The lack of correlation between wisdom and worldly rewards is unsettling, especially to those who are foolish enough to consider themselves wise. Why is it that the love of wisdom wouldn’t translate to glory, riches and creature comforts? The reason, as far as I can tell, is a deep disconnect between philosophy and life — as a wise (but distinctly unphilosophical) friend of mine put it in one of those hazy late-night stupors of the graduate years, “Philosophy to real life is what masturbation is to sex.” Yes, the masses see the love of wisdom as pointless intellectual masturbation. This view is perhaps echoed in what Russell said once:

Philosophy busies itself with things that seem obvious, to come up with something grandiose. This apparent obsession with trivialities is a false impression. Dispelling this impression is the purpose of this post. Let me start by pointing out one fact. Philosophy is at the root of everything that you do. You live a good, moral life? Or even a lousy, greedy one? Your behavior, choices and reasons are studied in Ethics. You are a quant, or do stuff technical or mathematical? Logic. Into physics and worship Einstein? You cannot then ignore the metaphysical aspects of space and time. Lawyer? Yeah, Rhetorics. Knowledge worker? Epistemology defines what knowledge is. Artist? Fashion designer? Work in the movie industry? We got you covered in Aesthetics. You see, every avenue of human endeavor has a philosophic underpinning to it.

Pointing out this underpinning is, in reality, not as big a deal as I make it out to be. It is merely a matter of definition. I define philosophy to be whatever it is that “underpins” all aspects of life, and then point out this underpinning as evidence of its importance. The real value of philosophy is in structuring our thoughts and guiding them, for instance, in perceiving the speciousness and subtle circularity of my underpinning-therefore-important argument. Philosophy teaches us that nothing stands own its own, and that there are structures and schools of thought that illuminate questions that befuddle us. There are scaffolds to support us, and giants on whose shoulders we can stand to see far and clear. To be sure, some of these giants may be facing the wrong way, but it is again the boldness and independence that come with philosophy that will help us see the errors in their ways. Without it, learning becomes indoctrination, and in our quest to assimilate information into wisdom, we get stuck somewhere in between — perhaps at the level of knowledge.

All this discussion still doesn’t give us a clue as to the disquieting connection between philosophy and bankruptcy. For when a great man voices his existential anguish as, “I think, therefore I am,” we can always say (as we often do), “Good for you mate, whatever works for you!” and go about our life.

Love of wisdom perhaps facilitates its acquisition, and the purpose of wisdom is only wisdom. It is very much like life, the purpose of which is merely to live a little longer. But without philosophy, how do we see the meaning of life? Or lack thereof?

The beauty and perfection I’m thinking about are of a different kind — those of ideas and concepts. At times, you may get an idea so perfect and beautiful that you know it has to be true. This conviction of truth arising from beauty may be what made Einstein declare:

But this conviction about the veracity of a theory based on its perfection is hardly enough. Einstein’s genius really is in his philosophical tenacity, his willingness to push the idea beyond what is considered logical.

Let’s take an example. Let’s say you are in a cruising airplane. If you close the windows and somehow block out the engine noise, it will be impossible for you to tell whether you are moving or not. This inability, when translated to physics jargon, becomes a principle stating, “Physical laws are independent of the state of motion of the experimental system.”

The physical laws Einstein chose to look at were Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism, which had the speed of light appearing in them. For them to be independent of (or covariant with, to be more precise) motion, Einstein postulated that the speed of light had to be a constant regardless of whether you were going toward it or away from it.

Now, I don’t know if you find that postulate particularly beautiful. But Einstein did, and decided to push it through all its illogical consequences. For it to be true, space has to contract and time had to dilate, and nothing could go faster than light. Einstein said, well, so be it. That is the philosophical conviction and tenacity that I wanted to talk about — the kind that gave us Special Relativity about a one hundred years ago.

Want to get to General Relativity from here? Simple, just find another beautiful truth. Here is one… If you have gone to Magic Mountain, you would know that you are weightless during a free fall (best tried on an empty stomach). Free fall is acceleration at 9.8 m/s/s (or 32 ft/s/s), and it nullifies gravity. So gravity is the same as acceleration — voila, another beautiful principle.

