an essay on albert einstein

Essay on Albert Einstein

500 words essay on albert einstein.

Albert Einstein was a physicist who is responsible for developing the famous general theory of relativity. Furthermore, he is one of the most influential and celebrated scientists of the 20th century. Let’s take a look at the life and achievements of this genius with the essay on Albert Einstein.

                                                                                                                 Essay On Albert Einstein

Early Life of Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was born in Germany into a Jewish family on 14th March 1879. Furthermore, Einstein had to deal with speech difficulties early on but was a brilliant student at his elementary school. His father, Hermann Einstein founded an electrical equipment manufacturing company with the help of his brother.

At the age of five, Albert’s father showed him a pocket compass . Moreover, this made him realize that the needle was moving due to something in empty space. According to Einstein, this experience left a deep and lasting impression on him.

In 1889, a ten-year-old Albert became introduced to popular science and philosophy texts. This happened due to a family friend named Max Talmud.

Albert Einstein spent time on books like Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ and ‘Euclid’s Elements’. From the latter book, Albert developed an understanding of deductive reasoning. Furthermore, by the age of 12, he was able to learn Euclidian geometry from a school booklet.

Einstein’s father’s intention was to see his son pursue electrical engineering. However, a clash took place between Albert and the authorities. This was because Albert had resentment for rote learning as, according to him,  it was against creative thought.

Achievements of Albert Einstein

In 1894, Einstein’s father’s business failed and his family went to Italy. At this time, Einstein was only fifteen. During this time, he wrote ‘The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields’, which was his first scientific work.

In 1901, there was the publishing of a paper by Einstein on the capillary forces of a straw in the prestigious ‘Annalen der Physik’. Furthermore, his graduation took place from ETH with a diploma in teaching.

In the year 1905, while working in the patent office, there took place the publishing of four papers by Einstein in the prestigious journal ‘Annalen der Physik’. Experts recognize all four papers as tremendous achievements of Albert Einstein. Therefore, people call the year 1905 as Einstein’s wonderful year’.

The four papers were special relativity, photoelectric effect, Brownian motion , and equivalence of matter and energy. He also made the discovery of the famous equation, E = mc².

The theory of relativity was completed by Einstein in 1915. The confirmation of his theory was by British astronomer, Sir Arthur Eddington, during the solar eclipse of 1919.

There was the continuation of research works by Einstein and finally, in 1921, his efforts bore fruits. Most noteworthy, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Albert Einstein for his services to Theoretical Physics.

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Conclusion of the Essay on Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein’s contribution to the field of physics is priceless. Furthermore, his ideas and theories are still authoritative for many physicists. Einstein’s lasting legacy in physics will continue to be an inspiration for young science enthusiasts.

FAQs For Essay on Albert Einstein

Question 1: What is the legacy of Albert Einstein?

Answer 1: Albert Einstein is one of the world’s greatest physicists and a Nobel Laureate. Furthermore, his greatest achievement is the theory of relativity which made a significant change in our understanding of the universe like. However, this wasn’t his only legacy as Einstein was also a refugee and a humanitarian.

Question 2: What is the equation E = MC 2 ?

Answer 2: Einstein’s E = MC 2 is the world’s most famous equation.  Furthermore, this equation means that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared.  Moreover, on the most basic level, this equation tells us that energy and mass happen to be interchangeable and that they are different forms of the same thing.

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• Albert Einstein Essay

Read Albert Einstein Essay on Vedantu

Albert Einstein was a Theoretical Physicist of German origin. He is the one who developed a pillar of modern Physics, the Theory of Relativity. Be it his mass-energy equivalence formula or his law of photoelectric effect, the theories he postulated changed the history of science forever. His works are still studied in standard institutions of learning throughout the world.

About Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was born on 14th March 1879 in Ulm in the Kingdom of Wurttemberg in the German empire. His father's name was Herman Einstein and his mother's name was Pauline Koch. His father worked as a salesman and as an engineer. In 1880, his father along with his family moved to Munich. His father and his uncle founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie. It is a company that manufactures electrical equipment based on direct current.

After birth, Albert Einstein's head was much larger than his body and he was born as a deformed abnormal child. Usually, children start speaking at the age of 2, but Albert Einstein started speaking after 4 years of age. When Einstein was 5 years old, his father gifted him with a magnetic compass on his birthday. The needle of the compass used to be in the North Direction, and seeing this, he became very fascinated and developed an interest to explore science well.

His Childhood

Albert Einstein was born on 14th March 1879, in Ulm, where his family ran a small shop. He had two siblings, an elder sister named Maja and a younger brother named Hans Albert. The Einsteins were non-observant Jews and moved to Munich when Albert was one year old. His parents wanted him to become a businessman, but he showed scientific inclinations from his childhood days. From 1890, the family resided in Milan where Einstein underwent Technical High School education. Since his father had relocated to Italy for work purposes, Albert Einstein decided not to move with his family to Berlin after matriculating from the Zurich Polytechnic in 1896.

He had problems with authority and left his academic institutions without a degree on several occasions. He started working as a patent clerk at the Swiss Patent Office in 1902, where he spent most of his time on theoretical physics. In 1905, he published four papers that revolutionized Physics. They were on (I) Brownian motion, (ii) photoelectric effect, (iii) special relativity and (iv) equivalence of mass and energy, which is famously known as the E=mc 2 equation. He worked on unified field Theory for more than ten years but was unable to complete it.

At the age of 5, he joined the Catholic Elementary School in Munich. After that, he enrolled in Luitpold Gymnasium, where he received his primary and secondary school education. When Albert Einstein was 15 years old, his father wanted him to do electrical engineering but Einstein used to fight with the authority of his school, about their way of teaching. He believed that due to so many strict rules and regulations in the school, the creative mind of children was lost and they only knew the strict rote learning. Einstein was thrown out of school too many times due to this behavior of his. He used to fight with his teachers, he also raised questions about their way of teaching.

At the age of 12, Einstein started learning Calculus on his own, and when he became 14 years old, he mastered Integral and Differential Calculus. Einstein got married in 1903 to Marci. In 1904 his son named Hans Albert Einstein was born, and in 1910 his second son Eduard was born.

Contribution Towards Science

Albert received a patent officer job at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern, Switzerland, at the age of 23, after completing college. While working there, he completed his Ph.D., after which he became a professor at the University of Zurich. During this period he gave the theory of mass-energy (E = mc 2 ). The atomic bombs dropped in Japan were built on this principle. However, throughout his life, Albert Einstein was against the atomic bomb dropped on Japan. He then gave a new theory of relativity, falsifying the old rules of relativity given by Isaac Newton, which proved that time and light are not constant. If traveling at the speed of light, i.e. 300000 km, it will be slow, and millions of years have passed on Earth. That is, he proved that time travel can be done. However, till date scientists have not been able to build a spaceship that can travel at the speed of light. 

In 1977, NASA conducted an experiment to prove this theory in which they set the clock in a satellite and were left to orbit the Earth. After a few years, when the satellite's clock was checked, it was much slower than the Earth's clock. In this theory of quantum physics, Indian scientist Satyendra Nath Bose wrote a letter from India to Albert Einstein in which he said that Newton's relativity theory is wrong. Albert Einstein then agreed to the letter of Satyendra Nath Bose, and he published that paper and later gave a new theory of relativity. Albert Einstein made many other inventions with this theory. 

He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1981 for his photoelectric effect. In 1933, Hitler killed millions of people in Germany, and at the same time, Albert Einstein was changing the whole world with science. He went to America from Europe forever, taking the citizenship there because Hitler placed a reward of \[$\]5000 on Albert Einstein's head and burned all his research books.

Moving to the United States

During World War-I, he was invited to join the Bureau of Standards in Washington before accepting its offer officially. He moved to the United States of America with his family in April 1933 after Hitler's rise to power.

He advised breaking up Bell Labs and nationalizing the electricity supply industry, worked on defense projects during World War II, and became a citizen of the United States in 1940.

In 1951, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect."

Albert Einstein died on 18th April 1955 at Princeton Hospital, New Jersey. He was 76 years old.

Death and Awards

On 17th April 1955, Einstein underwent internal bleeding in the Lower Abdominal, and he was taken to a hospital where the doctor asked him to undergo a surgery. Albert Einstein refused to undergo the surgery, and said that he would go when he wanted, and that it is tasteless to prolong life artificially. He told me that he would like to die like that. Later research was done on Albert Einstein's brain and it was found that the parts of Einstein's brain that were for mathematical calculus had developed 15% more as compared to the brains of normal people.

The whole world celebrates Albert Einstein's birthday on 14th March as World Genius Day. He had published more than 300 research papers on science in his life and had contributed to the advancement of science. This is the reason that Times magazine has awarded Albert Einstein the title of Person of the Century. Einstein received numerous awards and honors, and in 1922, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".

