Einstein's Autobiography

ôIt is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth which was lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the ômerely personal,ö from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes and primitive feelings. Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned as a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in its pursuit. The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of our capabilities presented itself to my mind, half consciously, half unconsciously, as a supreme goal. Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights they have achieved, were the friends who could not be lost. The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to religious paradise; but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it. ...

In a man of my type, the turning point ... lies in the fact that gradually the major interest disengages itself to a far-reaching degree from the momentary and the merely personal and turns inward toward the striving for a conceptual grasp of things.ö

"The great variety of the external situations and the narrowness of the momentary content of consciousness bring about a sort of atomizing of the life of every human being."

The bandwidth of conscious attention is small compared to the sentient sub-conscious processing.

"When, on the reception of sense impressions, memory pictures emerge, this is not yet 'thinking.' And when such pictures form sequences, each member of which calls forth another, this too is not yet 'thinking.' When, however, a certain picture turns up in many such sequences, then - precisely by such a return- it becomes an organizing element for such sequences, in that it connects sequences in themselves unrelated to each other. Such an element becomes a tool, a concept. I think thatthe transition from free association or ædreamingÆ to thinking is characterized by the more or less preeminent role played by the æconceptÆ. It is by no means necessary that a concept be tied to a sensorily cognizable and reproducible sign (word); but when this is the case, then thinking becomes thereby capable of being communicated. ...

With what right--the reader will ask--does this man operate so carelessly and primitively with ideas in such a problematic realm without making even the least effort to prove anything? My defense: all our thinking is of this nature of free play with concepts; the justification for this play lies in the degree of comprehension of our sensations that we are able to achieve with its aid. The concept of ætruthÆ can not yet be applied to such a structure; to my thinking this concept becomes applicable only when a far-reaching agreement (convention) concerning the elements and rules of the game is already at hand.

.... our thinking goes on for the most part without the use of signs (words) and beyond that to a considerable degree unconsciously. For how, otherwise, should it happen that sometimes we æwonderÆ quite spontaneously aboutsome experience? This æwonderingÆ appears to occur when an experience comes into conflict with a world of concepts already sufficiently fixed within us. Whenever such a conflict is experienced sharply and intensively it reacts back upon our world of thought in a decisive way. The development of this world of thought is in a certain sense a continuous flight from wonder.ö

Distinguish conscious attention. That is both subconscious thinking and conscious attention depend on back-action. The subconscious thinking is the motion of the system point before capture.

ô...dogmatic rigidity prevailed in matters of principle: In the beginning (if there was such a thing), God created NewtonÆs laws of motion together with the necessary masses and forces...

the more sophisticated development of the mechanics of discrete masses as the basis of all physics, was the achievement of the nineteenth century. What made the greatest impression ... was not so much the technical development of mechanics or the solution of complicated problems as the achievements of [classical Newtonian] mechanics in areas that apparently had nothing to do with mechanics: the mechanical theory of light, which conceived of light as the wave motion of a quasi-rigid elastic ether; and above all the kinetic theory of gases: the independence of the specific heat of monatomic gases from the atomic weight, the derivation of the equation of the state of a gas and its relation to the specific heat, the kinetic theory of the dissociation of gases, and above all the quantitative relationship between viscosity, heat conduction, and diffusion of gases which also furnished the absolute magnitude of the atom. ... In chemistry, however, only the ratios of the atomic masses played any role, not their absolute magnitudes, so the atomic theory [of the chemists] could be viewed more as a visualizing symbol than as knowledge concerning the actual composition of matter. ...

it was also of profound interest that the statistical theory of classical mechanics was able to deduce the basic laws of thermodynamics, something ... already accomplished by Boltzmann. ...

all physicists of the [19th] century saw in classical mechanics a firm and definitive foundation for all physics, indeed for the whole of natural science ... I see MachÆs greatness in his incorruptible skepticism and independence ... MachÆs epistemological position ... today appears to me to be essentially untenable. For he did not place in the correct light the essentially constructive and speculative nature of all thinking and more especially of scientific thinking.ö

Mach rejected the kinetic theory of atoms on positivistic grounds. This was before scanning tunnelling microscopes that can see individual atoms.

