Modern Europe: history, politics, and culture

¶ … Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud and the Search for Hidden Universes," Richard Panek argues that both Einstein and Freud cut across the barriers of science in their time and, through scrupulous observation not only did they produce a revolution in their respective fields of research but, most importantly, they prompted a "revolution in thought" by using as instruments of research not so much mathematical formulas, but more, the tool of imagination which conjures a new, different world for the XX st century.

The notion of the "invisible century" expresses just that. It is not necessary an era of invisible technologies, but one in which questions are answered by triggering flows of speculations based on information or facts which cannot be physically proven yet there is no doubt about their validity. The term "invisible century" points to a historical environment in which one can answer questions such as "what are dreams," "what is a beam of light," "where do we come from" with arguments which cannot be verified by practical means.

Solid contributions to defining the notion are those made by Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. They were not satisfied with proof acquired through classic means and started asking themselves obvious questions about the evolution of human kind, about man's inner world or simply rethinking old theories, as in the case of Einstein and Galileo. They all came to the same conclusion: any answer is relative, it depends on the perspective; thus, they gave rise to a revolution in approaching any science debate.

Darwin, in his masterpiece "Origin of species" (1859) argues that his theories are not exposed to explain the origins of life on the Planet, but rather its evolution and the influence of history, time and favorable variations of the human kind (Charles Darwin, Introduction). Freud, on the other hand, in a totally different field of research, asked himself questions about common facts about one's inner life, proving that factual data is not always the only basis for science. Einstein made the same point. A mere coincidence made him link relativity to gravity. Still, the famous formula equaling mass and energy, although long debated upon, could never be demonstrated by Einstein. Even so, as in the case with Freud and Darwin, their discoveries and theories are today considered obvious facts of life and are unanimously accepted.

Regarding Darwin's evolutionary theory, every discovery was made as a result of thorough observation and study. As Eric Hobsbawm stated in his book "The age of capital 1845-1875," the true importance of Darwin's theories is the validation of the supremacy of history over all other social sciences (Eric Hobsbawm, p. 293). Darwin affirms thought out his work that man is the result of change along the lines of history and natural conditions, ideas which introduced the term of evolution (Charles Darwin, Introduction), which for his political socialist contemporaries was associated with progress. Therefore, the static, invariable universe known to that day was given a dynamic, yet intangible and unquantifiable component: history. Darwin stressed the importance of time and social change for the evolution of the human race, for the process of natural selection (Charles Darwin, chapter 14: Recapitulation and Conclusion), ideas which will be later on considered to have been the basis for postulating the theory of the Arian superiority. Still, what was till then a result of practical, rigorous analysis became afterward defined in historical terms, unverifiable through objective means of research.

Following the same line but in a completely different area of study, Sigmund Freud steered great controversy with his theories on the unconscious self, when he established a method of medical treatment for psychological ailments and when he tried to prove that the psyche could be broken into analytical parts. As his contemporary Einstein, at the beginning of the XX th century, Freud sought to analyse an invisible world, one that cannot be demonstrated as being existent, but whose inexistence would reduce man to chaos. Determined to achieve that, Freud tried to find answers about human behaviour, about his inner activities, ideas that today stand at the heart of psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud, chapter VII: The Psychology of the Dream-Processes)

Finally, indeed, probably the "Person of the Century" according to Time Magazine, Einstein not only made remarkable discoveries in science, but he made us rethink the way we thing. "Richard Panek considers how Einstein and Freud took science to the next level by making creative leaps into theories that couldn't be proven physically, thus transforming physics and psychology" (The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes Science News, Sept 4, 2004) . Motivating his rather curious paring of the two men of science, in his book, he draws parallels between what science can achieve when people go beyond what they actually see. In the case of psychics, its evolution was always determined by inventing new instruments to supply new data. Einstein came up with the sparkplug that drove the discipline into the Xx st century, when, one afternoon in 1905, he imagined the builder from the rooftop opposite his window falling off and realised that the man would not feel his body weight until he would hit the ground. "The happiest thought of my life," Einstein called it. But at that moment in time, he extended his theory of relativity to gravity and postulated the famous by now theory of relativity.