND LIFE By "BETA"

I HAVE been criticized for attempting to write anything about relativity inas- much as I am not a mathematician, but it seems to me that this criticism means that my critic thinks there is only one frame of reference from which relativity can be measured, namely, mathematics. But this is a denial of the fundamental thought in relativity. The germ of rela- tivity consists in the idea that there is no one frame of reference from which alone reality can be measured. Does not this idea apply to relativity itself ? Can not a man measure relativity from a non- mathematical frame of reference? This is what I am attempting in this paper.

I wish first to define the term abso- lutism. By absolutism I mean the theory that states there is one unique frame of reference from which alone reality can be correctly measured. Now relativity is not so much a new affirma- tion as a denial of the old affirmation absolutism. In the history of ideas there have been three great movements from absolutism to relativity. The first was in religion. The church claimed there was only one frame of reference from which to measure spiritual values, namely, the Old Testament as inter- preted by the church. Luther intro- duced relativity or the right of private judgment. The next was absolutism in government or the divine right of kings. Democracy set up relativity or govern- ment by changing public opinion. The last stronghold of absolutism was in physical science, where it was long held that there must be one frame of refer- ence from which alone length, mass and time can be correctly measured. Michel-

son tried to prove this with his measure- ments of the velocity of light and failed, and then came Einstein, who destroyed the last absolutism as Luther had de- stroyed the first.

Now it is the persistence of absolutism in life that causes most of our troubles. Is not the cause of social friction in this world due to the fact that most of us, consciously or unconsciously, are abso- lutists and will not look at things from any but out own frame of reference? The chaos in middle Europe is due to absolutism in the form of nationalism. I agree that nationalism is a very good frame of reference from which to mea- sure sonme things. There are several very beautiful things in life which are well worth while and which nationalism sus- tains, such as art, literature, music, tra- ditions and sentiments. But the trouble is that when we are absolutists we meas- ure everything from one frame of refer- ence. Now if there is anything certain in this world it is that political economy can not be measured correctly from a nationalistic frame of reference. Yet that is just what the people of middle Europe are trying to do and naturally they are making a mess of things. The trouble is that in spite of Luther, de- mocracy and Einstein, the mass of man- kindi do not yet see that relativity and not absolutism states the truth about life.

Yet there have been men who for thousands of years have been relativists. I refer to artists. You will never hear artists claim there is only one way of expressing the beauty of life. The painter sees beauty in the statue and in

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RELATIVITY AND LIFE 171

music, in prose and in poetry, in differ- ent forms of architecture; he admits they are all different ways of expressing the beautiful. But before Einstein, if a physicist had said that this thing called measured length is not an abso- lute but will vary according to the way you look at it (which, of course, is just what all artists say of art in general) what would have happened to this pre- Einstein physicist? It is an interesting fact that there has never been the slight- est antagonism between art and religion, which is simply because artists are rela- tivists, whereas the antagonism between science and religion was due to the fact that pre-Einstein physicists were abso- lutists, just like the theologians, and whenever there is absolutism there are always reasons for fighting. Einstein has left the absolutists in physics no ground to stand on. Yet absolutism will be a long time dying out, and I find absolutism as a philosophy existiiig (often unconsciously) in men who claim to understand relativity. The reason why Einstein overthrew absolutism is because he is not a scientist. Einstein is an artist whose medium of expression happens to be mathematical physics in- stead of line, color or marble. One has only to look at his picture to recognize the artist.

I wish now to make the following heretical suggestions. It seems to me that the difference between the living organism and the so-called non-living is not so much a difference in the "thing in itself" as it is in the frames of refer- ence we use by which to measure it. Mechanism, which we think character- izes the non-living, implies repetition and hence predictability. But Einstein has shown there is no such thing as repe- tition in any real sense. We get repe- tition simply by choosing a frame of ref- erence which will show it. Thus, a sec- onds pendulum repeats if the origin of

our frame of reference is the point of support of the pendulum. But if our origin is in the sun, the pendulum will not repeat for at least a year. We can choose a frame with its origin such that we can never prove that the bob comes back to its original position. What then becomes of repetition and the so-called regularity of nature's laws? It does not exist in any absolute sense because we can not find a frame of reference at rest to prove regularity. We get regularity simply by agreeing to ignore the irregu- larities, and we do this by choosing the proper frame of reference. All that science has the right to say about nature is that it is generosity raised to the nth power. Nature will show us anything we want to see, provided we hunt with the proper frame of reference. The frame we choose is a function of the particular activity which interests us. Whenever we measure a phenomenon in science, our frame of reference must be outside the thing measured. This is the objective method of science, and a con- stant characteristic of this method is to ignore what does not interest us. So far as science ist concerned, it continually measures parts, not wholes.

Now it happens that, being living beings, we have the power of measuring one whole, and that is our own psychical life, and what do we find here? We find creation going on all the time. We never find repetition in our psychical life so long as we view ourself as a whole. This is all that we mean when we say that we grow older day by day. Our second experience is always different from our first experience if only because it has in it the memory of our first ex- perience. This must be true since other- wise how could we know the experience is a second experience? This of itself is convincing evidence of creation and a denial of repetition in our psychical life considered as a whole. But when we cut

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172 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

ourself up into parts (a very different frame of reference) and examine the parts objectively, of course we find repe- tition, and hence, mechanism. Each liv- ing organism is a closed system to itself, and hence it must be compared only to a complete universe closed in the Ein- stein sense, in which there is always creation when measured as a whole, but which, of course, show-s repetition when measured by parts, that is, objectively.

We have no direct conscious evidence of anything outside ourself, being as we are systems which are closed psycbi- cally. To this extent, Berkeley is right.

Our consciousness does, however, give us good grounds for inferring the existence of other systems and it is this justifiable inference which has built up objective science. In the same way we may infer the existence of universes other than our own, but, if Einstein is right, we can have no direct knowledge of them. Ac- cording to Einstein, try as hard as we may physically, nothing can get out of our own universe. Just so, according to Berkeley, try as hard as we may psychi- cally, we never can get out of our own consciousness.

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