Einstein says that theories must be judged both by ôinner perfectionö and ôexternal confirmation.ö

ô .. the incorporation of wave optics into the mechanical picture of the world was bound to arouse serious misgivings. If light was to be interpreted as undulatory motion in an elastic body (ether), this had to be a medium that permeates everything, because of the transversality of the light waves, in the main resembling a solid body, yet incompressible, so that longitudinal waves did not exist. This ether had to lead to a ghostly existence alongside the rest of matter, inasmuch as it seemed to offer no resistance whatever to the motion of ponderable bodies. In order to explain the indices of refraction of transparent bodies as well as the processes of emission and absorption of radiation, one would have to assume complicated interactions between the two types of matter, something that was not even seriously tried, let alone achieved.ö

There was no natural way to explain Maxwell classical electromagnetic field in terms of Newtonian classical particle mechanics.

ô.. thus mechanics as the basis of physics was being abandoned, almost imperceptibly, because its adaptation to the facts presented itself finally as a hopeless task. Since then, there exist two [classical] types of conceptual elements [in classical rocklike physics]: on the one hand, material points with forces at a distance between them and, on the other hand, the continuous field.ö

ôFrom the standpoint of purely geometrical description, all ærigidÆ coordinate systems are logically equivalent. The equations of mechanics (for example the law of inertia) claim validity only when referred to a specific class of such systems, I.e., the æinertial systemsÆ. In this connection the coordinate system as a material object is without any significance. Hence to justify the need for this specific choice one must search for something that exists beyond the objects (masses, distances) with which the theory deals. For this reason æabsolute spaceÆ as originally determinative was quite explicitly introduced by Newton as the omnipresent active participant in all mechanical events; by æabsoluteÆ [Newton] obviously means: uninfluenced by the masses and by their motion.ö

Einstein rejects the preferential selection of inertial frames of reference as special. In other words, the use of non-inertial frames should be equally valid, if not equally useful. Using an image reminiscent of AbbottÆs ôFlatlandö and PlatoÆs Allegory of the Cave, people who live in a small area and never see the stars ascribe a special physical attibute to the vertical direction of acceleration of falling bodies. Einstein concludes:

"The preference given to the vertical over all other spatial directions is precisely analogous to the preference given to inertial systems over other rigid coordinate systems.ö

Note EinsteinÆs use of the qualifier ôrigidö. He also points out that these poor fools, with chains around their necks that make it difficult to look upward to the stars and beyond.

ôThey might not let themselves be influenced by the argument that in its geometrical properties space is isotropic and that it is therefore unsatisfactory to postulate basic physical laws according to which there is to be a preferential direction...ö

EinsteinÆs argument applies to time as well as space - there is to be no preferential direction for time. This would seem to be an argument for the Wheeler-Feynman model which uses exactly ╜ each of the retarded electromagnetic potential from the past light cone to here-now plus the advanced electromagnetic potential from the future to here-now to get the correct radiation reaction for a point charge in motion. Feynman also pointed out that the essential classical requirement to get far field transverse radiation energy emitted is not the acceleration of the charge, but its time derivative, i.e., third time derivative of the charge displacement. This gives a third order in time dynamical equation of motion for the charge. One can see that this is required by the equivalence principle of general relativity which says that a charge at rest in a uniform gravitational field does not radiate. Therefore, by the equivalence principle, a uniformly accelerating charge cannot radiate transversely into the far field. However, Einstein denied the kind of action-at-a-distance that Wheeler and Feynman were to use later on. Einstein was in love with the field, Wheeler and Feynman, like Marc Antony at CaesarÆs Funeral, wished to bury it along with other ôhonorableö ideas. Remember these are the rocklike intensity-dependent form-independent classical force fields that are locally acting in ordinary three-dimensional relative space at each moment in relative time. ôRelativeö means ôframe-dependentö. Einstein, at that time, had no inkling that his ôspooky telepathicö thoughtlike quantum fields that are local in higher-dimensional configuration space, but nonlocally-acting in ordinary three-dimensional space and time, and are form-dependent and intensity-independent, were thoughtlike. Indeed, spooky telepathic nonlocality and form-dependence are highly non-classical, i.e., not rock-like, but, rather, non-material properties of thought. In other words, that the quantum wave properties of source matter and the quantum particle properties of their classical wave force fields, are the products of the action of a cosmic thoughtlike fundamental pattern in the universe forming a Sleeping God, were too much for him to admit to -- even though he was a mystical realist. My post-quantum back-action awakens this Sleeping God into The Conscious God. Here is the New Creation Mythematick for The Third Millennium. :-)

