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Einstein: Theories
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For Einstein, as for many others, simplicity is the criterion that mainly steers theory choice in domains where experiment and observation no longer provide an unambiguous guide. This, too, is a theme sounded early and late in Einstein's philosophical reflections (for more detail, see Howard 1998, Norton 2000, and van Dongen 2002). For example, the just-quoted remark from 1918 about the apparent determination of theory choice in practice, contrasted with in-principle underdetermination continues:
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In the spring of 1905, after considering these problems for ten years, Einstein realized that the crux of the problem lay not in a theory of matter but in a theory of measurement. At the heart of his special theory of relativity was the realization that all measurements of time and space depend on judgments as to whether two distant events occur simultaneously. This led him to develop a theory based on two postulates: the principle of relativity, that physical laws are the same in all inertial reference systems, and the principle of the invariance of the speed of light, that the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant. He was ... able to provide a consistent and correct description of physical events in different inertial frames of reference without making special assumptions about the nature of matter or radiation, or how they interact. Virtually no one understood Einstein’s argument.
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Always a leitmotif, Einstein's celebration of simplicity as a guide to theory choice comes clearly to the fore in the early 1930s. Why then? The reason might well be that his faith in simplicity had been vindicated when, seemingly with a sigh of relief, he found that he could drop from the gravitational field equations the cosmological constant that he had introduced in 1917 for the purpose of blocking non-static solutions, for the introduction of the cosmological constant in the first place had represented to him "a considerable renunciation of the logical simplicity of the theory" (Einstein 1949, 684-685). That his faith in simplicity was reaffirmed is clear. Witness what he wrote in his 1933 Herbert Spencer lecture:
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Einstein began to form a Generalized Theory of Gravitation with the universal law of gravitation and the electromagnetic force in his first attempt to demonstrate the unification and simplification of the fundamental forces. In the 1950s, he described his work in a Scientific American article. Einstein was guided by the belief of a single statistical measure of variance for the entire set of physical laws and he investigated the smiliar properties of the electromagnetic and gravity forces, as they are infinite and obey the inverse square law.
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Explicit citations of Duhem by Einstein are rare (for details, see Howard 1990a). But explicit invocations of a holist picture of the structure and empirical interpretation of theories are not hard to find. An especially interesting example is found in a review that Einstein wrote in 1924 of Alfred Elsbach's Kant und Einstein (1924), one of the flood of books and articles then trying to reconcile the Kantian doctrine of the a priori Euclidean character of space with general relativity's postulate of variable spacetime curvature. Having asserted that relativity theory is incompatible with Kant's doctrine of the a priori, Einstein explains why, more generally, he is not sympathetic with Kant:
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Einstein used to speak of this non-logical, intuitive way of reaching knowledge, as "tapping into God's thoughts". 40 "The deeper one penetrates into nature's secrets, the greater becomes one's respect for God." 41 Once when drawing out the implications of relativity theory in an amusing way which he hoped was in tune with the thoughts of God, he said "I cannot possibly know whether the good Lord does not laugh at it and has led me up the garden path"! 42 I think of that in connection with the fact that the equations of relativity theory predict their own limits, and ... direct us back to a zero point in the expansion of the universe from what is commonly known as "the black hole", which, as Henry Margenau held, implied the principle of creatio ex nihilo. 43 Einstein pointed out that "one must not conclude that the beginning [of the expansion of the universe] must mean a singularity in the mathematical sense." Then he added: "This consideration does, however, not alter the fact that the 'beginning of the world' really constitutes a beginning." 44 Such a beginning, a creatio ex nihilo, was of course an idea which was ruled out by Spinoza's Deus sive Natura notion of God as an infinite, eternal self-creating substance, and of his conception of the universe as non-contingent and completely necessary in its identification with God.
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