WHERE MINDS MEET

WHERE MINDS MEET

Friends across continents, pilgrims of peace and international goodwill, geniuses who left their mark on humanity, beacons in the tempestuous sea of life. Complementary thinkers in science and the arts which in conjunction lend humanity wholeness. And there is the deeper aspect of spirituality to which each had an inkling but not quite the grasp of it. Both were profoundly moved by the mystery life presents and, baffled as they were, they went about their way interpreting it for lesser mortals to get a fairer view of it. They came, they saw but they could not conquer. None ever has in totality of analytical understanding, for the complexity of life is beyond comprehension. It is best left alone till the essence of existence be reached. Then it will be seen that Maya, ever-shifting and ever-bewildering, is out of bounds of the human brain and the pursuit of it is like chasing a mirage for the elusive water in the desert.

In the inter-war years both were deeply distressed by the looming possibility of another war and formed an international fraternity of intellectuals who strove to promote peace and prevent war. But their efforts were in vain. Einstein escaped Nazi persecution in 1933 when he sought asylum in America. Tagore travelled far and wide to seek understanding and cooperation from world thinkers, his travels stretching across continents where he prophet-like addressed humanity with the sane voice of reason and the emotive appeal to love and peace. But history, cumulative resolution of forces that it is, does not respond to such simplistic naivete and unleashed its diabolical forces nonetheless to cause a second cataclysm. Tagore was heartbroken and wrote his epic treatise, 'The Crisis of Civilisation'. Elsewhere, Einstein was horrified by the possibility of Nazi Germany succeeding in making the dreaded atomic bomb with such a scientist as Werner Heisenberg apparently heading the atomic project.

This apprehension about the German nuclear capacity prompted Einstein to sign the memorandum to President Truman about America's need to build the atom bomb as a deterrent. But after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were needlessly nuked Einstein felt morally responsible for life for the harrowing catastrophe. He never recovered from the shock and became a nuclear pacifist along with the likes of Bertrand Russell and other world thinkers. It was Einstein's formula E=mc² that was after all behind the catastrophic release of fission energy on the two Japanese cities and somehow Einstein could never quite come to terms with his decision to sign the Manhattan Project memorandum.

Heisenberg, on the other hand, was widely misunderstood in the scientific world as having helped Hitler come close enough to building the atom bomb and remained a much maligned character for a long time till it was discovered that it was he who was instrumental in slowing down the pace of the Nazi nuclear programme and so saving the world from a Nazi victory in WW II and consequent enslavement to its horrors. Heisenberg was then not only absolved of his past Nazi association but also celebrated as a hero who had saved humanity from barbaric bondage.

Einstein lived to see Hiroshima and Nagasaki and prophesied that another World War would claim two-thirds of humanity as it would be a full-scale nuclear war in all probability. However, he reckoned that humanity would survive its horrors to revive again. But a worse catastrophe lay in wait for mankind and that was the environmental degradation which would surely consume all. Einstein, while working on his elusive Unified Field Theory, died a man despondent about the future of mankind which seemed destined to die at its own hands directly through war or indirectly through environmental catastrophe.

Einstein, an ardent believer in causality and deterministic physics, could never come to terms with quantum probability as governing Nature at its very foundations. He spent the last three decades and more of his life chasing the elusive goal of finding that single simple formula that could unite both Relativity and Quantum Physics, and despite several such attempts brought close to completion, failed to find the missing links that would complete the picture. When in 1955 at 76 years he refused to be operated upon, he died quietly, a man devoted to his doubts and discoveries, a lone pilgrim who had redefined our idea of the universe and changed our concept of space and time forever.

Tagore had died much earlier in 1941 at the age of 80, a shattered man witnessing the futility of human civilisation that lay in ruins all about him. He was deeply spiritual and never gave up hope that humanity would rise up from the ashes of the vast crematorium that the world had become to build anew the next sprouting civilisation. But he died a devastated man amidst death that had become more commonplace than ever before. On his deathbed it was discovered that a teardrop adorned his cheek, this from a man who had never been publicly seen to have shed tears. What this parting teardrop could have meant is for men to conjecture.

Written by Sugata Bose