Freud, Einstein have genius in common

The two men whose work most radically influenced 20th century thought met only once, in 1927, when Albert Einstein, then 47, paid a call on 70-year-old Sigmund Freud.

Remarked Freud: “He understands as much about psychology as I do about physics, so we had a very pleasant talk.” Einstein, responding to a friend’s suggestion that he undergo psychoanalysis, displayed a similar gift for humorous understatement: “I should like very much to remain in the darkness of not having been analyzed.”

Science writer Richard Panek begins “The Invisible Century” with this snapshot of the courteous but cautious meeting between the two intellectual giants. Although the author of the theory of relativity and the father of psychoanalysis may not have understood the intricacies of each other’s theories, the aim of Panek’s new book is to show us what they had in common: Each pursued a line of research that seemed to lead to an impasse, each “figured out that the solution lay not in a new perception but in a reconception of the problem” and each found it necessary to go beyond visible evidence to arrive at this solution.

Panek compares these transformations in 20th century science to the discoveries that ushered in the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century. When Galileo looked through his telescope to see moons of Jupiter undetectable by the naked eye, when Leeuwenhoek trained his magnifying lens on a drop of water and saw “upwards of one million living creatures” in it, people’s conception of the universe expanded exponentially.

But for Einstein and Freud, it wasn’t a question of looking harder or using better instruments. What each “found” was something that was, by its very nature, invisible: in Freud’s case, the unconscious; in Einstein’s, relativity, which yielded such vision-defying concepts as curved space, bent light, fourth and fifth dimensions.

Mind-boggling stuff, but was it all just speculation or was it really science? Einstein’s theory was confirmed in 1919, when a total solar eclipse enabled scientists to measure the deviation of light from normally invisible stars close to the sun. Einstein had predicted that the curvature of space caused by the sun’s gravitational field causes light to bend. They found that it did.

Had it not, theory would have been invalidated. But because Freud was dealing with human behavior, there were simply too many variables to allow for an experiment that would either prove or disprove his theory. Thus, Einstein’s method met the standard of falsifiability that the logical positivist Karl Popper saw as the sine qua non of genuine science, and Freud’s theory did not -- which, of course, did not necessarily mean that it was invalid or untrue.

Dividing his attention between the two men and equally sympathetic toward both, Panek offers a lucid account of how each arrived at his conclusions. He succeeds -- if not completely, then reasonably well -- in rendering Einstein’s theory understandable (well, relatively understandable) to the layperson. He also provides ample evidence of the extent to which Freud operated as a scientist in his training and in his research into the brain and nervous system. It was only when Freud had reached an impasse in finding neurological causes that he embarked on his mammoth quest to map the invisible but no less real world of the mind.

In his concluding chapter, Panek discusses some popular misconceptions about “relativity” that still bedevil us. For starters, he points out, it doesn’t mean that “everything is relative”: “What’s relative,” he explains, “are observations between two physical systems. What’s not is the single set of laws that describes the relationship between any two physical systems in the universe.” Einstein considered it wrong, even reprehensible, to base generalizations about the human condition on a physics theory. Freud agreed, deploring the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth. An enjoyable blend of theories and personalities, anecdotes and explanations, “Invisible Century” places these two pioneering geniuses in a context that helps clarify the nature of their achievements.