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Einstein: New Jersey
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Early in his career Einstein's studies of Newton and Kepler convinced him that there is no logical path to knowledge of the laws of nature, for there is no logical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles. 34 This was greatly reinforced by his study of James Clerk Maxwell. 35 It is the extra-logical problem, he held, that is essential, namely, the ontological reference of thought to reality. 36 Within the preestablished harmony of the universe, "ideas come from God"–they are revealed to the mind tuned into the master plan of the universe, and are apprehended through intuition resting on sympathetic understanding of experience. "He [the scientist] has to persist in his helpless attitude towards the separate results of empirical research, until principles which he can make the basis of deductive reasoning have revealed themselves to him." 37 "The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those elementary universal laws from which the cosmos can be built up by deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them...There is no logical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles; that is what Leibnitz described so happily as a 'preestablished harmony.'" 39
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Einstein's launch into fame, which occurred when measurements made during a 1919 eclipse confirmed his prediction of how much gravity bends light, coincided with, and contributed to, the birth of a new celebrity age. He became a scientific supernova and humanist icon, one of the most famous faces on the planet. The public earnestly puzzled over his theories, elevated him into a cult of genius, and canonized him as a secular saint.
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Einstein had won the Nobel Prize in physics for research that showed that light consists of particles of energy—research that laid the groundwork for quantum mechanics. Yet he dismissed the new theory out of hand. At the conference, he clashed with the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, launching a feud that would last until Einstein’s death in 1955.
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That was a conviction to which Einstein remained very firmly committed in place of the claims of the quantum theorists who called in question the deep invariable order in the sub-atomic realm, where nature appeared to be causally discontinuous, and irrational. Einstein had himself to face a similar problem over the implications of general relativity for our understanding of a non-Euclidean universe of curved space, when he insisted that "as far as mathematical propositions refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain they do not refer to reality." 53 Traditional logic applies to flat and not to curved space, so that new ways of thought are called for, which do not conform to the classical laws of logic and physics. That is why instead of going along entirely with the Copenhagen-G246ttingen form of quantum theory, Einstein pointed to the need for "an entirely new kind of mathematics" to cope with the profound intelligible relations with which quantum scientists sought to grapple. 54 A profound revolution in the logical structure of science was needed, in line with and in development of the logical structure of science initiated by Clerk Maxwell, when he called for "a new mathesis" in mathematics, and pointed to the need for a dynamic kind of mathematics with time relations built into it.
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Einstein contributed to the struggling new quantum theory. Meanwhile, he searched for a way to unify the theories of electromagnetism and gravity. In 1929 he announced a unified field theory, but the mathematics could not be compared with experiments; his struggle toward a useful theory had only begun. Meanwhile he argued with his colleagues, challenging their belief that quantum theory can give a complete description of phenomena.
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Many scientists only care about their work, but Einstein ... spoke and wrote often about politics and world peace. He liked the ideas of socialism and of having only one government for the whole world. He also worked for Zionism, the effort to try to create the new country of Israel.
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