Einstein wrong? It just goes to show

About three and a half years ago, a letter that Albert Einstein wrote on January 3, 1954 sold for a record-breaking amount.  This letter included some explicit descriptions of Einstein’s views on religion.

In the letter, Einstein referred to all religion as “an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.”  He claimed to “gladly belong” to the “Jewish people” with whom he had a "deep affinity," but also wrote that he “cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.”  The letter moreover states:  The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are

nevertheless pretty childish.  No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.

This last statement seems particularly ironic, given the subtle calculations that might be about to rock Einstein’s universe.  The very subtlest of entities, the neutrino, is strongly suspected of being able to travel faster than the speed of light.  According to Einstein’s famous energy/mass equation, it would be

impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, unless…  energy itself were infinite.

Although infinite energy might seem like a new notion – so “radical” that today’s scientists are afraid to even let the catabolism out of the bag – it is actually a concept that religion has embraced for eons.  Dr. Dharmbir Rai Sharma explains:  The cosmological singularity combines zero space-time and infinite energy.  In Vedanta the primordial state of existence of the Reality is an infinite emptiness (shunyata)…  However, this emptiness is not nothingness or non-existence.  It is pervaded by energy and consciousness.

Sharma goes on to say that one can only realize this Reality of infinite energy “when the mind is completely

empty and one transcends space-time in deep meditation…”  Perhaps the sheer brilliance of Einstein’s own thought processes blinded him to the primordial (as opposed to “primitive”) Reality that cradles us all.

Resources

http://www.dnaindia.com/world/report_did-albert-einstein-get-it-wrong_1590703

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/may/15/peopleinscience.controversiesinscience?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

http://www.huliq.com/3257/physicists-observe-faster-light-particles-perhaps-throwing-einsteins-theory-asunder

http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/7997/Default.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino

Copyright September 24, 2011 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved