Krista Tippett & Andrew Solomon

Einstein’s God: Conversations about Science

March 3, 2010

LIVE from the New York Public Library

Celeste Bartos Forum

MEG STEMMLER: My name is Meg Stemmler. I’m the Producer of Public Programs at the New York Public Library, known as LIVE from the NYPL. Our mission, as described by Director Paul Holdengräber, is to create cognitive theater and provide evenings of conversation that agitate the mind, bring ideas to life, and, of course, make the lions roar. It is my pleasure to welcome you to our third event of 2010.

Upcoming programs this spring season include author Richard Holmes on the Age of Wonder, artist William Kentridge, a tribute to George Carlin hosted by Whoopi Goldberg, and a conversation with George Prochnik, on his book In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise. I’m happy to announce that we just added a program scheduled for April 6, featuring the New Yorker editor David Remnick and his new biography on Barack Obama titled The Bridge. Remnick will be in conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Other events to look forward to this season include Peter Carey, Lena Herzog, Christopher Hitchens, and an evening on the World Cup.

Become a Friend of the Library for just fortydollars and receive discounted tickets on every LIVE event. Please consider donating to LIVE from the NYPL. It’s because of your support that we’re able to produce these evenings.

After the conversation we invite you to ask questions. Please come up to the microphone that will be in front of the stage and use the opportunity to ask questions instead of make statements. Paul Holdengräber has calculated that a question normally is about fifty-three seconds. Einstein may have agreed, I think. Both Krista Tippett and Andrew Solomon will be signing books tonight provided by independent bookseller 192 Books.

We are thrilled to welcome Krista Tippett back to the stage this evening, who was last here in 2008 to discuss her book Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters and How To Talk about It. Together with Stuart Brown, she looked at the relationship of faith and the science of play, unpacking the spiritual quest for a meaningful life. Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award–winning broadcaster and author. As the creator and host of Speaking of Faith at American Public Media, she has innovated a new model of intelligent, in-depth journalism about religion and spiritual ethics in every aspect of human endeavor. Her most recent book, Einstein’s God: Conversations about Science and the Human Spirit brings her to LIVE from the NYPL this evening for a conversation with Andrew Solomon, instigated by Paul Holdengräber. Krista found out today that her book is now Number 30 on the New York Times best-seller list. (applause) The book includes Tippett’s conversations with scientists both religious and nonreligious, including Freeman Dyson, Janna Levin, Mehmet Oz, Sherwin Nuland, and others as an examination of science and faith.

Andrew Solomon has argued that science and humanism are two different vocabularies for a single set of phenomena and that understanding order through the laws of mathematics and understanding order through faith in life’s underlying purpose are really identical exercise. Andrew Solomon is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and currently a scholar at Yaddo. His book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression won fourteen national awards, including the 2001 National Book Award. He is currently completing a Ph.D. in psychology at Cambridge and writing Love Matters: Discovering the Horizontal Family. The book is about the experience of families with children who are unusual or extraordinary including recent children with autism, Down’s Syndrome, deafness, and dwarfism. Solomon also looks at families of people who commit crimes and families of prodigies. He describes his book as a study of the resilience of parental love.

Krista Tippett’s Einstein’s God illuminates the wonder and awe possessed by Albert Einstein in his personal philosophy in support of science. Einstein could not conceive of a God who rewards or punishes his creatures but he did leave behind a fascinating legacy of musings and writings, some serious, some whimsical, about the relationship between science and religion and his own inquisitive reverence for the order deeply hidden behind everything.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: It follows from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are food, are but different manifestations of the same thing, a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average man. Furthermore, the equation E=mc2 in which energy is equal to mass squared with the velocity of light showed that a very small amount of mass may be converted into a very large amount of energy and vice versa. The mass and energy were in fact equivalent according to the formula mentioned above. This was demonstrated by Cockcroft and Walton in 1932 experimentally.

I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened men of all political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit, not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by nonparticipation

in anything you believe is evil.

(applause)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s a real pleasure to welcome you both tonight, Krista Tippett and Andrew Solomon. Andrew, had you ever heard Einstein speak before?

ANDREW SOLOMON: I had never heard those bits of Einstein speaking, no, and it was compelling and extraordinary to have his voice pouring out into this space, almost as though he had come from above.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I was discouraged by Krista Tippett’s producer to play it because of his accent. (laughter) She said that compared to Einstein I sounded as though I came from South Dakota. (laughter) And I decided we must play it because it would make me look very good.