ôIf one accepts the concepts of space (including geometry) and time without critical doubts, then there exists no reason to object to the idea of action at a distance, even though such a concept is unsuited to the ideas one forms on the basis of the raw experience of of daily life.ö

Einstein remarks that the requirement that ôforces depend only on the coordinates (and not, for example on their derivatives with respect to time) ... is not very natural...ö Phenomenological friction forces with the irreversible arrow of time depend on the first time derivative. Also look at the force of radiation reaction.

Einstein adds a second argument against the kind of intensity-dependent form-independent classical action at a distance as it is found in NewtonÆs law of gravitational force which practically speaking is very useful and accurate for travel between the planets, for airplanes, ships, boats, cars, machinery of all kinds etc.

ôWithin the framework of [NewtonÆs] theory alone it is entirely arbitrary that the forces of gravitation (and electricity), which come from one point, are governed by the potential function 1/r ... it has long been known tht this function is the spherically symmetric solution of the simplest (rotation-invariant) differential equation Laplacian of the potential = 0; it would therefore not be far-fetched to regard this as a clue that this function was to be considered as resulting from a spatial law, an approach that would have eliminated the arbitrariness in the force law. This is really the first insight that suggests a turning away from the theory of action at a distance, a development that - prepared by Faraday, Maxwellm and Hertz-- really begins only later in response to the external pressure of experimental data.ö

To summarize: Einstein attacks the classical action at a distance that Wheeler and Feynman embraced.

Einstein: Field? Yes! Instantaneous action-at-a-distance? No!

Wheeler and Feynman: Field? No! Delayed action-at-a-distance from the future? Yes!

Note here that there are three really different ideas of action at a distance -- the classical version, the quantum version, and the post-quantum version. Einstein above, and also Wheeler and Feynman in their classical delayed action at a distance both to the future and to the past light cones, are talking about classical form-independent but intensity-dependent classical action at a distance. In contrast, Bohm is talking about quantum form-dependent but intensity-independent action at a distance. EberhardÆs theorem asserts that conservation of quantum probability current densities in configuration space precludes the use of quantum action at a distance, nonlocal in ordinary 3D space and time as a direct communication channel. In contrast, post-quantum action at a distance informed by a direct back-action from the rocklike classical beable to its attached thoughtlike quantum pilot-wave, violates EberhardÆs theorem because the quantum currents are no longer conserved in configuration space. That is, the quantum analog to the classical Liouville theorem in classical statistical mechanics is violated. Indeed, this post-quantum friction provides the arrow of time and is the dynamo of creative thought driving the advance of civilization.

To summarize: Einstein attacks the form-independent/intensity-dependent classical action-at-a-distance that Wheeler and Feynman embraced.

Einstein: Field? Yes! Instantaneous action-at-a-distance? No!

Wheeler and Feynman: Field? No! Delayed action-at-a-distance from the future? Yes!

