Einstein's Joke

Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe was that it was so comprehensible. I would not presume to think I could get inside Einstein's brain, even for a moment, and figure out what he meant. There is simply too much room in there, and I would quickly get lost. Maybe something that is incomprehensible is the idea there have been human beings so smart they could imagine new rules governing all of reality, while holding down an unrelated day job, and then proceed to prove, mathematically and rigorously, that the rules are right. Such minds, so very few in number, exist at the far, far, far right extreme of the bell curve of human intelligence. I have been amused at times by the efforts of others to explain to me how smart Einstein was. I think such efforts simply demonstrate that we're uncomfortable with the incomprehensible; the only person who could even approximately explain how smart Einstein was is Einstein himself. Because everyone else must explain Einstein's intelligence in terms which they understand, and their explanations are subsumed in the greater set of Einstein's own understandings, which include subtleties and connections which only he could comprehend. After Einstein, physics veered increasingly toward the heuristic, into quantum physics, for example, which presents many fun paradoxes without actually describing phenomena that humans can understand or explain convincingly. A fortiori the quasi-mystical formulations of string theory.

This is only a hunch, but I think Einstein intended his comment as a cosmic joke. I have never heard anyone else say that, although his comment is widely quoted. It's taken at face value, and usually in terms that suggest humans should congratulate themselves on their mastery of the basic laws that govern all physical phenomena, at least at the macro- (larger than subatomic) scale. A mastery adumbrated by Richard Feynman's very subtle observation that it is remarkable that the real world can be expressed in the abstract symbolism of mathematics: why can we quantify reality?

It's overused, the idea that there is a deep and subtle connection between "Western" physics and Eastern mysticism, particularly Zen subjectivity. But I think that's the heuristic (the word is handy today) approach best suited to getting Einstein's joke. We think there is an essential congruence between the reality conveyed to us by our sensory apparatus and the rules for comprehension we have devised because we mistake our perceptions for reality. Einstein was saying, if you ask me, that it is impossible for humans to surmount this essential limitation in our conception of the universe; thus, our comprehension is itself the main obstacle. We cannot get beyond that comprehension. Of course our highly-developed ideas about the workings of the universe strike us a complete understanding of everything; those ideas simply reduce to mathematical formulations what we're able to see, which isn't the same as reality at all. Einstein was not saying humans should congratulate themselves on their epic discovery of the true nature of reality. He was hinting that we're the eternal prisoners of illusion.

Einstein's Joke: no setup, no premise, no punch line. I guess he was a genius comedian, too.