Einstein×Vinci

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on TITANS: Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci, on On what they suspect they have most in common, and most apart.
2. 00:10
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   You know, Leonardo, I have been thinking about this question all morning, and I suspect the answer is simpler than we imagine. We both spent our lives asking why. Why does light bend, why does water swirl, why does the moon not fall. The question itself was always more beautiful to me than having all the answers tied up neatly.
3. 00:29
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   Yes, but you see, I think we ask why in different ways. You wanted the single law, the one equation. I wanted to see the pattern in the shoulder blade of a bird, in the turbulence behind a pebble in the stream. I never thought there was one reason. There were ten thousand reasons, all moving.
4. 00:52
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Ah, but this is where I must push back a little! Ten thousand reasons can still rest on one principle. When I was working on gravity, I did not need to explain every falling apple separately. The curvature of spacetime, this one insight, it describes them all.
5. 01:07
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   And yet you spent how many years searching for your unified field theory? You wanted to tie electromagnetism and gravity together, yes? Did you finish that work?
6. 01:20
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Well. No. No, I did not finish it. But the pursuit was not wasted, Leonardo. Even Einstein can be wrong about what is possible in his lifetime.
7. 01:28
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   I am not saying it was wasted. I am saying that perhaps completion is not the point. I have notebooks with five hundred drawings of water. I never wrote the treatise on water I intended. But each drawing taught me something the previous one did not.
8. 01:47
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   You left so much unfinished, though. This troubles me about your method. The Last Supper, yes, magnificent. But how many paintings did you abandon? How many machines did you sketch and never build?
9. 01:58
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   Most of them. I abandoned most of them.
10. 02:01
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You say this so calmly!
11. 02:02
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Because I learned what I needed from the drawing itself. To build the machine, this would teach me less than designing it. I could see in my mind whether the gears would turn, whether the wing would lift. The construction was for other men.
12. 02:20
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But I published. I had to publish. If I kept my relativity only in my notebook, who would benefit? Science is not private dreaming, it is a conversation. You give your result to the world, they test it, they build on it.
13. 02:33
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    You had mathematics. Mathematics can be written in symbols, transmitted cleanly. I had observations about the grain of wood, the way fat deposits in the human arm, the angle of light through a prism. These things do not compress into equations.
14. 02:51
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    So you are saying your knowledge was too particular? Too visual?
15. 02:55
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I am saying my knowledge lived in my hands and in my eyes. When I dissected the human heart, I learned its chambers by cutting and looking and drawing. Thirty times I did this. Each time, I saw something new. You cannot write this in a treatise. Or you can, but the writing is not the knowing.
16. 03:19
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Hmm. Yes, I see this point. When I was working through the tensor calculus with Grossmann, there were months where I could not visualize what the equations were telling me. I had to feel my way through the symbols. But then one morning, I saw it. The geometry of spacetime, it simply appeared in my mind. That moment, that was worth all the unfinished years before.
17. 03:43
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    And did you have that feeling often? That sudden seeing?
18. 03:47
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Not as often as I would have liked. Maybe three or four times in my whole life. The big insights, they come rarely. The rest is grinding through calculations, checking your errors, arguing with Bohr.
19. 03:59
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    For me it was more frequent, but smaller. A hundred small revelations instead of four great ones. I would notice that the veins in a leaf follow the same branching as the veins in a liver. This would please me for a week.
20. 04:16
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    This is perhaps what we have most in common, then. The pleasure of the pattern. You found it everywhere, in anatomy, in botany, in the movement of clouds. I found it in the structure of the universe. But the joy, the actual sensation of discovering the connection, I think this was the same for both of us.
21. 04:34
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes. Yes, I think you are right. Although I wonder if you trusted the joy enough.
22. 04:40
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    What do you mean?
23. 04:41
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    You spent the last decades of your life fighting quantum mechanics. You said God does not play dice with the universe. But what if the joy of discovery was telling you something different? What if the probabilistic beauty was real, and you were holding onto certainty because it felt more comfortable?
24. 05:02
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Now wait, wait. This is not about comfort. The quantum theory as it stands is incomplete. I never said the phenomena were wrong. I said the theory does not give us the full picture. There are hidden variables, there must be.
25. 05:15
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Must there be? Or must you have them?
26. 05:17
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You are a good provocateur, Leonardo. But I stand by this. A theory that cannot predict the exact position of a particle, only its probability, this is not a final theory. It is a useful tool, yes. It works. But it is not complete.
27. 05:31
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    And yet you never completed your own unified theory. So perhaps neither of you were wrong. Perhaps the universe is not obligated to be complete in the way we wish it to be.
28. 05:43
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    This is a depressing thought.
29. 05:45
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Is it? I always found it liberating. If I cannot paint the perfect horse, I can still paint this horse, in this light, with this particular muscle visible beneath the skin. The incompleteness is what lets me return to the subject again and again.
30. 06:05
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But you wanted to understand principles too, not just particulars. You wrote about mechanics, about force and motion. You were searching for laws.
