God in the Equation: How Einstein Transformed Religion - Softcover

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Corey Powell is the News Editor at Discover magazine and a regular contributor. He has written for a variety of other publications including Scientific American and Newsday. He is an adjunct professor at New York University teaching a course on science writing. He graduated from Harvard in history and science.

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The God of Sci/religion

The world's newest spiritual center is a long way from Mecca or Jerusalem, Vatican City or Lhasa. It lies at the remote summit of Mauna Kea, a million-year-old mountain of lava and ash jutting nearly three miles above the tropical Hawaiian shore. While the old sites still hold a sacred place in the imaginations of countless billions, their spiritual wisdom hasn't changed in centuries. Hearing the latest gospel requires a pilgrimage to the top of this hulking, dormant volcano.

Antiseptic white domed buildings, mysteriously unmarked, interrupt the desolate landscape. There are no spires, no stained glass, no columns or gilded doorways to welcome the visitor. Inside, the high priests of science and their electronic surrogates peer through the dry, rarefied atmosphere into the vastness above. A trek to this remote pinnacle of astronomical power begins on the lightly traveled Saddle Road, which runs between Mauna Kea and its active twin, Mauna Loa, on Hawaii's Big Island. Your rental car is wheezing by the time you reach the stopping point halfway up, at Hale Pohaku. Even after a night of acclimation, your own lungs are working double time when you reach the top, an altitude of just under fourteen thousand feet. At night the stars appear strangely dim, because your retinas are starved for air and unable to pull their normal duty. The sky swims with the blackness of a near faint, similar to the kind of negative rush you see when you stand up too quickly. Take a deep breath of pure oxygen from a tank and all the visual chemistry falls back into place. Then, a revelation: The sky blooms with light, the universe made manifest by a dose of rudimentary medical technology.

The two Keck telescopes are the supreme oracles of Mauna Kea. After a half hour in the dark, a healthy person's pupils open not quite one-third of an inch, and behind them the retinas store about one-tenth of a second of visual information. Keck I and its newer twin, Keck II, maintain an unblinking gaze thirty-three feet across and can hold it for hours. Their thirty-six-piece, segmented mirrors gather billion-year-old light from faraway quasars and galaxies, amassing the raw information to answer questions otherwise unknowable to mere mortals. Photon by photon, the Kecks are validating the new way of understanding the world.

The word coming down from Mauna Kea is not traditional science. It is too grand in scope, embracing all of space out to the edge of the universe and all of time back to the moment of cosmic origin. It is empirical, but it knowingly overreaches, describing particles that have never been detected, fields that have never been felt, and regions of space that have never been seen. It utterly dwarfs human conceptions, much like an omnipotent deity. Yet this celestial form of enlightenment also bears little resemblance to Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or any other old-time religion. In place of the unity of God, it seeks out simplicity of explanation. In place of a central dogma, it rests on the falsification of theory through empirical data. It develops its own entrenched doctrines, but it also provides the tools with which to discard them. This new faith has acquired millions of converts and permeated every corner of American culture. It has changed our world, but until now it hasn't had a name.

Call it sci/religion, because it blends elements of the experimental and the mystical. The name also works as a pun on two defin-ing aspects of modern science. In quantum theory, the Greek letterpsi represents the fundamental uncertainty of measurement. At any moment, a subatomic particle does not have a single, well-defined position; instead, it has a statistical blur of potential positions. In essence, the uncertainty principle means a particle can be in two places at the same time, allowing interactions that would be forbidden according to classical physics or common sense. This quantum rule bending permits the nuclear reactions that cause stars to shine, and in some current cosmological models it even explains the origin of the universe. So: "psi religion." Sci/religion also evokes scientists' wariness about openly discussing the metaphysical strains that are increasingly obvious in their work. They shy away from questions about their personal faith, fearing that any answer will only make them look foolish or reactionary. When you ask them if they believe in God, they always respond the same way, with a sigh. So: "sigh, religion."

The founder and greatest prophet of sci/religion had no such qualms about finding common ground between the material and the mystical. Albert Einstein recognized the search for truth as an inherently spiritual endeavor. "Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe -- a spirit vastly superior to that of man," he explained to one of his students in 1936. Explicitly and implicitly in his work, Einstein preached the doctrines of unity, simplicity, and universality. These principles are the guiding lights of sci/religion. Few of his followers speak as openly as he did, but their actions give them away. Just look at the beliefs that motivate their experiments, their equations, and their journal articles. Look at their research on Mauna Kea. They worship in the Church of Einstein.

Like many people of my generation, I grew up immersed in the faith of sci/religion. As a child I marveled at the drawings of swirling nebulae and colliding galaxies in classic books such asThe World We Live In. Later I read about quasars in Astronomy magazine and puzzled over descriptions of curved space-time inScientific American. Imagining the infernal fireball of the big bang sent chills down my spine back then, and it still does so today. Later, digging into the history of science, I learned how these ideas have kept changing as one theory failed a crucial test and a new theory came along. That realization only strengthened my appreciation for the mystical power of science. Each blip of starlight arrives loaded with meaning. The priests of sci/religion steer their telescopes, observe, analyze, and draw up new theories. They know they will never attain full understanding but labor away, confident that they will arrive ever closer toward cosmic enlightenment. That endless pilgrimage gives purpose to life.

Four years ago, I heard that one of Einstein's disciples had experienced a breakthrough in the sci/religious faith. Saul Perlmutter, a hard-driven and deceptively boyish cosmologist at California's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL), had been approaching the Keck Observatory with new versions of some of our oldest queries. Will the universe continue forever, or will it someday come to an end? Do the heavens operate according to the same physical rules as the terrestrial realm? Above all, is there more to the universe than meets the eye? Three thousand miles away, in his spare hilltop office above the San Francisco Bay, Perlmutter pored over his precious data. The answers he sought might already be encoded somewhere in the buckets of starlight gathered by the Kecks.

Perlmutter...