Conclusion  

Albert Einstein was one of the best scientists, mathematicians, and physicists of the 20th century. In the early twentieth century, Albert Einstein formulated theories that changed the thinking of physicists and non-specialists alike. He will always be remembered for his law of photoelectric effect and mass-energy equivalence formula. His body of work is studied in universities across the world to this day. He is a famous and known name in the world of Physics, he also achieved a lot, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for his commendable research and accomplishments.

FAQs on Albert Einstein Essay

1. Why did Albert Einstein Have No Social Life?

Albert Einstein was a very intelligent person. He had no time for a social life because he was always busy with his research and work. Albert Einstein had more than 40 publications to his credit. His life and work were on research and inventions. His life revolved around his work and family. The work-life of Albert Einstein is an inspiration to all the people who are working day and night to achieve something great in their lives. One of the best scientists, mathematicians and physicists of the 20th century was none other than Albert Einstein. His achievement includes the most discussed formula in his name- the mass-energy equivalence equation. He was known for the impact he made on the world of physics and also for the awards and honors he received in his lifetime.

2. What Was the Theory of Relativity by Albert Einstein?

The theory of relativity is the scientific theory developed by Albert Einstein between 1905 and 1915. It is a theory of gravity and space-time. The theory revolutionized physics by proposing that the laws of physics are the same for all inertial frames of reference. That is, the laws of physics are the same whether an observer is stationary or in motion. The theory also proposed that the speed of light is a constant for all observers, regardless of their relative motion. This was a radical departure from classical mechanics and Newton's view of the universe. His theory is the basis for many features of our modern life and is used in daily applications. You can learn more about the theory of relativity in any good physics textbook.

3. What Did Albert Einstein Do for Science?

Albert Einstein was a German theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. He is best known in popular culture for his mass-energy equivalence formula E = mc 2 (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"). He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". This makes Einstein the only physicist to win twice. He is also known for his other great works, such as the world's smallest unit of time and explaining the Brownian motion of particles. His life's work has had a great impact on the modern world and the way we see things.

4. What Awards Did Albert Einstein Receive in His Lifetime?

Albert Einstein was one of the most genius scientists of all time. He is known for his great works in Physics. He also received a lot of awards in his lifetime. Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize in 1921 for physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". He is the only physicist to have been awarded a Nobel Prize twice. In 1921, he received the Nobel Prize in physics. In his acceptance lecture, titled "The Field Theory of Matter", he provided what is now viewed as a foundation for relativistic quantum field theory. Einstein was voted number 3 in BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.

5. Why Was Einstein Thought of as a Genius?

Albert Einstein was a brilliant and intelligent man. He changed the world because of his scientific ideas and theories. He is known for the mass-energy equivalence formula (E=mc 2 ); he came up with it in 1905; before coming to this theory, he did not have any notable publications. However, by the end of this year, he had already submitted two articles to Annalen der Physik. One of these was on the photoelectric effect, while the other was on "A new determination of molecular dimensions". Albert Einstein is considered a genius because he looked at things in an entirely different way than anyone else did before him. He also had wonderful ideas about space and time that changed the way we think about those things.

6. What Were the Names of Albert Einstein’s Father and Mother?

Albert Einstein was born on 14th March 1879 in Ulm in the Kingdom of  Wurttemberg in the German empire. His father’s name was Herman Einstein and His Mother’s name was Pauline Koch.

7. How Albert Einstein Was Different from Normal Kids?

After birth, Albert Einstein's head was much larger than his body and he was born as a deformed abnormal child. Usually, children start speaking at the age of 2, but in the case of Albert Einstein, he started speaking after 4 years of age. At the age of 12, Einstein learning Calculus and when he became 14 years old he had mastered Integral and Differential Calculus which is obviously not normal for any other kid.

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Einstein’s Philosophy of Science

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) is well known as the most prominent physicist of the twentieth century. His contributions to twentieth-century philosophy of science, though of comparable importance, are less well known. Einstein’s own philosophy of science is an original synthesis of elements drawn from sources as diverse as neo-Kantianism, conventionalism, and logical empiricism, its distinctive feature being its novel blending of realism with a holist, underdeterminationist form of conventionalism. Of special note is the manner in which Einstein’s philosophical thinking was driven by and contributed to the solution of problems first encountered in his work in physics. Equally significant are Einstein’s relations with and influence on other prominent twentieth-century philosophers of science, including Moritz Schlick, Hans Reichenbach, Ernst Cassirer, Philipp Frank, Henri Bergson, Émile Meyerson.

1. Introduction: Was Einstein an Epistemological “Opportunist”?

2. theoretical holism: the nature and role of conventions in science, 3. simplicity and theory choice, 4. univocalness in the theoretical representation of nature, 5. realism and separability, 6. the principle theories—constructive theories distinction, 7. conclusion: albert einstein: philosopher-physicist, einstein’s work, related literature, other internet resources, related entries.

Late in 1944, Albert Einstein received a letter from Robert Thornton, a young African-American philosopher of science who had just finished his Ph.D. under Herbert Feigl at Minnesota and was beginning a new job teaching physics at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez. He had written to solicit from Einstein a few supportive words on behalf of his efforts to introduce “as much of the philosophy of science as possible” into the modern physics course that he was to teach the following spring (Thornton to Einstein, 28 November 1944, EA 61–573). Here is what Einstein offered in reply:

I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth. (Einstein to Thornton, 7 December 1944, EA 61–574)

That Einstein meant what he said about the relevance of philosophy to physics is evidenced by the fact that he had been saying more or less the same thing for decades. Thus, in a 1916 memorial note for Ernst Mach, a physicist and philosopher to whom Einstein owed a special debt, he wrote:

How does it happen that a properly endowed natural scientist comes to concern himself with epistemology? Is there no more valuable work in his specialty? I hear many of my colleagues saying, and I sense it from many more, that they feel this way. I cannot share this sentiment. When I think about the ablest students whom I have encountered in my teaching, that is, those who distinguish themselves by their independence of judgment and not merely their quick-wittedness, I can affirm that they had a vigorous interest in epistemology. They happily began discussions about the goals and methods of science, and they showed unequivocally, through their tenacity in defending their views, that the subject seemed important to them. Indeed, one should not be surprised at this. (Einstein 1916, 101)

How, exactly, does the philosophical habit of mind provide the physicist with such “independence of judgment”? Einstein goes on to explain:

Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such an authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they come to be stamped as “necessities of thought,” “a priori givens,” etc. The path of scientific advance is often made impassable for a long time through such errors. For that reason, it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analyzing the long commonplace concepts and exhibiting those circumstances upon which their justification and usefulness depend, how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. By this means, their all-too-great authority will be broken. They will be removed if they cannot be properly legitimated, corrected if their correlation with given things be far too superfluous, replaced by others if a new system can be established that we prefer for whatever reason. (Einstein 1916, 102)

One is not surprised at Einstein’s then citing Mach’s critical analysis of the Newtonian conception of absolute space as a paradigm of what Mach, himself, termed the “historical-critical” method of philosophical analysis (Einstein 1916, 101, citing Ch. 2, §§ 6–7 of Mach’s Mechanik , most likely the third edition, Mach 1897).

The place of philosophy in physics was a theme to which Einstein returned time and again, it being clearly an issue of deep importance to him. Sometimes he adopts a modest pose, as in this oft-quoted remark from his 1933 Spencer Lecture:

If you wish to learn from the theoretical physicist anything about the methods which he uses, I would give you the following piece of advice: Don’t listen to his words, examine his achievements. For to the discoverer in that field, the constructions of his imagination appear so necessary and so natural that he is apt to treat them not as the creations of his thoughts but as given realities. (Einstein 1933, 5–6)

More typical, however, is the confident pose he struck three years later in “Physics and Reality”:

It has often been said, and certainly not without justification, that the man of science is a poor philosopher. Why then should it not be the right thing for the physicist to let the philosopher do the philosophizing? Such might indeed be the right thing at a time when the physicist believes he has at his disposal a rigid system of fundamental concepts and fundamental laws which are so well established that waves of doubt can not reach them; but it can not be right at a time when the very foundations of physics itself have become problematic as they are now. At a time like the present, when experience forces us to seek a newer and more solid foundation, the physicist cannot simply surrender to the philosopher the critical contemplation of the theoretical foundations; for, he himself knows best, and feels more surely where the shoe pinches. In looking for a new foundation, he must try to make clear in his own mind just how far the concepts which he uses are justified, and are necessities. (Einstein 1936, 349)

What kind of philosophy might we expect from the philosopher-physicist? One thing that we should not expect from a physicist who takes the philosophical turn in order to help solve fundamental physical problems is a systematic philosophy:

The reciprocal relationship of epistemology and science is of noteworthy kind. They are dependent upon each other. Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is—insofar as it is thinkable at all—primitive and muddled. However, no sooner has the epistemologist, who is seeking a clear system, fought his way through to such a system, than he is inclined to interpret the thought-content of science in the sense of his system and to reject whatever does not fit into his system. The scientist, however, cannot afford to carry his striving for epistemological systematic that far. He accepts gratefully the epistemological conceptual analysis; but the external conditions, which are set for him by the facts of experience, do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted in the construction of his conceptual world by the adherence to an epistemological system. He therefore must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist: he appears as realist insofar as he seeks to describe a world independent of the acts of perception; as idealist insofar as he looks upon the concepts and theories as free inventions of the human spirit (not logically derivable from what is empirically given); as positivist insofar as he considers his concepts and theories justified only to the extent to which they furnish a logical representation of relations among sensory experiences. He may even appear as Platonist or Pythagorean insofar as he considers the viewpoint of logical simplicity as an indispensable and effective tool of his research. (Einstein 1949, 683–684)

But what strikes the “systematic epistemologist” as mere opportunism might appear otherwise when viewed from the perspective of a physicist engaged, as Einstein himself put it, in “the critical contemplation of the theoretical foundations.” The overarching goal of that critical contemplation was, for Einstein, the creation of a unified foundation for physics after the model of a field theory like general relativity (see Sauer 2014 for non-technical overview on Einstein’s approach to the unified field theory program). Einstein failed in his quest, but there was a consistency and constancy in the striving that informed as well the philosophy of science developing hand in hand with the scientific project.

