How Einstein, Heisenberg and Gödel Used Constraints to Rethink the Universe, with Janna Levin

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Many procrastinators have claimed that ever-closer deadlines help them focus and enforce creativity. There may be something to that. Not quite the procrastination, but the forced wall of immovability restricting them that gets gears going. For proof, get your hands on a copy of The Five Obstructions, a documentary where experimental Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier inflicts five restrictions on his filmmaking mentor and friend Jørgen Leth, pushing him to make the same short film five times in different ways, driving him to the edge of creativity (and of his sanity).

Janna Levin, professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College at Columbia University and author of Black Hole Blues, believes that it’s the restrictions in science that help scientists get more creative. It’s these limits that give scientists something to work against, or with, and force them to move forward.

Albert Einstein himself, who was recently proven right about gravitational waves after 100 years, had his own limits that aided him in science. Einstein believed that light travels at a certain speed; no faster, no slower. He believed that anything else might change, anything else could be just a theory so long as the speed of light remained the same. Because he had this one constant, the speed of light, he went on to break new ground with the theory of relativity, black holes, and the shape of space. Despite having the restriction of something that could not be changed, Einstein arrived at multiple theorems still being proved true today.

Heisenberg had a similar creative burst from his own uncertainty principle. He said one can’t know exactly where a particle is. This doesn’t really add up to how we typically think about things – we can usually tell where an object is. But a particle’s momentum and the path of its motion are too complicated, especially after we’ve disturbed it. Because of this, he says we just can’t know where the particle is. And with this constant uncertainty, Heisenberg went on to discuss quantum physics in a new way.

Levin’s final example of limitation leading to creativity is Kurt Gödel. Gödel’s theory of limitation was complicated, in that he wanted to prove that not everything can be proven. His theory, considering everything including basic arithmetic, states that not everything can be proven true or false, not everything can be known in the mathematical proven state. But this idea propagated further creativity, including the invention of the computer and artificial intelligence. It was the limitations of the unknown that helped Alan Turing complete the very machines that were the building blocks of the high-tech, cutting-edge device that you’re reading these words on right now. Three cheers for limitations!

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JANNA LEVIN:

Janna Levin is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. She is also director of sciences at Pioneer Works, a center for arts and sciences in Brooklyn, and has contributed to an understanding of black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and gravitational waves in the shape of spacetime. Her previous books include How the Universe Got Its Spots and a novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, which won the PEN/Bingham Prize. She was recently named a Guggenheim fellow.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Janna Levin: I became interested in this phenomenon of constraints inspiring creative outbursts. And if you look at the last century there were three really profound examples of that. I would say the earliest that I found incredibly interesting was the limit of the speed of light leading Einstein to the theory of relativity. Where a lot of other scientists wanted to remove the limit, they wanted to say, 'There is no limit to the speed of light. That doesn't make any sense. That's impossible.' Einstein actually, despite the word relativity, adhered to a very strict absolute. And that absolute was the speed of light. He took that to be his guiding constraint. And by sticking to it rigidly he said, 'I'll give up anything else but the speed of light, the constancy of the speed of light.' And by doing so he gave up on the absolute nature of space and time.

I mean that's just much harder to let go of intuitively and a much greater violation of our common sense, but it was right. And so this was an example where this tight constraint led to a creative outburst. From this one constraint you could trace the line.....

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