The Relativity of Kansas City Given my high self-esteem, I am often astonished by the breadth and depth of knowledge of people whom I encounter at the Country Club Cafe on Tenth and Baltimore in downtown Kansas City. I recall, just for example, a scintillating conversation with John Garfield, a gentleman banker, and his associate, Susan Freund, a financial consultant, just prior to the anniversary of Einstein's birthday this year. John and Susan come into the cafe together regularly. John, an unprepossessing grey-haired gentlemen, about sixty years of age, always casually dressed, is soft-spoken. His associate, somewhat younger, with short dark hair, stern countenance, piercing brown eyes, always conservatively dressed, is almost as soft-spoken as her colleague. They dropped by the cafe while I was reading an article over my cup of joe; it was a front-page feature in The Kansas City Daily Advertiser, praising the astuteness of the library trustees for their selection of book titles to adorn the huge bookshelf mural on the front wall of the new downtown library's jumbo parking garage. The article informed me that Einstein had been skipped over by the trustees when they were considering the names of scientists, because his works, they said, were a "yawn" and were not "scintillating" - that is to say, boring. At that very moment my ears pricked up because I overheard Susan say, "Einstein." Excuse me for interrupting you, Carol, but did I hear you mention Einstein?" "Why, yes, you did, I said his birthday is March the fourteenth," she responded firmly. The banker looked askance at me for interrupting their conversation. "Did you see the newspaper article about the book titles for the wall of the new library parking garage?" I asked. "No," she answered, "I was thinking about terrorism this morning, then I noticed Einstein's name on my calender and remembered he warned Roosevelt about the possibility of the Germans making an atomic bomb," she answered. "I remember that, German scientists were studying fission," the banker joined in, nodding his head to emphasize the affirmation. "That led to the Manhattan project and the atomic bombing of Japan. Einstein I think was opposed to war in general, and warned that no nation was big enough to own the revolutionary force of the universe. He certainly was a brilliant man." "Will Einstein's name be on the garage?" Susan asked. "No," I replied, "the reporter said that the library trustees rejected both Einstein and Darwin with a yawn. Books by scientists were being discussed, and the trustees said Einstein's work was not scintillating enough." "Somebody ought to say something about that, maybe call them imbeciles," she said, frowning. "Have you read Einstein?" "I have a copy of his popular version of the theory of relativity, the one everybody is supposed to easily understand, on my nightstand. It puts me to sleep. I've read it several times over the years, bit by bit, but I do not understand it really." "Well, there are plenty of entertaining books that explain Einstein's theories - you might try reading them," Carol recommended. "His general theory of relativity is incredibly beautiful. It is not boring at all. Einstein believed that the ultimate test of a theory should be its beauty, and his theories are as scintillating in the intellectual universe as the Sun is scintillating in our solar system. My father heard Einstein speak and was amazed. Einstein was much in demand everywhere. He had a beautiful way of clarifying scientific problems and social problems." "You mean social issues," I corrected her - she seemed keen on the subject. "I mean problems. My daughter's math text has 'Issues to Solve' at the end of each section, so maybe we can do without math problems, but we should not eliminate social problems." "I don't understand the theory of relativity." "Various theories of relativity try to answer the question, Are the laws of nature we use to explain physical situations always the same for different observers even when their states of motion are not identical? The beauty of Einstein's answer was in his reduction of physical laws to geometrical propositions." "What? Were you a science major?" I asked. "Business, but I took physics in high school. According to Einstein, the laws of physics are the laws of geometry in four dimensions, laws determined by the distribution of matter and energy in the universe," Carol pedantically stated in an tone well under middle C. "What is relative?" "For one thing, time is relative." "Huh?" "Time is relative to the constant speed of light no matter what sort of change you use to describe time. Time is, as Einstein said, what you measure with a clock, but anything that can count more or less equal increments of any change is also a clock, for example, the earth and the stars can be used as clocks. Change is not what you measure with time; time is what you measure with changes. Now.... " "Whoa, hold your horses," I interrupted, "you are going too fast for me, professor Freund." "She often amazes me," declared John Garfield. "But I understand her because I took physics too. As every school kid knows, Einstein based his theory on the observation that the speed of light is not affected by the velocity of the source that produces it or the velocity of the observer who perceives it. That led him to postulate that the laws of physics must be the same in all frames of reference moving relative to one another with a constant velocity." "Gee, what high school did you go to?" I asked. "Topeka High School." "West?" "East. But let me finish, please. Observers in different but uniformly moving frames will find that the passage of time occurs at different rates as seen in different frames. According to the theory of special relativity, there is no such thing as absolute space and time. Spacetime is a variable thing." "That's right," Carol affirmed. "All observations, the timing of an event, the length of a piece of string, or the weight of an object, are relative, depending on the speed of an observer. "That strange," I shook my head. "Sounds like Einstein was a revolutionary thinker. What is Einstein's general theory?" "Not so revolutionary," said