Aug. 9, 2010
Albert Einstein once claimed that “the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true science and art.”
What did he mean by “mysterious?”
I think he meant something close to what Bucky Fuller said to me one day many years ago. He was drawing one of his dymaxion domes in the kitchen of his vacation cottage in Maine when I came in the door. Instead of making the usual small talk he pointed to the sunlight coming through the window. It was making a splash across his drawing and he said “beautiful!”
It may also be close to the something that religions have cultivated from time immemorial. The “mystic” in religion is a close relative to the “mysterious” in science. That hint that shivers through your spine with the sense that there is something more out there. Something more in here. There is something we don’t understand. Something much greater than we will ever understand. Some call it God. Einstein did not believe in a personal God or in immortality. He rejected atheism too. When a non-believing scientist asked if he was “religious” he answered, “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.”
When I produced Spaceship Earth, my first audiovisual program back in the 1970s, it was for me a kind of religious experience perhaps somewhat akin to the one Einstein talked about. I did not discover any new truths as Einstein did when he penetrated the secrets of space and time with naïve genius. I did have a near religious experience though, thinking about the mysteries of space, time, and life. The result was a program that surveyed the universe from the depths of outer space stars, planets and galaxies to the inner space depth of the human mind. It ended up with six parts progressing from the biggest to the smallest. Or maybe I should say not the “smallest” but what I still consider the most powerful, human consciousness. The six parts were: Universe, Biosphere, Living Things, Cells, Atom & Molecules, A Little While Aware. I apparently struck some kind of near religious spark in others. I’m a bit chagrined to admit that I got far more positive response to Spaceship Earth than to any program I have completed in the 36 years since that time. One satisfying memory from those early days is the friend who took Part One: The Universe to show at a Sunday service in his church.
In those same 70s days I read with interest the books of a remarkable doctor who it seemed had an intuitive sense of the mysterious, perhaps similar to Einstein. Lewis Thomas was a specialist in immunology in New York City. He was also in his mature years a remarkable writer. I was especially taken by his first book Lives of a Cell. Dr. Thomas had that rare ability to penetrate the mysterious and then to tell about it in simple moving words. I used inspiration in part due to his book to produce Air, Earth, Fire and Water. It too was well received and this year I have made it available for the first time on DVD.
The “mysterious” in life is sometimes funny as well. The quote my friend Piers McBride sent me qualifies. “I met an old friend yesterday I hadn’t seen for 20 years. And you know he had changed so much he didn’t even recognize me.”
As do quips of Walt Whitman. “A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.” Or, “oh God, if I am to have so much … let me have more!”
I still get the same thrill of recognition and mystery when I think of some of the stories told about one my heroes, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had a rare combination of intelligence, humility, humor and compassion. One of my favorite tales is the one where a distraught father came into his office to plead for his son’s life. The boy had been sentenced to death by the military for falling asleep on watch. Lincoln, as he did so often, had stayed the sentence. The father pleaded, “but Mr. President, it says here he is not be shot until further orders come from me. And you might order him shot next week!”
Lincoln replied, “my friend, I see you do not know me very well. If your son never faces death until further orders come from me to shoot him, he will live to be a great deal older than Methuselah.”
Great literature of course also qualifies. Not only Sophocles and Shakespeare, but modern authors like A.A. Milne, Robert Frost, Samuel Beckett and Lewis Thomas. I find some of the short poems of Emily Dickenson pregnant with this strange kind of mysterious beauty.
Hope is a thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune–without the words—
And never stops at all.
Einstein was religious but not conventionally so. He, like Calvin, was also a determinist. That is he did not believe in free will. He thought the universe was governed by some inexplicable mysterious force that we could never hope to penetrate with our meager intellects. He also claimed that “human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are as causally bound as the stars in their motions.” This belief left little room or role for human beings in cosmic history, whether you consider that history tragedy or comedy.
I part ways from Einstein here. Instead I like the take that the dancer Martha Graham had on a closely related issue.
“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening which is translated through you into action. And since there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. The world will not have it.”
I also like the way Robert Frost put it:
The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be–
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.
They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
Btu when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?
In a youthful poem of my own I claimed that we humans, foolish and ignorant as we may be, can still “add an increment of honest meaning to the not-quite-finished universe.” I can’t prove it. But like the people in Robert Frost’s poem, when was that ever a bar to any watch I keep.
Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill
P.S. See Spaceship Earth and Air, Earth, Fire and Water. You can read the entire scripts on our web site: www.hawkhill.com.
P.P.S. Having written this week’s effort I do think the subject deserves fuller treatment, especially as it relates to the connections between religion, science and democracy. Look for more on this topic in weeks to come. In the meantime you might want to check out one of my latest programs, Religion and Democracy that explores many connections between these two powerful ideas.
P.P.P.S. I just watched for the first time in quite a few years another older program of mine, Welcome to the Universe. It is an adaptation of Spaceship Earth for younger students that we have just this fall made available on DVD for a quite modest price. If you have a bright child, age 7 to 11, you might consider buying this program if you want them to experience the mysterious in science. I really consider it one my best efforts and believe that is does touch that chord that Einstein considered the “source of all true science and art.” It also has magnificent music composed and performed especially for this program by my son, Michael Stonebarger.