Indeed, from early to late a few key ideas played the central, leading role in Einstein’s philosophy of science, ideas about which Einstein evinced surprisingly little doubt even while achieving an ever deeper understanding of their implications. For the purposes of the following comparatively brief overview, we can confine our attention to just five topics:

• Theoretical holism.
• Simplicity and theory choice.
• Univocalness in the theoretical representation of nature.
• Realism and separability.
• The principle theories-constructive theories distinction.

The emphasis on the continuity and coherence in the development of Einstein’s philosophy of science contrasts with an account such as Gerald Holton’s (1968), which claims to find a major philosophical break in the mid-1910s, in the form of a turn away from a sympathy for an anti-metaphysical positivism and toward a robust scientific realism. Holton sees this turn being driven by Einstein’s alleged realization that general relativity, by contrast with special relativity, requires a realistic ontology. However, Einstein was probably never an ardent “Machian” positivist, [ 1 ] and he was never a scientific realist, at least not in the sense acquired by the term “scientific realist” in later twentieth century philosophical discourse (see Howard 1993). Einstein expected scientific theories to have the proper empirical credentials, but he was no positivist; and he expected scientific theories to give an account of physical reality, but he was no scientific realist. Moreover, in both respects his views remained more or less the same from the beginning to the end of his career.

Why Einstein did not think himself a realist (he said so explicitly) is discussed below. Why he is not to be understood as a positivist deserves a word or two of further discussion here, if only because the belief that he was sympathetic to positivism, at least early in his life, is so widespread (for a fuller discussion, see Howard 1993).

That Einstein later repudiated positivism is beyond doubt. Many remarks from at least the early 1920s through the end of his life make this clear. In 1946 he explained what he took to be Mach’s basic error:

He did not place in the correct light the essentially constructive and speculative nature of all thinking and more especially of scientific thinking; in consequence, he condemned theory precisely at those points where its constructive-speculative character comes to light unmistakably, such as in the kinetic theory of atoms. (Einstein 1946, 21)

Is Einstein here also criticizing his own youthful philosophical indiscretions? The very example that Einstein gives here makes any such interpretation highly implausible, because one of Einstein’s main goals in his early work on Brownian motion (Einstein 1905b) was precisely to prove the reality of atoms, this in the face of the then famous skepticism of thinkers like Mach and Wilhelm Ostwald:

My principal aim in this was to find facts that would guarantee as much as possible the existence of atoms of definite size.… The agreement of these considerations with experience together with Planck’s determination of the true molecular size from the law of radiation (for high temperatures) convinced the skeptics, who were quite numerous at that time (Ostwald, Mach), of the reality of atoms. (Einstein 1946, 45, 47)

Why, then, is the belief in Einstein’s early sympathy for positivism so well entrenched?

The one piece of evidence standardly cited for a youthful flirtation with positivism is Einstein’s critique of the notion of absolute distant simultaneity in his 1905 paper on special relativity (Einstein 1905c). Einstein speaks there of “observers,” but in an epistemologically neutral way that can be replaced by talk of an inertial frame of reference. What really bothers Einstein about distant simultaneity is not that it is observationally inaccessible but that it involves a two-fold arbitrariness, one in the choice of an inertial frame of reference and one in the stipulation within a given frame of a convention regarding the ratio of the times required for a light signal to go from one stationary observer to another and back again. Likewise, Einstein faults classical Maxwellian electrodynamics for an asymmetry in the way it explains electromagnetic induction depending on whether it is the coil or the magnet that is assumed to be at rest. If the effect is the same—a current in the coil—why, asks Einstein, should there be two different explanations: an electrical field created in the vicinity of a moving magnet or an electromotive force induced in a conductor moving through a stationary magnetic field? To be sure, whether it is the coil or the magnet that is taken to be at rest makes no observable difference, but the problem, from Einstein’s point of view, is the asymmetry in the two explanations. Even the young Einstein was no positivist.

First generation logical empiricists sought to legitimate their movement in part by claiming Einstein as a friend. They may be forgiven their putting a forced interpretation on arguments taken out of context. We can do better.

Einstein’s philosophy of science is an original synthesis drawing upon many philosophical resources, from neo-Kantianism to Machian empiricism and Duhemian conventionalism. Other thinkers and movements, most notably the logical empiricists, drew upon the same resources. But Einstein put the pieces together in a manner importantly different from Moritz Schlick, Hans Reichenbach, and Rudolf Carnap, and he argued with them for decades about who was right (however much they obscured these differences in representing Einstein publicly as a friend of logical empiricism and scientific philosophy). Starting from the mid-1920s till the end of the decade Einstein show some interest in the rationalistic realism of Émile Meyerson (Einstein, 1928; cf. Giovanelli 2018; on the contemporary debate between Einstein and Bergson, see Canales 2015). Understanding how Einstein puts those pieces together therefore sheds light not only on the philosophical aspect of his own achievements in physics but also upon the larger history of the development of the philosophy of science in the twentieth century.

Any philosophy of science must include an account of the relation between theory and evidence. Einstein learned about the historicity of scientific concepts from Mach. But his preferred way of modeling the logical relationship between theory and evidence was inspired mainly by his reading of Pierre Duhem’s La Théorie physique: son objet et sa structure (Duhem 1906). Einstein probably first read Duhem, or at least learned the essentials of Duhem’s philosophy of science around the fall of 1909, when, upon returning to Zurich from the patent office in Bern to take up his first academic appointment at the University of Zurich, he became the upstairs neighbor of his old friend and fellow Zurich physics student, Friedrich Adler. Just a few months before, Adler had published the German translation of La Théorie physique (Duhem 1908), and the philosophy of science became a frequent topic of conversation between the new neighbors, Adler and Einstein (see Howard 1990a).

Theoretical holism and the underdetermination of theory choice by empirical evidence are the central theses in Duhem’s philosophy of science. His argument, in brief, is that at least in sciences like physics, where experiment is dense with sophisticated instrumentation whose employment itself requires theoretical interpretation, hypotheses are not tested in isolation but only as part of whole bodies of theory. It follows that when there is a conflict between theory and evidence, the fit can be restored in a multiplicity of different ways. No statement is immune to revision because of a presumed status as a definition or thanks to some other a priori warrant, and most any statement can be retained on pain of suitable adjustments elsewhere in the total body of theory. Hence, theory choice is underdetermined by evidence.

That Einstein’s exposure to Duhem’s philosophy of science soon left its mark is evident from lecture notes that Einstein prepared for a course on electricity and magnetism at the University of Zurich in the winter semester of 1910/11. Einstein asks how one can assign a definite electrical charge everywhere within a material body, if the interior of the body is not accessible to test particles. A “Machian” positivist would deem such direct empirical access necessary for meaningful talk of a charge distribution in the interior of a sold. Einstein argues otherwise:

We have seen how experience led to the introd. of the concept of the quantity of electricity. it was defined by means of the forces that small electrified bodies exert on each other. But now we extend the application of the concept to cases in which this definition cannot be applied directly as soon as we conceive the el. forces as forces exerted on electricity rather than on material particles. We set up a conceptual system the individual parts of which do not correspond directly to empirical facts. Only a certain totality of theoretical material corresponds again to a certain totality of experimental facts. We find that such an el. continuum is always applicable only for the representation of el. states of affairs in the interior of ponderable bodies. Here too we define the vector of el. field strength as the vector of the mech. force exerted on the unit of pos. electr. quantity inside a body. But the force so defined is no longer directly accessible to exp. It is one part of a theoretical construction that can be correct or false, i.e., consistent or not consistent with experience, only as a whole . ( Collected Papers of Albert Einstein , hereafter CPAE, Vol. 3, Doc. 11 [pp. 12–13])

One can hardly ask for a better summary of Duhem’s point of view in application to a specific physical theory. 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 started to prevail at the turn of the 1920s.

