Moral compass guided Einstein

Moral compass guided Einstein
Eminent physicist finds humanity at core of famous theories

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Beginning with pictures and ending with a plea, physicist Sylvester James Gates Jr. used Albert Einstein’s legacy as a framework to discuss not only what science means to us, but also what we mean to science.

JEFF FITLOW
Physicist Sylvester Gates presented “Einstein’s New Millennium Legacy” as part of the President’s Lecture Series at Rice Oct. 15.

Gates, director of the Center for String and Particle Theory at the University of Maryland, spoke on ”Einstein’s New Millennium Legacy” as part of the President’s Lecture Series at Rice University Oct. 15. Addressing a nearly packed Shell Auditorium at McNair Hall (despite competition with the final presidential debate, which Rice President David Leebron referenced as the evening’s “alternative entertainment” in his introduction), Gates said Americans need to be as forward-thinking in their attitudes about science in this century as Einstein was in the last.

Promising he wouldn’t deliver a physics talk (”If you see something that might be physics, you are hallucinating,” he quipped), Gates proceeded down that very path, supported by films and photos that touched upon such cosmic phenomena as pulsars and graviton waves and earthbound tools like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which he hopes will discover the missing elemental particles scientists have long sought but never seen.

(Of one such particle known as winos, he said, ”I live for the day when there’s an announcement from CERN, perhaps in the New York Times, saying, ‘Winos found at LHC.”’)

Not long into his lecture, Gates, displaying the warmth that has made him a popular contributor to many PBS science shows over the years, began skipping from theme to theme, all connected in some way to Einstein’s theories and, ultimately, his humanity.

”What I’ve tried to give you is a sense of Einstein’s legacy to science, and how it’s driving, even today, the frontier questions that we are asking as physicists.

”All of you actually walk around with a piece of Einstein attached to your person almost all the time,” Gates said. ”Most of you have cell phones. A lot of you have beepers. Those things are loaded with Einstein’s legacy, because Einstein is also the father of quantum mechanics, which tells us how to play with electrons.”

Gates sought to put theories into perspective, even extending them to Einstein’s attitudes on religion and race. Despite Einstein’s premise that science can never supersede religion, Gates said most scientists have no problem debating spiritual questions. But ”this is an unacceptable thing … that there are people out there who (say they) can, through their doctrines, prove or disprove what I may or may not hold as a spiritual belief.

”Einstein’s beliefs about religion are at least as complicated as his theory of general relativity,” said Gates. ”Einstein is, in fact, a man of theories. … It’s the theory of general relativity. It’s the theory of special relativity. It’s the theory of electromagnetism. It’s the theory of classical Newtonian mechanics. The reason we call them theories is because we know they might be wrong.

”An accepted theory must explain thousands, tens of thousands of measurements. Facts. On the other hand, a single fact can actually destroy a theory,” he said.

If one could look back from the far future, we’d see many current theories bear fruit, said Gates, whose research encompasses string theory, supersymmetry and the search for a unified theory of everything. ”We’re willing to say we don’t know all the answers, but we also believe we are capable of improving constantly the answers we provide to society. And those answers … are the basis of more technology.”

Einstein’s career incorporated not only the theories that led to much of what we enjoy about the modern world, Gates said, but also to Einstein’s own sense of regret, specifically over how his theory of relativity led to the invention of the atomic bomb.

Einstein’s moral center was evident throughout his life, said Gates. ”One of the things in my exploration of Einstein that was most shocking to me was that you could praise him as a civil rights activist on behalf of African-Americans.”

Of racism, ”Einstein said, ‘The more I feel American, the more the situation pains me. I can escape the feeling of complicity only by speaking out. Many persons will answer me, ”They are not our equals in intelligence, sense of responsibility and liability.”’ And Einstein’s response to this is, ‘I am firmly convinced that whoever believes this suffers from a fatal misconception.’

”Einstein, to me, in this regard, shows an amazing ability to take himself out of the space and time in which he existed.”

Science isn’t cheap, Gates admitted, and money spent on long-term research could arguably be spent to solve short-term ills. But there would be a severe consequence, he said, and pleaded with listeners to support science by reading, learning and calling their congressional representative.

”We have a contract with Americans who have not been born yet,” he said. ”And we will abrogate that contract if we say, ‘We’re not going to invest in the future. We don’t want the future to be as bright for Americans two or three generations down the road as it has been for us.’ I think that’s immoral.”

The President’s Lecture Series is sponsored by the Office of the
President and supported by the J. Newton Rayzor Lecture Fund. The next
lecture will be by British mathematician Andrew Wiles, who will discuss
“The Story of an Equation” Nov. 11.