Curioser and Curiouser.

 

Well what do you know???

I was wondering what Einstein would be considering, if he could have been involved with the treasure hunt at CERN for the elusive Higgs Bosun particle, aka ‘The God Particle’. What I have been reading about Einstein pleases me. I love his curiosity, his marvel in the complexity of the universe in which we live. I love the humility with which he accepts the limitations of human understanding yet marries it with an intellectual rigour and a drive to discover . I love the way he doesn’t mind being wrong. And I share his view of the cosmos having a spiritual dimension which is unknowable.
In his lecture at Einstein’s memorial, nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer summarized his impression of him as a person: “He was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without worldliness . . . There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn.”  I can’t help wishing I had met him, perhaps walking the dog. There we would be, chatting and exchanging views on this and that, and recognising in each other some common thread of spirit.
A man born into a Jewish family, non-practising, who was more influenced by Catholicism, but matures into someone who accepts a religiosity, but not a creed. The philosophy of religion and the quest for spiritual truth preoccupied Albert Einstein–so much that it has been said “one might suspect he was a disguised theologian.”

I share with him the sense of awe over the majesty of the universe and the sense that its workings is all the “religion” needed by our species. He required no formal institutions, no religious acts other than being true to his intellectual curiosity, had no missionary zeal to convert others to his position, and was without a personal need for immortality. He found it impossible not to think of himself as religious in the sense of humility and awe at the mystery, rationality and complexity of nature, considering “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”
Whilst I am amazed and impressed with the findings modern scientists are claiming, I return to Einsteins thought “I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one ?” I find it inconceivable that once this particle unravels our current understanding of physics, and propels us into new, unimagined possibilites, we will not be left with the constant dilemnas we all face, -How do I live, What do I believe, Who am I? For me, Einstein hits the nail on the head when he tells us “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.” However much we learn about the machinery of the world, and of the universe, it remains for the individual to discover their own value within it. He takes me back to the ideas I blogged about concerning left brained thinking, in which we discover that analysis alone will never progress human thinking . The mystery of the universe refuses to be merely dissected to be understood, as “The really good music, whether of the East or of the West, cannot be analyzed.”(Interview with Rabindranath Tagore (14 April 1930) Perhaps we need to learn how to listen to the music.

If you want to know more about the latest scientific discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider, start here: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html

 

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