How Science Can Help Us Live In Peace. Markolf H. Niemz

      Fig. 14: Life is interplay of chance and rules

      Darwin’s theory of evolution is accepted today by most scientists. So it really is a great mystery to me that—being familiar with Darwin’s revelations—we haven’t been questioning the individuality of every human being. Let me be more specific: Why should a God—if he/she/it does exist— choose not to create individual species on the one hand, but create a human being as an individual on the other? Darwin teaches us that life is one big picture. Shutting yourself off is unsexy. It retards the mixing of genotypes and counteracts evolution. Life prospers through mating! And yet, people seek individuality and they do that for religious reasons— they hope to play an individual role in life and try to preserve it even beyond the course of their lives. But nature is pursuing a different goal: Whoever reads her clues will be deeply compelled to abandon the desire for individuality and take the path of a far greater adventure—the adventure of a cosmic consciousness. Well, this is Brahman whom Adi Shankara had spoken about.

      New insights don’t just fall from the sky every day. They need time—a lot of time. After Darwin’s sensational revelation that animals and mankind are related to each other, nearly half of a century went by before another falsehood was dispelled: the absoluteness of space and time.

Einstein’s Spacetime

      The theory of relativity, a mathematical work of formulas, was published by Albert Einstein in 1905 and 1915. But the cornerstone of this theory can also be expressed completely without formulas—with pictures instead. This is what I am inviting you to: Welcome to Einstein’s spacetime!

      Einstein assumed only two things:36 The speed of light is a natural constant—a number that never changes—and the laws of nature have the same mathematical form for all non-accelerating37 observers. From these assumptions alone, he concluded that neither time nor space are absolute which means that they can’t be the same for all observers in the universe. Temporal (time like) and spatial (space like) distances also depend on how fast an object or an activity is moving relative to me. For example, when a watch moves relative to me, it is going from my perspective slower than a watch that I am wearing on my arm—even if both watches are identical!