ANDREW SOLOMON: Paul, you always look very good.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Well, thank you, thank you. Krista, it’s a great pleasure to have you back. I think you were here two, two and a half years ago, to speak with Stuart Brown on the relationship between faith, religion, and play, and now you’ve written this book which we hear is thirtieth on the best-seller list, the New York Times best-seller list, Einstein’s God. I’m—let me start by asking you a very obvious question. Why this book now? Why this title?

KRISTA TIPPETT: Well, the title is the title of the program we did on Einstein in which both of those clips appeared. I think Kate did not prevail. We got them into the program as well. Wasn’t that a wonderful way to start?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Oh, it’s fantastic.

KRISTA TIPPETT: And I was thinking about how Paul Davies, who’s one of the people I interviewed for that show who is—

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: We will hear him in a little while.

KRISTA TIPPETT: —is an astrobiologist and physicist and he talked about how Einstein’s view of time—you know, Einstein always said that our sense of time as compartmentalized, as an arrow moving forward through past, present, and future, is a stubbornly persistent delusion; our five senses conspire in that illusion. And Paul Davies explained to me how in Einstein’s conception of long time, really in some way that I can’t begin to grasp, so I can just say what he explained to me, you know, it is really all happening at the same time.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Does this happen to you often that you’re speaking with these scientists and you can’t completely grasp what they’re talking about?

KRISTA TIPPETT: Yes. I do not understsand E=mc2. But he said that you may have your fourscore years and ten but the entirety of your life is still imprinted, it’s still there. And I did have this feeling when we did the show with Einstein, and it came back to me when we were listening to his voice.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: On Einstein.

KRISTA TIPPETT: On Einstein, yeah, with Einstein. I did commune with Einstein at a cosmic level. You know, that he’s present, and although that sounds like a really lofty, strange concept, I think many of us have that experience when—with people in our own lives who have died, of the fact that they are imprinted beyond their lives. So why now? So these are some of the programs we do. I mean, this program is absolutely exhilarating, even though I still do not understand E=mc2, it was exhilarating for us as producers and these conversations with scientists are some of the shows our listeners love the most and that’s always been true, and so when we talked about putting a book together finally that was centered around programs it was very clear to me that we needed to pull out our scientists and our physicians.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And you attribute the love of the listeners for listening to scientists to what?

KRISTA TIPPETT: That’s a big question. Well, they’re fascinating, and I do think—I think even in publishing you can look at

and writing about science as two of the only areas that are growing. There is this parallel curiosity about these things and when you’re able to bring them together—

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Parallel.

KRISTA TIPPETT: Parallel. Yes.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Meaning they do not intersect.

KRISTA TIPPETT: Not necessarily. And in fact in our public life as we all know, and I think, even on this stage didn’t you have Christopher Hitchens and Al Sharpton?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Your favorite men.

KRISTA TIPPETT: In our public life they’ve—we’ve pit them against each other, and they’ve been debated, set at odds, but nevertheless there is this parallel curiosity, I think there’s this parallel sense that both of these things, both of these things together tell us about what it means to be human, which is a very large canvas, and when you can as we do, when we bring scientists onto Speaking of Faith, when you can bring those things into conversation, when you can even just hear the echoes between the questions they’re raising, not setting their answers one against the other, it’s wonderful.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Forgive me for reading something for a minute but I much enjoy this passage from Clive James in his book called Cultural Amnesia; it’s an entry on Charlie Chaplin. “‘They cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you because no one understands you.’” That’s Charlie Chaplin to Albert Einstein at the 1931 premiere of City Lights.

KRISTA TIPPETT: Right.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: “On the big night, both of the great men looked good both in their tuxedoes, but the film star was undoubtedly the more adroit and social charm. He said exactly the right thing. He wasn’t quite right, however, about the ‘no one understands you.’ By now almost everyone literate, almost every literate person can recite the equation E=mc2 and even give a rough account of it. To give a rough account, however, is not the same as giving a precise one, and having some idea is not the same as understanding. Chaplin’s remark nailed down a discrepancy between two kinds of knowledge—the artistic and the scientific. The power of science is to transform the world in ways that not even scientists can predict. The power of the humanities is to interpret the world in ways that anyone can appreciate. Einstein knew that science had given Chaplin the means to be famous. Einstein also knew that Chaplin could live without the knowledge of science, but as Einstein told Chaplin on many occasions, he himself, Einstein, could not live without the knowledge of the humanities.