During the decade 1905–1915, Einstein had more or less explicitly assumed that in a good theory there are certain individual parts that can be directly coordinated with the behavior of physically-existent objects used as probes. A theory can be said to be ‘true or false’ if such objects respectively behave or do not behave as predicted. In special relativity, as in classical mechanics, the fundamental geometrical/kinematical variables, the space and time coordinates, are measured with rods and clocks separately from the other non-geometrical variables, say, charge electric field strengths, which were supposed to be defined by measuring the force on a charge test particle. In general relativity, coordinates are no longer directly measurable independently from the gravitational field. Still, the line element \(ds\) (distance between nearby spacetime points) was supposed to have a ‘natural’ distance that can be measured with rods and clocks. In the late 1910s, pressed by the epistemological objections raised by different interlocutors—in particular Hermann Weyl (Ryckman 2005) and the young Wolfgang Pauli (Stachel, 2005)—Einstein was forced to recognize that this epistemological model was at most a provisional compromise. In principle rod- and clock-like structures should emerge as solutions of a future relativistic theory of matter, possibly a field theory encompassing gravitation and electromagnetism. In this context, the sharp distinction between rods and clocks that serve to define the geometrical/kinematical structure of the theory and other material systems would become questionable. Einstein regarded such distinction as provisionally necessary, give the current state of physics. However, he recognized that in principle a physical theory should construct rods and clocks as solutions to its equations (see Ryckman 2017, ch. VII for an overview on Einstein view on the relation between geometry and experience).

Einstein addressed this issue in several popular writings during the 1920s, in particular, the famous lecture Geometrie und Erfahrung (Einstein 1921, see also Einstein, 1923, Einstein, 1924, Einstein 1926; Einstein 1926; see Giovanelli 2014 for an overview). Sub specie temporis , he argued, it was useful to compare the geometrical/kinematical structures of the theory with experience separately from the rest of physics. Sub specie aeterni , however, only geometry and physics taken together can be said to be ‘true or false.’ This epistemological model became more appropriate, while Einstein was moving beyond general relativity in the direction of theory unifying the gravitational and the electromagnetic field. Einstein had to rely on progressively more abstract geometrical structures which could not be defined in terms of the behavior of some physical probes. Thus, the use of such structures was justified because of their role in the theory as a whole. In the second half of the 1920s, in correspondence with Reichenbach (Giovanelli 2017) and Meyerson (Giovanelli 2018), Einstein even denied that the very distinction between geometrical and non-geometrical is meaningful (Lehmkuhl 2014).

A different, but especially interesting example of Einstein’s reliance on a form of theoretical holism 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 Kant’s philosophy. 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:

This does not, at first, preclude one’s holding at least to the Kantian problematic , as, e.g., Cassirer has done. I am even of the opinion that this standpoint can be rigorously refuted by no development of natural science. For one will always be able to say that critical philosophers have until now erred in the establishment of the a priori elements, and one will always be able to establish a system of a priori elements that does not contradict a given physical system. Let me briefly indicate why I do not find this standpoint natural. A physical theory consists of the parts (elements) A, B, C, D, that together constitute a logical whole which correctly connects the pertinent experiments (sense experiences). Then it tends to be the case that the aggregate of fewer than all four elements, e.g., A, B, D, without C, no longer says anything about these experiences, and just as well A, B, C without D. One is then free to regard the aggregate of three of these elements, e.g., A, B, C as a priori, and only D as empirically conditioned. But what remains unsatisfactory in this is always the arbitrariness in the choice of those elements that one designates as a priori, entirely apart from the fact that the theory could one day be replaced by another that replaces certain of these elements (or all four) by others. (Einstein 1924, 1688–1689)

Einstein’s point seems to be that while one can always choose to designate selected elements as a priori and, hence, non-empirical, no principle determines which elements can be so designated, and our ability thus to designate them derives from the fact that it is only the totality of the elements that possesses empirical content.

Much the same point could be made, and was made by Duhem himself (see Duhem 1906, part 2, ch. 6, sects. 8 and 9), against those who would insulate certain statements against empirical refutation by claiming for them the status of conventional definitions. Edouard Le Roy (1901) had argued thus about the law of free fall. It could not be refuted by experiment because it functioned as a definition of “free fall.” And Henri Poincaré (1901) said much the same about the principles of mechanics more generally. As Einstein answered the neo-Kantians, so Duhem answered this species of conventionalist: Yes, experiment cannot refute, say, the law of free fall by itself, but only because it is part of a larger theoretical whole that has empirical content only as a whole, and various other elements of that whole could as well be said to be, alone, immune to refutation.

That Einstein should deploy against the neo-Kantians in the early 1920s the argument that Duhem used against the conventionalism of Poincaré and Le Roy is interesting from the point of view of Einstein’s relationships with those who were leading the development of logical empiricism and scientific philosophy in the 1920s, especially Schlick and Reichenbach. Einstein shared with Schlick and Reichenbach the goal of crafting a new form of empiricism that would be adequate to the task of defending general relativity against neo-Kantian critiques (see Schlick 1917 and 1921, and Reichenbach 1920, 1924, and 1928; for more detail, see Howard 1994a). But while they all agreed that what Kant regarded as the a priori element in scientific cognition was better understood as a conventional moment in science, they were growing to disagree dramatically over the nature and place of conventions in science. The classic logical empiricist view that the moment of convention was restricted to conventional coordinating definitions that endow individual primitive terms, worked well, but did not comport well with the holism about theories

It was this argument over the nature and place of conventions in science that underlies Einstein’s gradual philosophical estrangement from Schlick and Reichenbach in the 1920s. Serious in its own right, the argument over conventions was entangled with two other issues as well, namely, realism and Einstein’s famous view of theories as the “free creations of the human spirit” (see, for example, Einstein 1921). In both instances what troubled Einstein was that a verificationist semantics made the link between theory and experience too strong, leaving too small a role for theory, itself, and the creative theorizing that produces it.

If theory choice is empirically determinate, especially if theoretical concepts are explicitly constructed from empirical primitives, as in Carnap’s program in the Aufbau (Carnap 1928), then it is hard to see how theory gives us a story about anything other than experience. As noted, Einstein was not what we would today call a scientific realist, but he still believed that there was content in theory beyond mere empirical content (on the relations between Einstein’s realism and constructism see Ryckman 2017, ch. 8 and 9). He believed that theoretical science gave us a window on nature itself, even if, in principle, there will be no one uniquely correct story at the level of deep ontology (see below, section 5). And if the only choice in theory choice is one among conventional coordinating definitions, then that is no choice at all, a point stressed by Reichenbach, especially, as an important positive implication of his position. Reichenbach argued that if empirical content is the only content, then empirically equivalent theories have the same content, the difference resulting from their different choices of coordinating definitions being like in kind to the difference between “es regnet” and “il pleut,” or the difference between expressing the result of a measurement in English or metric units, just two different ways of saying the same thing. But then, Einstein would ask, where is there any role for the creative intelligence of the theoretical physicist if there is no room for genuine choice in science, if experience somehow dictates theory construction?

The argument over the nature and role of conventions in science continued to the very end of Einstein’s life, reaching its highest level of sophistication in the exchange between Reichenbach and Einstein the Library of Living Philosopher’s volume, Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Physicist (Schilpp 1949). The question is, again, whether the choice of a geometry is empirical, conventional, or a priori. In his contribution, Reichenbach reasserted his old view that once an appropriate coordinating definition is established, equating some “practically rigid rod” with the geometer’s “rigid body,” then the geometry of physical space is wholly determined by empirical evidence:

The choice of a geometry is arbitrary only so long as no definition of congruence is specified. Once this definition is set up, it becomes an empirical question which geometry holds for physical space.… The conventionalist overlooks the fact that only the incomplete statement of a geometry, in which a reference to the definition of congruence is omitted, is arbitrary. (Reichenbach 1949, 297)

Einstein’s clever reply includes a dialogue between two characters, “Reichenbach” and “Poincaré,” in which “Reichenbach” concedes to “Poincaré” that there are no perfectly rigid bodies in nature and that physics must be used to correct for such things as thermal deformations, from which it follows that what we actually test is geometry plus physics, not geometry alone. Here an “anonymous non-positivist” takes “Poincaré’s” place, out of respect, says Einstein, “for Poincaré’s superiority as thinker and author” (Einstein 1949, 677), but also, perhaps, because he realized that the point of view that follows was more Duhem than Poincaré. The “non-positivist” then argues that one’s granting that geometry and physics are tested together contravenes the positivist identification of meaning with verifiability:

Non-Positivist: If, under the stated circumstances, you hold distance to be a legitimate concept, how then is it with your basic principle (meaning = verifiability)? Must you not come to the point where you deny the meaning of geometrical statements and concede meaning only to the completely developed theory of relativity (which still does not exist at all as a finished product)? Must you not grant that no “meaning” whatsoever, in your sense, belongs to the individual concepts and statements of a physical theory, such meaning belonging instead to the whole system insofar as it makes “intelligible” what is given in experience? Why do the individual concepts that occur in a theory require any separate justification after all, if they are indispensable only within the framework of the logical structure of the theory, and if it is the theory as a whole that stands the test? (Einstein 1949, 678).

