Article September 11, 2006 Issue

learning from light

BY DAVID A. CORNELL

As a young patent office clerk in Bern, Switzerland, Albert Einstein rode the trolley to work. Every day he passed a clock tower. One day as he watched the clock fade in the distance, he asked himself, "If I could ride a light beam from that clock, what would happen to the time I would see on the clock?" His answer was that the clock reading would remain constant in his view. Fond of considering such a question, Einstein called it a "thought experiment," or in German, ein Gedankenexperiment.

Einstein's Gedankenexperiment and its answer set him to thinking about what became his theory of relativity. Repercussions of his theory are many. Prime among them is that time — even according to the physical sciences — is not absolute, but depends upon the motion of the observer. While it isn't regarded as physically possible for a material body to travel with a light beam, relativity raises the question about the meaning of time intervals. Answering this question can lead thinkers to glimpse a deeper spiritual truth — the truth that time and its limitations do not govern life. Certainly not life in its divine meaning, as Christ Jesus lived and taught it.

In the eighth chapter of John's Gospel, Jesus speaks to people in the temple, assuring them that the temporal transition called death is unnecessary for those who follow him. Incredulous, the Jewish scholars ask Jesus if he claims to be greater than the Old Testament patriarch Abraham, who was long dead. Claiming only the honor God bestows on all, Jesus responds with the statement that astounded his listeners then, and is just as astounding to conventional material thinking today, a message that points thought toward the deep truth of eternal life: "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58).