Jamie Dimon is a business rock star. He’s run one of the world’s biggest financial institutions, JP Morgan, for 18 years with pretty much undiluted success. Whatever he says tends to be treated as gospel. And he recently pronounced that Elon Musk was “our Einstein”. To which my response is a very loud “bollocks”.
Musk is undeniably many things, including being brilliant at building pioneering companies across different sectors and at making money. Tons of it. That does not make him Einstein’s third cousin’s pet dog let alone comparable to one of the greatest scientists and philosophers the world has ever known.
To draw any line between the two demonstrates the intense limits of Dimon’s worldview and that of most people who specialise in finance. Dimon ploughed a blue-chip furrow from Boston Consulting to Harvard Business School, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, American Express and Citigroup before JP Morgan. Clearly, he has learned how to move and make money. And, in this narrow lane, he has come to equate business success and innovation with the highest levels of human achievement.
Here’s the thing, Jamie. Einstein — and you can add Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Hume, Wittgenstein, Russell, Hawking, Confucius and many others — never “made” a single thing. You could not buy what they created. They did not change how we do things. Few of them had any wealth. And their achievements could not be measured on the Nasdaq. They were philosophers, physicists, astronomers and mathematicians on a different plane; people who disassembled what was thought of as truth and reality and recreated a new version of it.
Maybe, Jamie, you should read Helgoland: The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics by Carlo Ravelli. I have never enjoyed a book so much that I truly understood so little of. Ravelli is a fine scientist in his own right and an even better writer and I was expecting to “get” quantum physics after reading it but, after about six pages, I was completely lost and never found my way again. It soon became clear to me that that was the point. Ravelli tells us, “If I have explained this in a way which makes you feel that you understand quantum physics then I haven’t written well enough.” He calls quantum physics fragmentary and insubstantial.
To think even momentarily that you can explain such complex, deeply philosophical and scientific issues to someone like me — who barely understood basic physics at school — in 150 pages is absurd and an insult to the extraordinary minds which created the whole edifice. But it doesn’t matter that you don’t understand because at least you learn where quantum physics came from and where it is headed, what it is built on and why it matters, and why you don’t understand. It also makes clear that philosophy, quantum physics and deep maths, and even religion, are overlapping worlds.
It is a brief and truly beautiful book, the story of how German scientist Werner Heisenberg developed his principle of uncertainty in isolation on the windswept island of Helgoland in the 1920s. He would later win a Nobel Prize for this work as the man who created quantum physics. (He would also go on to be accused, probably unfairly, of helping Hitler to try to build an atomic bomb, but that’s another tale.)
It’s also the story of Schrödinger’s cat — is it asleep or awake? — and there’s Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Buddha, Plato, Karl Marx, Lenin, Sigmund Freud and a cast from all angles. Elon Musk, Jamie, would never even have a bit part in this conversation.
It’s all relative
I am not going to try to explain what Heisenberg’s breakthrough was because, as noted above, I don’t understand it. But in blunt, inaccurate terms it means that things as we see them are not “things”. They are only things in relation to other things. Everything is interconnected and moving and different. There is no one physical reality. It is always moving and changing. The world is a web of interactions. Entities are nothing more than ephemeral nodes in this web. Their properties are not fixed or determined until the moment of these interactions. Everything is what it is only in relation to something else.
I will go no further because I will get lost. If I am not already. As Ravelli says, “The conceptual clarity of classical physics has been swept away by quanta … this was the abrupt awakening from the pleasant sleep in which we had been cradled by the illusions of Newton’s success.”
Einstein’s role in this intellectual roller coaster ride is hugely significant as the man who “completed the picture by showing that gravity is also carried by a field: a field that is the very geometry of space and time”. He was, however, initially resistant to quantum physics, famously commenting that “God does not play dice.” The Danish genius Bohr responded by admonishing Einstein to “stop telling God what to do”. Which, according to Ravelli, means: “Nature is richer than our metaphysical prejudices. It has more imagination than we do.”
Coming back to Musk. He might be compared credibly, Jamie, to an inventor like Thomas Edison or business innovators like Henry Ford (also a conspiracy theorist of note) and Steve Jobs or to a great engineer like Robert Stephenson. I might, very reluctantly, let Leonardo da Vinci creep into the picture — Musk’s celebrated biographer Walter Isaacson also wrote a book about the Italian Renaissance polymath. But there it stops. Musk is off the charts (and, probably, the spectrum) on process and business imagination. But he is way too functional, too mercenary, too glib, too lacking in humanity and any kind of self-awareness, and too morally compromised to be any kind of philosopher king.
Musk is also far too damn sure of himself about everything that crosses his path (including South African politics and society). As Ravelli notes, “I believe one of the greatest mistakes made by human beings is to want certainties when trying to understand something. The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by the radical absence of certainty. Thanks to the acute awareness of our ignorance, we are open to doubt and can continue to learn and to learn better. This has always been the strength of scientific thinking — thinking born of curiosity, revolt, change. There is no cardinal fixed point, philosophical or methodological, with which to anchor the adventure of knowledge.” DM
Helgoland: The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics by Carlo Ravelli is published by Penguin.