“Einstein loved music, for example, and was so wedded to the concept of aesthetic satisfaction that he gained added faith in his general relativity equations from finding them beautiful and frowned on the propositions of quantum mechanics because he found them shapeless. On the latter point he turned out to be wrong, and physicists in the next generation were generally agreed that the aesthetic sense had led him astray. Whoever was inspired to invent the tuxedo, however, did the world a service. On that big night the two different geniuses looked like the equals they were.”

What was my point, (laughter) except for the aesthetical pleasure of it all? I think my point to some extent and I think the point maybe of Clive James in Cultural Amnesia of linking Charlie Chaplin to Einstein is to talk about something that comes out so fabulously in one of your interviews with Freeman Dyson—is Einstein’s extraordinary sense of humor.

KRISTA TIPPETT: Yes, yes.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Could you talk a little bit about that?

KRISTA TIPPETT: And what I wrote when I was reflecting on that show is I did have this feeling of almost giddiness coming out of it and going into it, it was quite daunting to think we’re going to talk about Einstein’s ideas, but there was a logic of sorts to that giddiness, because he was a funny guy and he used humor, and Freeman Dyson said that his sense of humor went hand in hand with the fact that being a great scientist means failing a lot of the time. It means failing many times on the way to every great discovery, and Einstein—

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And you need humor to—

KRISTA TIPPETT: Well, his sense of humor was what allowed him to pick himself up and keep going and even be graceful about it.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I see a big smile developing there and maybe the notion of resilience comes into play here—

ANDREW SOLOMON: There’s always a smile when I hear Krista’s eloquent words. But I was just thinking that the passage you read is very interesting, and it’s interesting to me because I’ve ended up on this platform despite the fact that I spent most of my childhood with no interest in either faith or science but a great interest in the arts and humanities. And I think what Krista really looks at in her book is not simply the intersection of faith—not simply the intersection of humanity and science but it’s also faith, which is also about the imponderable and the incomprehensible and, really, I think the virtue of this very splendid book is that it brings together two different ways of identifying the vastness and incomprehensibility of experience outside the sort of narrow confines of the individual human being and that what Charlie Chaplin was getting at was being able to move entirely inside and that that’s then the translational act of people who write books or conduct interviews onstage at the library or have radio shows. So I think there are three pieces to this rather than two and they’re constellated.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I’d like us to listen to the first clip we have.

FREEMAN DYSON: He has a marvelous sense of human and that’s a very important part of life and of course the fact is that scientists have on the whole cultivated this sense of humor because so much of science is the history of failures, and most, if you’re a creative person, it’s true in other kinds of creative life but more in science. So much of science ends up to be wrong. And that you do something you’ve spent weeks and months, finally the whole thing collapses, and you need to have a sense of humor, otherwise you couldn’t survive and Einstein I think understood that particularly well.

KRISTA TIPPETT: I wanted to ask you what physicists are learning now that would befuddle him, what would intrigue him, and I suppose we’ve already wandered into that territory. What else is happening now that perhaps he made possible but that might surprise him?

FREEMAN DYSON: Well, I think the big thing that he made possible but which he never accepted was black holes, places where big stars have collapsed and effectively disappeared from the universe except that there’s left behind a hole where the star used to be, so you have there a very strong gravitational field without any bottom. The black hole is the only place where space and time are really so mixed up that they behave in a totally different way. I mean, that you fall into a black hole and your space is converted into time and your time is converted into space.

KRISTA TIPPETT: Sort of the ultimate relativity?

FREEMAN DYSON: Yes, in a way, it’s the most exciting and the most beautiful consequence of his theory and nature would not be the same without them and I think if Einstein came back, he really would be surprised by that. I mean, he would have to accept—if he came back now—he would have to accept that black holes are real and they’re here to stay and they are actually a tremendous triumph of his own ideas. I think it would be amusing to see his reaction. I am sure he would accept it and probably make some very suitable joke.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Any reaction to that?

ANDREW SOLOMON: I think it’s exquisitely and beautifully said. I think the issue of Einstein’s—the relationship for him between an aesthetic appreciation, the beauty that he found in the laws that he saw and the actual concrete applications and consequences of them—that’s a significantly, and I think it’s often the case that you have a visionary who has the idea in its purest and its most abstract form and the distance from that abstraction to a concrete reality is sometimes a difficult one. I don’t profess to be an expert on the extent to which Einstein could work out those correlations, you know a lot of things I don’t, but I think the essence really of what Dyson is saying is that you have to have a grand vision and then you have to have people to refine it and to make sense of it and to adduce it into something which is actually relevant and useful to the fabric of our lives or indeed of the life of the universe.