Two years before the Quine’s publication of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951), Einstein here makes explicit the semantic implications of a thoroughgoing holism.

If theory choice is empirically underdetermined, then an obvious question is why we are so little aware of the underdetermination in the day-to-day conduct of science. In a 1918 address celebrating Max Planck’s sixtieth birthday, Einstein approached this question via a distinction between practice and principle:

The supreme task of the physicist is … the search for those most general, elementary laws from which the world picture is to be obtained through pure deduction. No logical path leads to these elementary laws; it is instead just the intuition that rests on an empathic understanding of experience. In this state of methodological uncertainty one can think that arbitrarily many, in themselves equally justified systems of theoretical principles were possible; and this opinion is, in principle , certainly correct. But the development of physics has shown that of all the conceivable theoretical constructions a single one has, at any given time, proved itself unconditionally superior to all others. No one who has really gone deeply into the subject will deny that, in practice, the world of perceptions determines the theoretical system unambiguously, even though no logical path leads from the perceptions to the basic principles of the theory. (Einstein 1918, 31; Howard’s translation)

But why is theory choice, in practice, seemingly empirically determined? Einstein hinted at an answer the year before in a letter to Schlick, where he commended Schlick’s argument that the deep elements of a theoretical ontology have as much claim to the status of the real as do Mach’s elements of sensation (Schlick 1917), but suggested that we are nonetheless speaking of two different kinds of reality. How do they differ?

It appears to me that the word “real” is taken in different senses, according to whether impressions or events, that is to say, states of affairs in the physical sense, are spoken of. If two different peoples pursue physics independently of one another, they will create systems that certainly agree as regards the impressions (“elements” in Mach’s sense). The mental constructions that the two devise for connecting these “elements” can be vastly different. And the two constructions need not agree as regards the “events”; for these surely belong to the conceptual constructions. Certainly on the “elements,” but not the “events,” are real in the sense of being “given unavoidably in experience.” But if we designate as “real” that which we arrange in the space-time-schema, as you have done in the theory of knowledge, then without doubt the “events,” above all, are real.… I would like to recommend a clean conceptual distinction here . (Einstein to Schlick, 21 May 1917, CPAE, Vol. 8, Doc. 343)

Why, in practice, are physicists unaware of underdetermination? It is because ours is not the situation of “two different peoples pursu[ing] physics independently of one another.” Though Einstein does not say it explicitly, the implication seems to be that apparent determination in theory choice is mainly a consequence of our all being similarly socialized as we become members of a common scientific community. Part of what it means to be a member of a such a community is that we have been taught to make our theoretical choices in accord with criteria or values that we hold in common.

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, van Dongen 2002, 2010, Giovanelli 2018). For example, the just-quoted remark from 1918 about the apparent determination of theory choice in practice, contrasted with in-principle underdetermination continues:

Furthermore this conceptual system that is univocally coordinated with the world of experience is reducible to a few basic laws from which the whole system can be developed logically. With every new important advance the researcher here sees his expectations surpassed, in that those basic laws are more and more simplified under the press of experience. With astonishment he sees apparent chaos resolved into a sublime order that is to be attributed not to the rule of the individual mind, but to the constitution of the world of experience; this is what Leibniz so happily characterized as “pre-established harmony.” Physicists strenuously reproach many epistemologists for their insufficient appreciation of this circumstance. Herein, it seems to me, lie the roots of the controversy carried on some years ago between Mach and Planck. (Einstein 1918, p. 31)

There is more than a little autobiography here, for as Einstein stressed repeatedly in later years, he understood the success of his own quest for a general theory of relativity as a result of his seeking the simplest set of field equations satisfying a given set of constraints.

Einstein’s celebration of simplicity as a guide to theory choice comes clearly to the fore in the early 1930s, when he was immersed his project of a unified field theory (see, van Dongen 2010 for a reconstruction of the philosophical underpinning of Einstein’s search of a unified field theory). Witness what he wrote in his 1933 Herbert Spencer lecture:

If, then, it is true that the axiomatic foundation of theoretical physics cannot be extracted from experience but must be freely invented, may we ever hope to find the right way? Furthermore, does this right way exist anywhere other than in our illusions? May we hope to be guided safely by experience at all, if there exist theories (such as classical mechanics) which to a large extent do justice to experience, without comprehending the matter in a deep way? To these questions, I answer with complete confidence, that, in my opinion, the right way exists, and that we are capable of finding it. Our experience hitherto justifies us in trusting that nature is the realization of the simplest that is mathematically conceivable. I am convinced that purely mathematical construction enables us to find those concepts and those lawlike connections between them that provide the key to the understanding of natural phenomena. Useful mathematical concepts may well be suggested by experience, but in no way can they be derived from it. Experience naturally remains the sole criterion of the usefulness of a mathematical construction for physics. But the actual creative principle lies in mathematics. Thus, in a certain sense, I take it to be true that pure thought can grasp the real, as the ancients had dreamed. (Einstein 1933, p. 183; Howard’s translation)

Einstein’s conviction that the theoretical physicist must trust simplicity is that his work was moving steadily into domains ever further removed from direct contact with observation and experiment. Einstein started to routinely claim that this was the lesson he had drawn from the way in which he had found general relativity (Norton 2000). There are, however, good reasons to think that Einstein’s selective recollections (Jannsen and Renn 2007) were instrumental to his defense of relying on a purely mathematical strategy in the search for a unified field theory (van Dongen 2010):

The theory of relativity is a beautiful example of the basic character of the modern development of theory. That is to say, the hypotheses from which one starts become ever more abstract and more remote from experience. But in return one comes closer to the preeminent goal of science, that of encompassing a maximum of empirical contents through logical deduction with a minimum of hypotheses or axioms. The intellectual path from the axioms to the empirical contents or to the testable consequences becomes, thereby, ever longer and more subtle. The theoretician is forced, ever more, to allow himself to be directed by purely mathematical, formal points of view in the search for theories, because the physical experience of the experimenter is not capable of leading us up to the regions of the highest abstraction. Tentative deduction takes the place of the predominantly inductive methods appropriate to the youthful state of science. Such a theoretical structure must be quite thoroughly elaborated in order for it to lead to consequences that can be compared with experience. It is certainly the case that here, as well, the empirical fact is the all-powerful judge. But its judgment can be handed down only on the basis of great and difficult intellectual effort that first bridges the wide space between the axioms and the testable consequences. The theorist must accomplish this Herculean task with the clear understanding that this effort may only be destined to prepare the way for a death sentence for his theory. One should not reproach the theorist who undertakes such a task by calling him a fantast; instead, one must allow him his fantasizing, since for him there is no other way to his goal whatsoever. Indeed, it is no planless fantasizing, but rather a search for the logically simplest possibilities and their consequences. (Einstein 1954, 238–239; Howard’s translation)

What warrant is there for thus trusting in simplicity? At best one can do a kind of meta-induction. That “the totality of all sensory experience can be ‘comprehended’ on the basis of a conceptual system built on premises of great simplicity” will be derided by skeptics as a “miracle creed,” but, Einstein adds, “it is a miracle creed which has been borne out to an amazing extent by the development of science” (Einstein 1950, p. 342). The success of previous physical theories justifies our trusting that nature is the realization of the simplest that is mathematically conceivable

But for all that Einstein’s faith in simplicity was strong, he despaired of giving a precise, formal characterization of how we assess the simplicity of a theory. In 1946 he wrote about the perspective of simplicity (here termed the “inner perfection” of a theory):

This point of view, whose exact formulation meets with great difficulties, has played an important role in the selection and evaluation of theories from time immemorial. The problem here is not simply one of a kind of enumeration of the logically independent premises (if anything like this were at all possible without ambiguity), but one of a kind of reciprocal weighing of incommensurable qualities.… I shall not attempt to excuse the lack of precision of [these] assertions … on the grounds of insufficient space at my disposal; I must confess herewith that I cannot at this point, and perhaps not at all, replace these hints by more precise definitions. I believe, however, that a sharper formulation would be possible. In any case it turns out that among the “oracles” there usually is agreement in judging the “inner perfection” of the theories and even more so concerning the degree of “external confirmation.” (Einstein 1946, pp. 21, 23).

As in 1918, so in 1946 and beyond, Einstein continues to be impressed that the “oracles,” presumably the leaders of the relevant scientific community, tend to agree in their judgments of simplicity. That is why, in practice, simplicity seems to determine theory choice univocally.