In order to make use of this principle, Einstein perhaps thought of it in pictures. What does acceleration mean? It is how fast the speed of something is changing. And what is speed? Think of something moving in a straight line — our cruising airplane, for instance, and call the line of flight the X-axis. We can visualize its speed by thinking of a time T-axis at right angles with the X-axis so that at time = 0, the airplane is at x = 0. At time t, it is at a point x = v.t, if it is moving with a speed v. So a line in the X-T plane (called the world line) represents the motion of the airplane. A faster airplane would have a shallower world line. An accelerating airplane, therefore, will have a curved world line, running from the slow world line to the fast one.

So acceleration is curvature in space-time. And so is gravity, being nothing but acceleration. (I can see my physicist friends cringe a bit, but it is essentially true — just that you straighten the world-line calling it a geodesic and attribute the curvature to space-time instead.)

The exact nature of the curvature and how to compute it, though beautiful in their own right, are mere details, as Einstein himself would have put it. After all, he wanted to know God’s thoughts, not the details.

Standing in the other corner, all gloved up to knock the daylight out of creationism, is science. It tells us that we came out of complete lifelessness through successive mutations goaded by the need to survive. This is Evolution, a view so widely accepted that the use of capital E is almost justified.

All our experience and knowledge point to the rightness the Evolution idea. It doesn’t totally preclude the validity of God, but it does make it more likely that we humans created God. (It must be just us humans for we don’t see a cat saying Lord’s grace before devouring a mouse!) And, given the inconveniences caused by the God concept (wars, crusades, the dark ages, ethnic cleansing, religious riots, terrorism and so on), it certainly looks like a blunder.

No wonder Nietzsche said,

On the other hand, if God did create man, then all the stupid things that we do — wars, crusades etc. + this blog — do point to the fact that we are a blunder. We must be such a disappointment to our creator. Sorry Sir!

Historically, these bouts of complacency are followed by rapid developments that revolutionize the way physics is done, showing us how wrong we have been. This humbling lesson of history is probably what prompted Feynman to say:

Such an age of complacency existed at the turn of the 19th century. Famous personas like Kelvin remarked that all that was left to do was to make more precise measurements. Michelson, who played a crucial role in the revolution to follow, was advised not to enter a “dead” field like physics.

Who would have thought that in less than a decade into the 20th century, we would complete change the way we think of space and time? Who in their right mind would say now that we will again change our notions of space and time? I do. Then again, nobody has ever accused me of a right mind!

Another revolution took place during the course of the last century — Quantum Mechanics, which did away with our notion of determinism and dealt a serious blow to the system-observer paradigm of physics. Similar revolutions will happen again. Let’s not hold on to our concepts as immutable; they are not. Let’s not think of our old masters as infallible, for they are not. As Feynman himself would point out, physics alone holds more examples of the fallibility of its old masters. And I feel that a complete revolution in thought is overdue now.

You might be wondering what all this has to do with sex. Well, I just thought sex would sell better. I was right, wasn’t I? I mean, you are still here!

Feynman also said,

It then should come as a surprise to us that Einstein didn’t quite believe in QM. He spent the latter part of his career trying to device thought experiments that would prove that QM is inconsistent with what he believed to be the laws of nature. Why is it that Einstein could not accept QM? We will never know for sure, and my guess is probably as good as anybody else’s.

Einstein’s trouble with QM is summarized in this famous quote.

It is indeed difficult to reconcile the notions (or at least some interpretations) of QM with a word view in which a God has control over everything. In QM, observations are probabilistic in nature. That is to say, if we somehow manage to send two electrons (in the same state) down the same beam and observe them after a while, we may get two different observed properties.

We can interpret this imperfection in observation as our inability to set up identical initial states, or the lack of precision in our measurements. This interpretation gives rise to the so-called hidden variable theories — considered invalid for a variety of reasons. The interpretation currently popular is that uncertainty is an inherent property of nature — the so-called Copenhagen interpretation.

In the Copenhagen picture, particles have positions only when observed. At other times, they should be thought of as kind of spread out in space. In a double-slit interference experiment using electrons, for instance, we should not ask whether a particular electron takes on slit or the other. As long as there is interference, it kind of takes both.

The troubling thing for Einstein in this interpretation would be that even God would not be able to make the electron take one slit or the other (without disturbing the interference pattern, that is). And if God cannot place one tiny electron where He wants, how is he going to control the whole universe?