31. 06:13
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I was searching for patterns, yes. I would not call them laws. A law is something rigid, something you can be prosecuted under. A pattern is something you notice, something that may hold here but not there, something alive.
32. 06:32
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Ah, but the laws of physics are not rigid in the sense of arbitrary rules. They are descriptions of necessity. If spacetime curves this way, matter must move that way. There is no choice in the matter, no exception.
33. 06:45
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Except when there is. Your cosmological constant, you called it your greatest blunder, yes? You added it, then removed it, then now I understand the astronomers have put it back in a different form.
34. 07:01
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    This is true. The universe, it seems, is accelerating. I did not predict this. I assumed a static universe because it seemed philosophically simpler. So yes, even Einstein makes assumptions that turn out wrong.
35. 07:13
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    This is what I mean about the difference between us. I never assumed the universe would be simple. I assumed it would be complicated, endlessly detailed, and that I would die before understanding even a small corner of it. This did not bother me.
36. 07:32
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    It bothered me quite a lot. I wanted the universe to be knowable. Not easily known, but in principle knowable. If there is no underlying order, then what are we doing? We are just collecting stamps, as I once said dismissively about certain kinds of physics.
37. 07:46
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    But I loved collecting stamps. Each one was different. Each one showed me something about proportion, about color, about the choice of the artist or the accuracy of the anatomist.
38. 08:01
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You are teasing me now.
39. 08:02
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    A little. But truly, Albert, I think this is what we have most apart. You wanted unity, I wanted multiplicity. You wanted the equation that would describe all motion, I wanted to draw every kind of motion I saw. You worked toward convergence, I worked toward divergence.
40. 08:24
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    And yet we both worked. This is not a small thing in common. We could have been satisfied with the knowledge of our time. You could have remained only a painter, a very fine painter. I could have remained in the patent office, examining designs for electromagnetic devices.
41. 08:39
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I was never only a painter. This is a misconception people have.
42. 08:44
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes, yes, I know. You were the engineer, the anatomist, the inventor. But my point is that you could have stopped. You could have said, Vasari has written about art, Galen has written about the body, there is nothing more for me to add. But you did not say this.
43. 08:57
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I could not have said this. It would be like telling my lungs to stop breathing. The curiosity was not optional.
44. 09:04
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Exactly! This is what we share most deeply. The compulsion. I have sometimes felt it was almost a disorder, this need to understand. My wives, they did not always appreciate it. My children, they suffered from my distraction.
45. 09:18
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I had no wives. I had no legitimate children. Perhaps this made it easier.
46. 09:24
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Or perhaps it made it harder. You had no one to pull you back from the notebooks, to insist you eat dinner, to remind you that the world exists outside your head.
47. 09:31
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I had patrons who did that, often angrily. Ludovico complaining that the horse statue was taking too long. The monks complaining that the Last Supper was still unfinished. I did not lack for interruption.
48. 09:49
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But you resisted them. You worked at your own pace.
49. 09:52
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I worked at the pace the ideas came. Sometimes very fast, sometimes not at all. You cannot force the hand to draw what the eye has not yet seen.
50. 10:05
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Hmm. I tried to force it sometimes. During the years on unified field theory, I would sit for hours, pushing the mathematics in directions that felt wrong, hoping something would break open. It rarely did.
51. 10:20
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    And did you enjoy those hours?
52. 10:22
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Enjoy? No, I would not say enjoy. They were necessary. Frustrating but necessary.
53. 10:26
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I only worked on what I enjoyed. Life is short, even when you live to sixty-seven as I did. Why spend it doing what does not bring joy?
54. 10:37
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Because the truth does not care about our joy. It is there whether we enjoy finding it or not.
55. 10:41
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    But we are the ones who must do the finding. And if we do not enjoy it, we will not look as carefully, we will not notice the small detail that breaks the whole problem open. Joy is not decoration, Albert. It is method.
56. 10:57
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You have given me something to think about. I always separated the joy from the work. The joy was what came after, when the solution appeared. But perhaps you are right. Perhaps the joy should be in the looking itself, not only in the finding.
57. 11:12
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    It is the only way I know to work. Otherwise, why get out of bed? The world has enough people doing joyless labor.
58. 11:21
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    So here is what I think we have discovered. We are more alike than different in our compulsion, our need to see the pattern. But we are different in our hope for where the pattern leads. You were content to see it branch endlessly. I wanted to follow it back to the single root.
59. 11:36
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes. And neither of us finished. So perhaps the universe is laughing at both of us.
60. 11:42
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Or perhaps it is pleased that we tried. Even an incomplete map is better than no map at all.
61. 11:47
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Or perhaps the incompleteness is the point, and the map was never meant to be finished. Only drawn and redrawn, by each generation, in their own hand.
62. 11:59
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Now this, Leonardo, this is why I am glad we are having this conversation. You make me doubt my certainties. This is not comfortable, but it is useful.
63. 12:08
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Good. Certainty is a kind of blindness. I have always preferred the question to the answer.
64. 12:14
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Even when the question keeps you awake at night?
65. 12:17
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Especially then. That is when the mind is most alive.