Quantum mechanics meets literature: Tagore and Einstein in Berlin.

While many perceive Rabindranath Tagore as a landlord who wrote most of his masterpieces sitting in his palace-like abode, or on a luxurious boat cruising down a peaceful river, he actually ventured much deeper into the vastness beyond his regular life and social circles. During his visits abroad, he engaged in intriguing conversations with brilliant minds from across the world — starting from British sci-fi master H.G. Wells to French dramatist-art historian Romain Rolland to genius German physicist Albert Einsten — where he spoke about the correlation of art and science, international relations and religion, and multiculturalism.

His conversation with Einstein — at the latter’s residence in suburban Berlin — brought out an interesting array of subjects. Tagore opens the talk with the topic of “new mathematical discoveries which tell us that in the realm of infinitesimal atoms chance has its play; the drama of existence is not absolutely predestined in character.” Causality, atomic disorder, elasticity of sub-atomic levels of freedom and the general stability concepts of quantum physics also get a human analogy. The differences in European and Eastern music also dominate the conversation. Einstein — who was an avid music listener — gets a glimpse into how music in the East is written and driven: the structure, the artistes’ liberty to improvise on a set of guidelines to produce a new presentation of the same music, linguistic structures. Tagore, at one point, compares harmony and melody to lines and colours; of how a line drawing can become vague and less expressional with the use of colours, while a proper combination of the two can create beautiful art. Einstein’s scientific inquisitiveness is also found in the conversation, where he proposes of an experiment to study the effects of European music on an Indian who has not listened to it before, but adds that the problem with great music is that it cannot be analysed; Tagore adds that what deeply affects the listener is beyond oneself.

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