In the physics and philosophy of science literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the principle according to which scientific theorizing should strive for a univocal representation of nature was widely and well known under the name that it was given in the title of a widely-cited essay by Joseph Petzoldt, “The Law of Univocalness” [“Das Gesetz der Eindeutigkeit”] (Petzoldt 1895). An indication that the map of philosophical positions was drawn then in a manner very different from today is to found in the fact that this principle found favor among both anti-metaphysical logical empiricists, such as Carnap, and neo-Kantians, such as Cassirer. It played a major role in debates over the ontology of general relativity and was an important part of the background to the development of the modern concept of categoricity in formal semantics (for more on the history, influence, and demise of the principle of univocalness, see Howard 1992 and 1996). One can find no more ardent and consistent champion of the principle than Einstein.

The principle of univocalness should not be mistaken for a denial of the underdetermination thesis. The latter asserts that a multiplicity of theories can equally well account for a given body of empirical evidence, perhaps even the infinity of all possible evidence in the extreme, Quinean version of the thesis. The principle of univocalness asserts (in a somewhat anachronistic formulation) that any one theory, even any one among a set of empirically equivalent theories, should provide a univocal representation of nature by determining for itself an isomorphic set of models. The unambiguous determination of theory choice by evidence is not the same thing as the univocal determination of a class of models by a theory.

The principle of univocalness played a central role in Einstein’s struggles to formulate the general theory of relativity. When, in 1913, Einstein wrongly rejected a fully generally covariant theory of gravitation, he did so in part because he thought, wrongly, that generally covariant field equations failed the test of univocalness. More specifically, he reasoned wrongly that for a region of spacetime devoid of matter and energy—a “hole”—generally covariant field equations permit the construction of two different solutions, different in the sense that, in general, for spacetime points inside the hole, they assign different values of the metric tensor to one and the same point (for more on the history of this episode, see Stachel 1980 and Norton 1984). But Einstein’s “hole argument” is wrong, and his own diagnosis of the error in 1915 rests again, ironically, on a deployment of the principle of univocalness. What Einstein realized in 1915 was that, in 1913, he was wrongly assuming that a coordinate chart sufficed to fix the identity of spacetime manifold points. The application of a coordinate chart cannot suffice to individuate manifold points precisely because a coordinate chart is not an invariant labeling scheme, whereas univocalness in the representation of nature requires such invariance (see Howard and Norton 1993 and Howard 1999 for further discussion).

Here is how Einstein explained his change of perspective in a letter to Paul Ehrenfest of 26 December 1915, just a few weeks after the publication of the final, generally covariant formulation of the general theory of relativity:

In §12 of my work of last year, everything is correct (in the first three paragraphs) up to that which is printed with emphasis at the end of the third paragraph. From the fact that the two systems \(G(x)\) and \(G'(x)\), referred to the same reference system, satisfy the conditions of the grav. field, no contradiction follows with the univocalness of events. That which was apparently compelling in these reflections founders immediately, if one considers that the reference system signifies nothing real that the (simultaneous) realization of two different \(g\)-systems (or better, two different grav. fields) in the same region of the continuum is impossible according to the nature of the theory. In place of §12, the following reflections must appear. The physically real in the universe of events (in contrast to that which is dependent upon the choice of a reference system) consists in spatiotemporal coincidences .* [Footnote *: and in nothing else!] Real are, e.g., the intersections of two different world lines, or the statement that they do not intersect. Those statements that refer to the physically real therefore do not founder on any univocal coordinate transformation. If two systems of the \(g_{\mu v}\) (or in general the variables employed in the description of the world) are so created that one can obtain the second from the first through mere spacetime transformation, then they are completely equivalent. For they have all spatiotemporal point coincidences in common, i.e., everything that is observable. These reflections show at the same time how natural the demand for general covariance is. (CPAE, Vol. 8, Doc. 173)

Einstein’s new point of view, according to which the physically real consists exclusively in that which can be constructed on the basis of spacetime coincidences, spacetime points, for example, being regarded as intersections of world lines, is now known as the “point-coincidence argument.” Einstein might have been inspired by a paper by the young mathematician Erich Kretschmann (Howard and Norton 1993; cf. Giovanelli 2013) or possibly by a conversation with Schlick (Engler and Renn, 2017). Spacetime coincidences play this privileged ontic role because they are invariant and, thus, univocally determined. Spacetime coordinates lack such invariance, a circumstance that Einstein thereafter repeatedly formulated as the claim that space and time “thereby lose the last vestige of physical reality” (see, for example, Einstein to Ehrenfest, 5 January 1916, CPAE, Vol. 8, Doc. 180).

One telling measure of the philosophical importance of Einstein’s new perspective on the ontology of spacetime is the fact that Schlick devoted his first book, Raum und Zeit in den gegenwärtigen Physik (1917), a book for which Einstein had high praise (see Howard 1984 and 1999). But what most interested Einstein was Schlick’s discussion of the reality concept. Schlick argued that Mach was wrong to regard only the elements of sensation as real. Spacetime events, individuated invariantly as spacetime coincidences, have as much or more right to be taken as real, precisely because of the univocal manner of their determination. Einstein wholeheartedly agreed, though he ventured the above-quoted suggestion that one should distinguish the two kinds of reality—that of the elements and that of the spacetime events—on the ground that if “two different peoples” pursued physics independently of one another they were fated to agree about the elements but would almost surely produce different theoretical constructions at the level of the spacetime event ontology. Note, again, that underdetermination is not a failure of univocalness. Different though they will be, each people’s theoretical construction of an event ontology would be expected to be univocal.

Schlick, of course, went on to become the founder of the Vienna Circle, a leading figure in the development of logical empiricism, a champion of verificationism. That being so, an important question arises about Schlick’s interpretation of Einstein on the univocal determination of spacetime events as spacetime coincidences. The question is this: Do such univocal coincidences play such a privileged role because of their reality or because of their observability. Clearly the former—the reality of that which is univocally determined—is important. But are univocal spacetime coincidences real because, thanks to their invariance, they are observable? Or is their observability consequent upon their invariant reality? Einstein, himself, repeatedly stressed the observable character of spacetime coincidences, as in the 26 December 1915 letter to Ehrenfest quoted above (for additional references and a fuller discussion, see Howard 1999). [ 2 ]

Schlick, still a self-described realist in 1917, was clear about the relationship between observability and reality. He distinguished macroscopic coincidences in the field of our sense experience, to which he does accord a privileged and foundational epistemic status, from the microscopic point coincidences that define an ontology of spacetime manifold points. Mapping the former onto the latter is, for Schlick, an important part of the business of confirmation, but the reality of the spacetime manifold points is in no way consequent upon their observability. Indeed, how, strictly speaking, can one even talk of the observation of infinitesimal spacetime coincidences of the kind encountered in the intersection of two world lines? In fact, the order of implication goes the other way: Spacetime events individuated as spacetime coincidences are real because they are invariant, and such observability as they might possess is consequent upon their status as invariant bits of physical reality. For Einstein, and for Schlick in 1917, understanding the latter—physical reality—is the goal of physical theory.

As we have seen, Schlick’s Raum und Zeit in den gegenwärtigen Physik promoted a realistic interpretation of the ontology of general relativity. After reading the manuscript early in 1917, Einstein wrote to Schlick on 21 May that “the last section ‘Relations to Philosophy’ seems to me excellent” (CPAE, Vol. 8, Doc. 343), just the sort of praise one would expect from a fellow realist. Three years earlier, the Bonn mathematician, Eduard Study, had written another well-known, indeed very well-known defense of realism, Die realistische Weltansicht und die Lehre vom Raume (1914). Einstein read it in September of 1918. Much of it he liked, especially the droll style, as he said to Study in a letter of 17 September (CPAE, Vol. 8, Doc. 618). Pressed by Study to say more about the points where he disagreed, Einstein replied on 25 September in a rather surprising way:

I am supposed to explain to you my doubts? By laying stress on these it will appear that I want to pick holes in you everywhere. But things are not so bad, because I do not feel comfortable and at home in any of the “isms.” It always seems to me as though such an ism were strong only so long as it nourishes itself on the weakness of it counter-ism; but if the latter is struck dead, and it is alone on an open field, then it also turns out to be unsteady on its feet. So, away we go ! “The physical world is real.” That is supposed to be the fundamental hypothesis. What does “hypothesis” mean here? For me, a hypothesis is a statement, whose truth must be assumed for the moment, but whose meaning must be raised above all ambiguity . The above statement appears to me, however, to be, in itself, meaningless, as if one said: “The physical world is cock-a-doodle-doo.” It appears to me that the “real” is an intrinsically empty, meaningless category (pigeon hole), whose monstrous importance lies only in the fact that I can do certain things in it and not certain others. This division is, to be sure, not an arbitrary one, but instead …. I concede that the natural sciences concern the “real,” but I am still not a realist. (CPAE, Vol. 8, Doc. 624)

Lest there be any doubt that Einstein has little sympathy for the other side, he adds:

The positivist or pragmatist is strong as long as he battles against the opinion that there [are] concepts that are anchored in the “A priori.” When, in his enthusiasm, [he] forgets that all knowledge consists [in] concepts and judgments, then that is a weakness that lies not in the nature of things but in his personal disposition just as with the senseless battle against hypotheses, cf. the clear book by Duhem. In any case, the railing against atoms rests upon this weakness. Oh, how hard things are for man in this world; the path to originality leads through unreason (in the sciences), through ugliness (in the arts)-at least the path that many find passable. (CPAE, Vol. 8, Doc. 624)

What could Einstein mean by saying that he concedes that the natural sciences concern the “real,” but that he is “still not a realist” and that the “real” in the statement, “the physical world is real,” is an “intrinsically empty, meaningless category”?

