EINSTEINISM

Introduction

Einstein about Space and Science

Sandor Balogh, Ph. D.

If scientists can philosophize incorrectly, let us allow the philosophers philosophize correctly.

I have been working on the problem of fields and dimensions for several years. Two years ago (2007) my research took a new turn when I found a brief essay that Einstein wrote in 1952 and was published in the 15^th edition of one of his books.⁽¹⁾ The 1961 copyright is still in effect so it is not on the internet. This might explain why there has been no comment at all from the scientific community to this groundbreaking essay from one of the “most brilliant scientists” of the 20th Century.

Einstein could not accept the statistical explanation to the problems of the quantum world, so he devoted the last decades of his life to search for a different theory, a new paradigm, but did not succeed. In 1953 he wrote to the young John Moffat that “Our situation is the following: we are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open, and we try hard to discover about what is and is not in it.” That closed box is the universe, of course, that Einstein tried to open, and found that the materialist key did not open the box.

While most scientists were fumbling with the old key, trying to push it in and open the door, Einstein set out to find a better key.

This search for the key had consumed so much of his time that he almost completely withdrew from social life and some of his colleagues considered him possessed with this idea. According to Moffat, at one point Schrödinger, another of the great ones of that generation, shouted at him, “Einstein is a fool!” But this brief writing that summarizes Einstein’s thinking at that time proves he was not a fool, but a frustrated old man, with time running out on him.

In the Introduction ("Note to the 15th Edition") Einstein refers to the “general and … the gradual modifications of our ideas on space” and explains “that space-time is not necessarily something to which one can ascribe a separate existence, independently of the actual objects of physical reality. Physical objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially extended. In this way the concept of “empty space" loses its meaning.” In the essay Einstein justifies relativity theory as a necessary step to eliminate aether, which was an artificial concept, by the similarly artificial theory of relativity. But by 1952 he came to recognize that relativity was not the final answer either to the problem of understanding full reality. So, instead of patching up inconsistencies in the old theory, he is looking for an entirely new approach.

We don’t know yet if Einstein’s suggestion is right or wrong, if he found the right key to the box, but the old key was definitely wrong.

Andrew Whitaker of Queens University of Belfast compared Einstein’s criticism and Bohr’s position in a 350 page book,⁽²⁾ and admits, that Bohr clearly won in terms of winning the support of the profession. But in strictly logical sense Einstein’s argument was better. Yet, he cannot declare Einstein the winner, because although Einstein “put up arguments which severely damaged Bohr’s position, and stamped his authority on the debate by re-introducing the ideas of realism and locality, but he never put forward a clear and thorough position which could be considered seriously as winning the argument."⁽³⁾

So, in plain English, there is no winner, only one loser: Bohr. My purpose with this project is to develop Einstein’s suggestion and ideas into a coherent system that can be matched up against Bohr’s indeterminist solution to the “quantum dilemma.” It is unfortunate, that even Whitaker was not aware of Einstein's essay written in 1954, some 40 years before Whitaker undertook his study and comparison, and in the subject index does not even mention fields, the foundation of Einstein’s new approach.

Einstein starts the brief essay by reminding that Descartes denied the existence of space, and proceeds to prove that in view of Newton’s laws this view seemed absurd. To get around Descartes’ denial, aether was invented. Next, to eliminate the need for aether, the Minkovsky space and special relativity theory was invented, but this was not perfect solution either. Today we must accept that the basic physical reality is the four dimensional field. The problem is that we cannot place the 4D field into the 3D space. Therefore, his final conclusion is that there is no 3D empty space, and admits that Descartes was right, after all, “There is no such thing as an empty space, i.e. a space without field. Space-time does not claim existence on its own, but only as a structural quality of the field. Thus Descartes was not so far from the truth … there exists no space "empty of field".” In other words, what we call “space," is filled with fields.

Einstein closed his essay with this statement:

“At the present time, the main question is whether a field theory of the kind here contemplated can lead to the goal at all. By this is meant a theory which describes exhaustively physical reality, including four-dimensional space, by a field. The present-day generation of physicists is inclined to answer this question in the negative. In conformity with the present form of the quantum theory, it believes that the state of a system cannot be specified directly, but only in an indirect way by a statement of the statistics of the results of measurement attainable on the system. The conviction prevails that the experimentally assured duality of nature (corpuscular and wave structure) can be rea1ised only by such a weakening of the concept of reality. I think that such a far-reaching theoretical renunciation is not for the present justified by our actual knowledge, and that one should not desist from pursuing to the end the path of the relativistic field theory.”