Carol. "He took off from Newton and Maxwell. "The general theory posits a relationship between gravity and accelerating frames of motion, in such a way that mass alters structures of space and time, producing an apparent force that causes acceleration. He predicted that light from a star would be bent by the Sun's mass, for example. A satellite is supposed to be sent up soon to demonstrate that our rotating Earth warps time and space. "Remember that energy equals mass times the speed of light squared," said the banker. "Good grief," said I. "My head is spinning." "My daughter is more up to date on these things than I am," Carol said. "She is reading Einstein's early papers on the photon theory, special theory of relativity, mass-energy equivalence, Brownian motion, and such." "Wow, you must live in a prosperous school district. Clay County?" "Johnson County." "One thing that I do know," I stated, "is that most people have the wrong idea about Einstein's theory. They think it proves that anything you can get away with goes because everything is relative." "That is indeed a popular misconception," Susan agreed, "for Einstein posited a universal law. No law, no science, no nothing. Protagoras was misunderstood too, after he said that man is the measure of all things, of those which are, that they are, and of those which are not, that they are not." "Precisely," said her banking colleague with a smile. "Protagoras also noted that, for every question, there are two speeches which stand in opposition to each other. So the standard complaint was made against him as against other sophists, the same complaint we make of lawyers today, that a lawyer can turn the weaker cause or argument into the stronger one and win the worser cause. Of course rhetoric is just a tool, and can win good causes as well. But they went even further with Protagoras, insisting that he was an ethical relativist. He was not an ethical relativist - he was a sophisticated teacher of useful skills. " "Well said, John," Susan complimented him. "To say that a man measures things does not imply that things do not exist according to certain uniform laws. Individuals agree on standards, on uniform objective measures in order to cooperate in their work and to accomplish their mutual objectives. In any real event they may not defy the laws of their universe and get away with it for long. Protagoras was defamed. He was not a subjective idealist or an anarchist." "Oh, but what nonsense all that was," said John to Susan as I sat there, dumbfounded by the scintillating discourse at the cafe - perchance I was dreaming, I thought. "Protagoras was a pedant, a grammarian, the intimate friend of Pericles," John declared almost under his breath. "He wrote the constitution for the colony at Thurii. He was all for law and order and thought he had found the right standards for same." "Wasn't Protagoras an atheist?" I had to ask. "A wealthy bigot and military officer accused him of impiety because of his treatise on the gods," Susan answered for John, "but the gist of that treatise is this, Since our conceptions of reality are derived from sensation of the world and not from intuition of ideal archetypes, the gods, although they might exist, cannot be apprehended or seized by the human mind. One might have blind faith in gods, but gods are not the subject of belief, for belief is the gradual perfection of knowledge. That is, the more we know about something, the more certain our knowledge is, the more we believe it is correct, although not perfect." "It is important to make a difference between faith and belief in the lending business too," the banker observed, "and thanks to your advice, Susan, and the theories of probability, I often make it. I think Protagoras said something like, 'In respect to the gods, I am unable to know either that they are or that they are not, for there are many obstacles to such knowledge, above all the obscurity of the matter, and the life of man, in that it is short." "You two amaze me," I interjected. "I never thought I'd run into bankers and financial consultants who know so much about Einstein and Protagoras, at least not in Kansas City." "It's too bad he drowned," stated Susan matter of factly. "Who drowned?" I asked. "Protagoras. He was convicted, fled town, and was drowned on the way to Sicily. Euripides called him Wisdom, and said to the bigots, 'You have killed Wisdom.' We can thank our lucky stars that Einstein did not live then," Carol said. "I guess I should borrow Einstein's works from the library. I don't quite understand all this." "Einstein could explain it much better than I can. It takes some time to do so, and I must get back to work." "Thanks to Susan and her understanding of statistics and quantum mechanics," said the banker, "I have plenty of time. I'm going to play some golf in Hawaii next week." "Nice chatting with you," I said as John and Carol prepared to leave the cafe. By the way, may I quote you folks in my public journal?" "Sure," said John. "Why not?" said Carol. "I don't know if anyone will believe me. The managing editor of the alternative newspaper said my conversations were contrived and that I should write about what is really going on in Kansas City." "He doesn't know his culo from a black hole," John whispered. "Go ahead and quote us. By the way, I don't think Einstein would want his name on the library's garage," John said as he opened the door. "Have a nice day," said Carol. "The same to you." "Ate logo," said John. "Ate logo."
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"So," I concluded, "Protagoras and Einstein did not believe that ethics is relative? that there is no absolute truth or good? that everything is permitted? that anything goes? so we cannot do whatever if we can get away with it?
"Hardly!" Susan exclaimed. "Einstein spoke of rational scientific laws not irrational license. He belief was based on proven knowledge. For example, his mass-energy equivalence theory has been verified time and time again, as has his theory of relativity. He believed that a world of simplicity and harmony could be achieved by acting on principles derived from experience and clear thinking."