The answer might be that realism, for Einstein, is not a philosophical doctrine about the interpretation of scientific theories or the semantics of theoretical terms. [ 3 ] For Einstein, realism is a physical postulate, one of a most interesting kind, as he explained on 18 March 1948 in a long note at the end of the manuscript of Max Born’s Waynflete Lectures, Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance (1949), which Born had sent to Einstein for commentary:

I just want to explain what I mean when I say that we should try to hold on to physical reality. We are, to be sure, all of us aware of the situation regarding what will turn out to be the basic foundational concepts in physics: the point-mass or the particle is surely not among them; the field, in the Faraday - Maxwell sense, might be, but not with certainty. But that which we conceive as existing (’actual’) should somehow be localized in time and space. That is, the real in one part of space, A, should (in theory) somehow ‘exist’ independently of that which is thought of as real in another part of space, B. If a physical system stretches over the parts of space A and B, then what is present in B should somehow have an existence independent of what is present in A. What is actually present in B should thus not depend upon the type of measurement carried out in the part of space, A; it should also be independent of whether or not, after all, a measurement is made in A. If one adheres to this program, then one can hardly view the quantum-theoretical description as a complete representation of the physically real. If one attempts, nevertheless, so to view it, then one must assume that the physically real in B undergoes a sudden change because of a measurement in A. My physical instincts bristle at that suggestion. However, if one renounces the assumption that what is present in different parts of space has an independent, real existence, then I do not at all see what physics is supposed to describe. For what is thought to by a ‘system’ is, after all, just conventional, and I do not see how one is supposed to divide up the world objectively so that one can make statements about the parts. (Born 1969, 223–224; Howard’s translation)

Realism is thus the thesis of spatial separability, the claim that spatial separation is a sufficient condition for the individuation of physical systems, and its assumption is here made into almost a necessary condition for the possibility of an intelligible science of physics.

The postulate of spatial separability as that which undergirds the ontic independence and, hence, individual identities of the systems that physics describes was an important part of Einstein’s thinking about the foundations of physics since at least the time of his very first paper on the quantum hypothesis in 1905 (Einstein 1905a; for more detail on the early history of this idea in Einstein’s thinking, see Howard 1990b). But the true significance of the separability principle emerged most clearly in 1935, when (as hinted in the just-quoted remark) Einstein made it one of the central premises of his argument for the incompleteness of quantum mechanics (see Howard 1985 and 1989). It is not so clearly deployed in the published version of the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen paper (1935), but Einstein did not write that paper and did not like the way the argument appeared there. Separability is, however, an explicit premise in all of Einstein’s later presentations of the argument for the incompleteness of quantum mechanics, both in correspondence and in print (see Howard 1985 for a detailed list of references).

In brief, the argument is this. Separability implies that spacelike separated systems have associated with them independent real states of affairs. A second postulate, locality, implies that the events in one region of spacetime cannot physically influence physical reality in a region of spacetime separated from the first by a spacelike interval. Consider now an experiment in which two systems, A and B, interact and separate, subsequent measurements on each corresponding to spacelike separated events. Separability implies that A and B have separate real physical states, and locality implies that the measurement performed on A cannot influence B’s real physical state. But quantum mechanics ascribes different theoretical states, different wave functions, to B depending upon that parameter that is measured on A. Therefore, quantum mechanics ascribes different theoretical states to B, when B possesses, in fact, one real physical state. Hence quantum mechanics is incomplete.

One wants to ask many questions. First, what notion of completeness is being invoked here? It is not deductive completeness. It is closer in kind to what is termed “categoricity” in formal semantics, a categorical theory being one whose models are all isomorphic to one another. It is closer still to the principle discussed above—and cited as a precursor of the concept of categoricity—namely, the principle of univocalness, which we found doing such important work in Einstein’s quest for a general theory of relativity, where it was the premise forcing the adoption of an invariant and thus univocal scheme for the individuation of spacetime manifold points.

The next question is why separability is viewed by Einstein as virtually an a priori necessary condition for the possibility of a science of physics. One reason is because a field theory like general relativity, which was Einstein’s model for a future unified foundation for physics, is an extreme embodiment of the principle of separability: “Field theory has carried out this principle to the extreme, in that it localizes within infinitely small (four-dimensional) space-elements the elementary things existing independently of the one another that it takes as basic, as well as the elementary laws it postulates for them” (Einstein 1948, 321–322). And a field theory like general relativity can do this because the infinitesimal metric interval—the careful way to think about separation in general relativistic spacetime—is invariant (hence univocally determined) under all continuous coordinate transformations.

Another reason why Einstein would be inclined to view separability as an a priori necessity is that, in thus invoking separability to ground individuation, Einstein places himself in a tradition of so viewing spatial separability with very strong Kantian roots (and, before Kant, Newtonian roots), a tradition in which spatial separability was known by the name that Arthur Schopenhauer famously gave to it, the principium individuationis (for a fuller discussion of this historical context, see Howard 1997).

A final question one wants to ask is: “What does any of this have to do with realism?” One might grant Einstein’s point that a real ontology requires a principle of individuation without agreeing that separability provides the only conceivable such principle. Separability together with the invariance of the infinitesimal metric interval implies that, in a general relativistic spacetime, there are joints everywhere, meaning that we can carve up the universe in any way we choose and still have ontically independent parts. But quantum entanglement can be read as implying that this libertarian scheme of individuation does not work. Can quantum mechanics not be given a realistic interpretation? Many would say, “yes.” Einstein said, “no.”

There is much that is original in Einstein’s philosophy of science as described thus far. At the very least, he rearranged the bits and pieces of doctrine that he learned from others—Kant, Mach, Duhem, Poincaré, Schlick, and others—in a strikingly novel way. But Einstein’s most original contribution to twentieth-century philosophy of science lies elsewhere, in his distinction between what he termed “principle theories” and “constructive theories.”

This idea first found its way into print in a brief 1919 article in the Times of London (Einstein 1919). A constructive theory, as the name implies, provides a constructive model for the phenomena of interest. An example would be kinetic theory. A principle theory consists of a set of individually well-confirmed, high-level empirical generalizations, “which permit of precise formulation” (Einstein 1914, 749). Examples include the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Ultimate understanding requires a constructive theory, but often, says Einstein, progress in theory is impeded by premature attempts at developing constructive theories in the absence of sufficient constraints by means of which to narrow the range of possible constructive theories. It is the function of principle theories to provide such constraint, and progress is often best achieved by focusing first on the establishment of such principles. According to Einstein, that is how he achieved his breakthrough with the theory of relativity, which, he says, is a principle theory, its two principles being the relativity principle and the light principle.

While the principle theories-constructive theories distinction first made its way into print in 1919, there is considerable evidence that it played an explicit role in Einstein’s thinking much earlier (Einstein 1907, Einstein to Sommerfeld 14 January 1908, CPAE, vol. 5, Doc. 73, Einstein 1914). Nor was it only the relativity and light principles that served Einstein as constraints in his theorizing. Thus, he explicitly mentions also the Boltzmann principle, \(S = k \log W\), as another such:

This equation connects thermodynamics with the molecular theory. It yields, as well, the statistical probabilities of the states of systems for which we are not in a position to construct a molecular-theoretical model. To that extent, Boltzmann’s magnificent idea is of significance for theoretical physics … because it provides a heuristic principle whose range extends beyond the domain of validity of molecular mechanics. (Einstein 1915, p. 262).

Einstein is here alluding the famous entropic analogy whereby, in his 1905 photon hypothesis paper, he reasoned from the fact that black body radiation in the Wien regime satisfied the Boltzmann principle to the conclusion that, in that regime, radiation behaved as if it consisted of mutually independent, corpuscle-like quanta of electromagnetic energy. The quantum hypothesis is a constructive model of radiation; the Boltzmann principle is the constraint that first suggested that model.