This proposal is one of the most important scientific insights of the 20th Century. It not only vindicates Descartes and others who denied the existence of empty space, but challenges the atomistic view of Democritos which claims that only empty space and indivisible particles exist. This paradigm currently dominates what is called modern science.

Einstein recognized one of the most basic problems of science. Obviously, there are substances that have more than three dimensions that could not be fit into space if space has only three-dimensions. Einstein’s brilliant solution cut the Gordian knot: eliminate the concept of space as a real substance all together and instead, focus on the real substances, no matter how many dimensions or extensions they may have.

This made useless and unnecessary a whole cottage industry of creating theories of higher dimensions and also changed my focus from space to the objects. There are dozens of attempts to create higher dimensions, one more complicated than the other, including the super-complicated super-string theories.

One of the better known theories has to do with Theodore Kaluza’s attempt to unite gravity and electromagnetism. He used a four dimensional mathematical formula that would have succeeded were it not for the problem that the 4D solution could not be fit into 3 D space. So Oscar Klein suggested that the fourth dimension had shrunk into tiny bubbles in 3 D space, and this concept is known even today as the Kaluza-Klein theory, or KK theory or model. But Einstein could not accept this explanation and Kaluza’s approach became little more than a footnote in the history of quantum physics. Had Einstein realized then that space is not a container, and there is no 3 D space so the four dimension should apply to the objects, Kaluza’s equation would have changed quantum physics.

Bernard Riemann suggested an even more exotic solution: our 3 D universe is the 3 D hypersurface of a 4 D hypersphere. Another interesting speculation about spatial dimensions was presented by Edwin Abbott in a story of “Flatland,” the 2 D world of A-Square where everything is flat: people, houses, even trees. Two-dimensionality is the official dogma in Flatland and any speculation about higher dimensions is severely punished. Einstein’s solution throws interesting light on the Flatland problem. If there is no 3 D space, there is no 2 D space (plane) either. Abbott’s world is 2 D only because the objects are 2 D, or rather, in their 2 D world view they are perceived as 2 D, just like our 4 D physical reality is perceived as 3 D world where there is no room for more than three extensions.

It is here that Einstein’s genius really shows. He explains that our sense experiences dominate our thinking so much that psychologically we were not able to rise above the domination of sense experiences. We were convinced that what we experience is true and final, there is nothing, or at least cannot be studied by science, anything outside the world that is subject to our senses. Then he asks the fundamental question: why is it necessary to question materialist science? “Why is it necessary to drag down from the Olympian fields of Plato the fundamental ideas of thought in natural science, and to attempt to reveal their earthly lineage? Answer: In order to free these ideas from the taboo attached to them, and thus to achieve greater freedom in the formation of ideas or concepts.”

Einstein’s recognition that modern scientism handcuffs true science is even more significant discovery than his invention of relativity. Relativity was a stop-gap solution that bridged the gap between aether and the 4 D field theories (that Einstein supported in this essay before his death) but this insight set science free from its more than two thousand year old bondage, tied to Democritos’ space-and-atom-only materialist paradigm. We have to step outside the box of the “void space-and-particle-only” prison and free ourselves not only to focus on fields instead of particles in the physical sciences but to be able to study scientifically human existence, life, consciousness, freedom, and the whole range of higher realities.

Einstein brief essay has turned my focus also in the right direction, and instead of many-dimensional space I now focus on fields and substances, and instead of dimenisons, on ‘extensions.” Therefore, based on my old research, using the philosophical approach, I worked out and will present the geometry of four-extension fields and a non-geometrical approach to higher extensional (dimensional) substances.

In 1944 Einstein repeats his famous saying in his letter to Born: “You believe in the God who plays dice, and I in a complete law and order in a world which objectively exists.... No doubt, the day will come when we will see whose instinctive attitude was the correct one.” But his most direct attack came in 1948, when he wrote that “I would enjoy picking your positivist philosophical attitude to pieces myself. But this is hardly likely to happen during our lifetime.”

Over a half century passed since his death, and nothing has happened. With this project I hope to put the crown on Einstein’s efforts during the last decades of his life, so they would not have been in vain. I hope to prove that Einsteins instinctive attitude was correct.

In honor of Einstein, I propose to call this approach EINSTEINISM. +

[1] Albert Einstein, RELATIVITY, A Clear Explanation that Anyone can Understand, copyright MCMLCI, by the Estate of Albert Einstein.

[2] Andrew Whitaker, EINSTEIN, BOHR AND THE QUANTUM DILEMMA, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

[3] Ibid., p. 325.

Used only with express written permission

Professor Balogh lectures about Einsteinism, holding up Einstein’s book