Art: new theories Cubist Dubuffet: Jean Dubuffet, Tower of Lace, courtesy of the Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Collection

With the passage of time since the 1905 miracle year, the Einstein legacy includes some interesting intersections between science and religion. He didn't just leave us more in awe of the universe, but he also left us in awe of the power of the human mind. More particularly, he left us in awe of the reach of the human imagination. After all, Einstein was less likely to perform computational miracles than to make great leaps of the imagination--envisioning himself, for example, riding on a beam of light. He was doing more than synthesizing empirical evidence. He was inventing analytical frameworks to apply to the most perplexing, if rarely acknowledged, problems.

The universe of Galileo and Newton, which prevailed well into the nineteenth century, was built on the metaphor of a machine. God was seen as the Great Watchmaker. Then came the dramatic developments in theoretical physics, from Einstein and more recent cosmological thinkers, like the string theorists. "And the world becomes a much more mysterious place," observes Kalman Bland, a professor of religion at Duke. "We can know the position of a particle, but we can't know its velocity. Or if we know its velocity, we don't know where it is now. So it's a limit on our ability to know. And the same set of circumstances will not always yield the same consequences."

Einstein had "faith in the intelligibility of the universe," says Bland. Like the seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza, whom he admired, Einstein equated the discovery of natural law and the discovery of the divine.

"And that for him was the deepest religious impulse. He calls it cosmic religion. So the universe for him was a religious object, but it was religious because of its orderliness and its vulnerability to human understanding. If you're willing to concede that orderliness is itself a mysterious thing, then I think we could say, yes, he discovered the religious mystery of the universe. But I think it would be leading to semantic confusion to think that this is the same kind of mystery that religious people necessarily gravitate to. I think the underlying religious belief is in the limits of the human mind, and that the universe governed by God is not ultimately subject to human analysis. And Einstein believed in the power of the human mind to crack the mysteries."

John Mayrose is working to crack some of the mysteries of music. Mayrose is a Duke graduate student in music composition. For his Ph.D., he is creating a work based on cosmological theories, including Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity. His adviser, Stephen Jaffe, professor of music, describes the work as "something like a concerto grosso, where several different ensembles compete, combine, and collide."

Mayrose discusses the process of composing almost as a scientist would talk about the process of discovery. There's attention to detail and intense concentration, but lots of exercise of imagination and intuition. The work comprises five movements. For the middle movement, inspired by relativity, he says he thought of space in terms of musical notes and time in terms of musical rhythms. In a metaphorical bending of space and time, each of four groups of musical instruments "gradually bends the other groups to what they're doing, and then that group in turn will be bent into a new shape by the other groups." Surrounding relativity are movements inspired by Johannes Kepler, the seventeenth-century astronomer who discovered laws of planetary motion, which he called "harmony of the spheres"; the Uncertainty Principle; supersymmetry; and String Theory.

Mayrose, who teaches courses that thematically blend music with technology and science, says he's read general-interest books on relativity and space-and-time concepts, including works by Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene. And he enjoys mathematics; in the realm of electronic music, he regularly constructs sounds by numbers. But he says it's risky for a generalist to be taking on such a high-powered theory as musical inspiration. Kepler wanted someone to write music based on his ideas, but no one took him up on it, Mayrose says.

One of Mayrose's fascinations is with String Theory, the working title of his composition. String Theory is an effort to frame a unified field theory of physics, which would describe nature's forces within an all-encompassing framework. That was Einstein's ultimate quest. As its proponents see it, String Theory will meld Einstein's Theory of General Relativity and quantum mechanics--seemingly incompatible ways of describing something very large, deformations in spacetime, and something very small, microscopic objects that show the properties of particles in some circumstances and the properties of waves in others.

Brian Greene, the Columbia University physicist and String Theory proponent, who has lectured occasionally at Duke, notes that such cosmological constructs pose enormous challenges to our way of seeing the universe. The emerging idea of the universe, he writes, imagines "loops of strings and oscillating globules, uniting all of creation into vibrational patterns that are meticulously executed in a universe with numerous hidden dimensions capable of undergoing extreme contortions in which their spatial fabric tears apart and then repairs itself."

So Einstein's universe may become even more complicated, even stranger to contemplate. Douglas Adams anticipated that prospect--not without trepidation--in his sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, titled The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. "There is a theory which states that if anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable," he wrote. "There is another which states that this has already happened."