Einstein Albert (1879–1955), German-born American physicist, founder of the special and general theories of relativity and a fundamental contributor to several branches of physics and to the philosophical analysis and critique of modern physics, notably of relativity and the quantum theory. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1922, ‘especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.’
Born in Ulm in the German state of Württemberg, Einstein studied physics at the Polytechnic in Zürich, Switzerland. He was called to Berlin as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (1914) at the peak of the German ultranationalism that surrounded World War I. His reaction was to circulate an internationalist ‘Manifesto to Europeans’ and to pursue Zionist and pacifist programs. Following the dramatic confirmation of the general theory of relativity (1919) Einstein became an international celebrity. This fame also made him the frequent target of German anti-Semites, who, during one notable episode, described the theory of relativity as ‘a Jewish fraud.’ In 1933 Einstein left Germany for the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Although his life was always centered on science, he was also engaged in the politics and culture of his times. He carried on an extensive correspondence (whose publication will run to over forty volumes) with both famous and ordinary people, including significant philosophical correspondence with Cassirer, Reichenbach, Moritz Schlick, and others. Despite reservations over logical positivism, he was something of a patron of the movement, helping to secure academic positions for several of its leading figures. In 1939 Einstein signed a letter drafted by the nuclear physicist Leo Szilard informing President Roosevelt about the prospects for harnessing atomic energy and warning of the German efforts to make a bomb. Einstein did not further participate in the development of atomic weapons, and later was influential in the movement against them. In 1952 he was offered, and declined, the presidency of Israel. He died still working on a unified field theory, and just as the founders of the Pugwash movement for nuclear disarmament adopted a manifesto he had cosigned with Russell. Einstein’s philosophical thinking was influenced by early exposure to Kant and later study of Hume and Mach, whose impact shows in the operationalism used to treat time in his famous 1905 paper on special relativity. That work also displays a passion for unity in science characteristic of nearly all his physical thinking, and that may relate to the monism of Spinoza, a philosopher whom he read and reread. Einstein’s own understanding of relativity stressed the invariance of the space-time interval and promoted realism with regard to the structure of spacetime. Realism also shows up in Einstein’s work on Brownian motion (1905), which was explicitly motivated by his long-standing interest in demonstrating the reality of molecules (and atoms), and in the realist treatment of light quanta in his analysis (1905) of the photoelectric effect. While he pioneered the development of statistical physics, especially in his seminal investigations of quantum phenomena (1905–25), he never broke with his belief in determinism as the only truly fundamental approach to physical processes. Here again one sees an affinity with Spinoza. Realism and determinism brought Einstein into conflict with the new quantum theory (1925–26), whose observer dependence and ‘flight into statistics’ convinced him that it could not constitute genuinely fundamental physics. Although influential in its development, he became the theory’s foremost critic, never contributing to its refinement but turning instead to the program of unifying the electromagnetic and gravitational fields into one grand, deterministic synthesis that would somehow make room for quantum effects as limiting or singular cases. It is generally agreed that his unified field program was not successful, although his vision continues to inspire other unification programs, and his critical assessments of quantum mechanics still challenge the instrumentalism associated with the theory. Einstein’s philosophical reflections constitute an important chapter in twentieth-century thought. He understood realism as less a metaphysical doctrine than a motivational program, and he argued that determinism was a feature of theories rather than an aspect of the world directly. Along with the unity of science, other central themes in his thinking include his rejection of inductivism and his espousal of holism and constructivism (or conventionalism), emphasizing that meanings, concepts, and theories are free creations, not logically derivable from experience but subject rather to overall criteria of comprehensibility, empirical adequacy, and logical simplicity. Holism is also apparent in his acute analysis of the testability of geometry and his rejection of Poincaré’s geometric conventionalism.
See also DETERMINISM , FIELD THEORY, QUANTUM MECHANICS , RELATIVITY , UNITY OF SCIENC. A.F.