ôI would also like to mention , as one internal asymmetry of this [Newtonian] theory, that the inertial mass that occurs in the law of motion also appears in the law of gravitational force, but not in the expressions for the other forces.ö

Einstein also says that: ôthe division of energy into two essentially different parts, kinetic and potential energy, must be felt to be unnatural.ö What does he mean by that? Why does he use the word ôunnaturalö? ôH. Hertz felt this to be so disturbing that, in his very last work, he attempted to free mechanics from the concept of potential energy (i.e., from the concept of force)."

Einstein did abolish gravitational force in general relativity. He replaced NewtonÆs instantaneous classical action at a distance force by local curved 4D spacetime geometry. The test mass simply rolls along a slower than light locally straightest path in spacetime called the ôtimelike geodesicö. This geodesic while as straight as it can be in curved 4D spacetime, corresponds, counterintuitively, to the motion of a point particle on a closed precessing ellipse when viewed in seemingly flat 3D space. The modern fiber bundle theory of gauge forces partially attempts to do with the electroweak and strong forces what Einstein did with the gravity force. These forces are curvatures in the connection among tiny extra-dimensional hyperspheres attached to each spacetime event. This is still classical. All of the gauge forces are intensity-dependent and form-independent rocklike i.e., material things. They must be combined with the intensity-independent and form-dependent thoughtlike nonmaterial, but still physical, quantum superpotential to get the modern theory of relativistic quantum fields that create and destroy quanta and their anti-quanta.

NewtonÆs idea of ôabsolute spaceö means no direct classical back-action of the motion of masses on the structure of the space in which they move. EinsteinÆs great achievement in the general theory of relativity was to explain gravitation as the warping of spacetime by the actual motion of all forms of mass-energy. The warping or bending of spacetime, i.e., curvature, is a kind of classical back-action of that creates a feedback loop between mass-energy and spacetime geometry making the gravitational field equation highly nonlinear.

My idea of post-quantum back-action to explain the mind-matter ôhard problemö is analogous to EinsteinÆs classical back-action from the stress-energy tensor distribution directly to the formerly rigid Newtonian 3D space , thus transforming it into a dynamical mutable object morphing its inner spacelike shape while also bending time, e.g., the pinching off of the wormhole. In the same way, the actual motion of the system point (or beable) of the complex self-organizing adaptive post-quantum system exerts a direct post-quantum back-action on the quantum pilot wave guiding the system pointÆs actual motion. There is then a two-way relation between this thoughtlike thing (or mind) and its attached rocklike thing (or brain).

The thoughtlike thing and the rocklike thing form a new self-determining non-random living post-quantum whole that is greater than the sum of its lower level completely random quantum-indeterministic thoughtlike part and its completely classical-deterministic rocklike part. The post-quantum living system decomposes into its quantum and classical pieces when it dies i.e., when the post-quantum back-action gets too small relative to the non-self Darwinian natural selection pressures. The post-quantum back-action in Nietzschean terms is the Will to Consciousness.

1) EinsteinÆs classical back-action in general relativity is the two-way relationship between the spacetime geometry and its attached stress-energy tensor distribution. The resulting complex adaptive system is our actual expanding classical universe from the big bang.

2) My post-quantum back-action in the really New Physics is the two-way relationship between the thoughtlike quantum-indeterministic pilot-wave and its attached classical-deterministic material system pointÆs actual path, or hidden variable beable, in configuration space. The resulting complex adaptive systems are our living mind-brains. The stream of inner felt attentive waking consciousness, as well as dream-time consciousness, as well as sentient sub-conscious processing or thinking, corresponds to the successive captures of the brain system point, and its lower level subsystem points, by a sequence of self-similar fractal memetic attractors that are continuously regenerated by the motion of the system point while simultaneously generating the motion of that system point. This is a highly nonlinear nonalgorithmic globally self-consistent self-organizing strange creative loop -- the dynamo of free will in the face of external Darwinian natural selection pressures on memes.