Freedom of Science

Shtetl-Optimized says:

At no point did Einstein ever embrace mysticism per se. That’s another crucial difference between him and Newton . . .

Einstein was practicing mysticism when he claimed to compute the radius of the ultimate reality.¹ Mysticism is the claim of “achieving communion or conscious awereness of ultimate reality through direct experience, intuition or mathematics.”² Einstein reached the ultimate mystical experience when he achieved a conscious awareness of the shape and size of the totality. Mathematics was the means he used. But is this really mysticism? Or is it mathematicism?³ A mystic does not attempt to calculate the properties of the unknown, he experiences it. Computing the radius of the totality is more like charlatanism. If not charlatanism, it must be called European petit-burgeoisism, i.e. the practice of always sanctifying one’s own provincialism as the universal. Mysticism is too generous a word to describe the vaporous scholastic polemics of European Doctors of Philosophy of two centuries ago.

An important difference between Einstein and Newton is that Newton was a shameless professional self-mythologizer. As far as I know Einstein never prefaced one of his papers with a hagiographic ode to himself written by an acolyte venerating the author as the demi-god of science. Einstein was an accidental celebrity who wanted to be left alone to do his research. Newton is the true anti-science here.

The crucial difference though is that Einstein rejected the occult qualities in science, more specifically, the Newtonian occult force, Newton defined it.

1. Einstein’s legacy is the modern cosmic mythology called cosmology. [↩]
2. In the quote above, I’ve edited the Wikipedia definition of mysticism and added mathematics as one of its methods. [↩]
3. Mathematicism is the art of using the authority of mathematics to reach non-mathematical conclusions. [↩]

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