There are anticipations of the principle theories-constructive theories distinction in the nineteenth-century electrodynamics literature, James Clerk Maxwell, in particular, being a source from which Einstein might well have drawn (see Harman 1998). At the turn of the century, the “physics of principles” was a subject under wide discussion. At the turn of 1900, Hendrik A. Lorentz (Lorentz 1900, 1905; see Frisch 2005) and Henri Poincaré (for example, Poincaré 1904; see, Giedymin 1982, Darrigol 1995) presented the opposition between the “physics of principles“ and the “physics of models“ as commonplace. In a similar vein, Arnold Sommerfeld opposed a “physics of problems“, a style of doing physics based on concrete puzzle solving, to the “practice of principles“ defended by Max Planck (Seth 2010). Philipp Frank (1908, relying on Rey 1909) defined relativity theory as a “ conceptual theory“ based on abstract, but empirically well confirmed principles rather than on intuitive models. Probably many other examples could be find. . But however extensive his borrowings (no explicit debt was ever acknowledged), in Einstein’s hands the distinction becomes a methodological tool of impressive scope and fertility. What is puzzling, and even a bit sad, is that this most original methodological insight of Einstein’s had comparatively little impact on later philosophy of science or practice in physics. Only in recent decades, Einstein constructive-principle distinction has attracted interest in the philosophical literature, originating a still living philosophical debate on the foundation of spacetime theories (Brown 2005, Janssen 2009, Lange 2014). [ 4 ]

Einstein’s influence on twentieth-century philosophy of science is comparable to his influence on twentieth-century physics (Howard 2014). What made that possible? One explanation looks to the institutional and disciplinary history of theoretical physics and the philosophy of science. Each was, in its own domain, a new mode of thought in the latter nineteenth century, and each finally began to secure for itself a solid institutional basis in the early twentieth century. In a curious way, the two movements helped one another. Philosophers of science helped to legitimate theoretical physics by locating the significant cognitive content of science in its theories. Theoretical physicists helped to legitimate the philosophy of science by providing for analysis a subject matter that was radically reshaping our understanding of nature and the place of humankind within it. In some cases the help was even more direct, as with the work of Einstein and Max Planck in the mid-1920s to create in the physics department at the University of Berlin a chair in the philosophy of science for Reichenbach (see Hecht and Hartmann 1982). And we should remember the example of the physicists Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann who were the first two occupants of the new chair for the philosophy of science at the University of Vienna at the turn of the century.

Another explanation looks to the education of young physicists in Einstein’s day. Not only was Einstein’s own youthful reading heavily focused on philosophy, more generally, and the philosophy of science, in particular (for an overview, see Einstein 1989, xxiv–xxv; see also Howard 1994b), in which respect he was not unlike other physicists of his generation, but also his university physics curriculum included a required course on “The Theory of Scientific Thought” (see Einstein 1987, Doc. 28). An obvious question is whether or not the early cultivation of a philosophical habit of mind made a difference in the way Einstein and his contemporaries approached physics. As indicated by his November 1944 letter to Robert Thorton quoted at the beginning of this article, Einstein thought that it did.

Einstein’s letters and manuscripts, if unpublished, are cited by their numbers in the Einstein Archive (EA) control index and, if published, by volume, document number, and, if necessary, page number in:

Works by year

• Born, Max, 1949. Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Brown, Harvey R., 2005. Physical Relativity. Space-time Structure from a Dynamical Perspective , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• ––– (ed.), 1969. Albert Einstein-Hedwig und Max Born: Friefwechsel, 1916–1955 , Munich: Nymphenburger.
• Canales, Jimena, 2015. Einstein, Bergson and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Carnap, Rudolf, 1928. Der logische Aufbau der Welt , Berlin-Schlachtensee: Weltkreis-Verlag; English translation: The Logical Structure of the World & Psuedoproblems in Philosophy , Rolf A. George (trans.), Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969.
• Darrigol, Olivier, 1995. “Henri Poincaré’s Criticism of fin de siécle Electrodynamics”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics), 26 (1): 1–44.
• Duhem, Pierre, 1906. La Théorie physique: son objet et sa structure , Paris: Chevalier & Rivière. English translation of the 2nd. ed. (1914): The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory , P. P. Wiener (trans.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954; reprinted, New York: Athaneum, 1962.
• –––, 1908. Ziel und Struktur der physikalischen Theorien , Friedrich Adler (trans.), foreword by Ernst Mach, Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth.
• Elsbach, Alfred, 1924. Kant und Einstein. Untersuchungen über das Verhältnis der modernen Erkenntnistheorie zur Relativitätstheorie , Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter.
• Engler, Fynn Ole and Jürgen Renn, 2013. “Hume, Einstein und Schlick über die Objektivität der Wissenschaft”, in Moritz Schlick–Die Rostocker Jahre und ihr Einfluss auf die Wiener Zeit , Fynn Ole Engler and Mathias Iven (eds.), Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 123–156.
• Fine, Arthur, 1986. “Einstein’s Realism”, in The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism, and the Quantum Theory , Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 86–111.
• Frank, Philipp, 1909. “Die Stellung Des Relativitätsprinzips Im System Der Mechanik Und Der Elektrodynamik” Sitzungsberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften 118 (IIa), 373–446.
• Friedman, Michael, 1983. Foundations of Space-Time Theories: Relativistic Physics and Philosophy of Science , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Frisch, Mathias, 2005. “Mechanisms, Principles, and Lorentz’s Cautious Realism”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics), 36: 659–679.
• Giedymin, Jerzy, 1982. “The Physics of the Principles and Its Philosophy: Hamilton, Poincaré and Ramsey”, in Science and Convention: Essays on Henri Poincaré’s Philosophy of Science and the Conventionalist Tradition , Oxford: Pergamon, 42–89.
• Giovanelli, Marco, 2013. “Erich Kretschmann as a Proto-Logical-Empiricist. Adventures and Misadventures of the Point-Coincidence Argument”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics , 44 (2), 115–134.
• –––, 2013. “Talking at Cross-Purposes. How Einstein and the Logical Empiricists never Agreed on what they were Disagreeing About”, Synthese 190 (17): 3819–3863.
• –––, 2014. “‘But One Must Not Legalize the Mentioned Sin’. Phenomenological vs. Dynamical Treatments of Rods and Clocks in Einstein’s Thought”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics), 48: 20–44.
• –––, 2016. “‘…But I StillCan’t Get Rid of a Sense of Artificiality’: The Einstein-Reichenbach Debate on the Geometrization of the Electromagnetic Field”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics , 54, 35–51.
• –––, 2018. “Physics Is a Kind of Metaphysics”, Émile Meyerson and Einstein’s late Rationalistic Realism”, European Journal for Philosophy of Science , 8: 783–829
• Harman, P. M., 1998. The Natural Philosophy of James Clerk Maxwell , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hecht, Hartmut and Hoffmann, Dieter, 1982. “Die Berufung Hans Reichenbachs an die Berliner Universität”, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 30: 651–662.
• Holton, Gerald, 1968. “Mach, Einstein, and the Search for Reality”, Daedalus 97: 636–673. Reprinted in Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973, 219–259.
• Howard, Don, 1984. “Realism and Conventionalism in Einstein’s Philosophy of Science: The Einstein-Schlick Correspondence”, Philosophia Naturalis 21: 618–629.
• –––, 1985. “Einstein on Locality and Separability”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 16: 171–201.
• –––, 1989. “Holism, Separability, and the Metaphysical Implications of the Bell Experiments”, in Philosophical Consequences of Quantum Theory: Reflections on Bell’s Theorem , James T. Cushing and Ernan McMullin (eds.), Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 224–253.
• –––, 1990a. “Einstein and Duhem”, Synthese 83: 363–384.
• –––, 1990b. “’Nicht sein kann was nicht sein darf,’ or the Prehistory of EPR, 1909–1935: Einstein’s Early Worries about the Quantum Mechanics of Composite Systems”, in Sixty-Two Years of Uncertainty: Historical, Philosophical, and Physical Inquiries into the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics , Proceedings of the 1989 Conference, “Ettore Majorana” Centre for Scientific Culture, International School of History of Science, Erice, Italy, 5–14 August. Arthur Miller, ed. New York: Plenum, 61–111.
• –––, 1992. “Einstein and Eindeutigkeit: A Neglected Theme in the Philosophical Background to General Relativity”, in Jean Eisenstaedt and A. J. Kox (eds.), Studies in the History of General Relativity (Einstein Studies: Volume 3), Boston: Birkhäuser, 154–243.
• –––, 1993. “Was Einstein Really a Realist?” Perspectives on Science: Historical, Philosophical, Social 1: 204–251.
• –––, 1994a. “Einstein, Kant, and the Origins of Logical Empiricism”, in Language, Logic, and the Structure of Scientific Theories (Proceedings of the Carnap-Reichenbach Centennial, University of Konstanz, 21–24 May 1991), Wesley Salmon and Gereon Wolters (eds.), Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press; Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 45–105.
• –––, 1994b. “’A kind of vessel in which the struggle for eternal truth is played out’-Albert Einstein and the Role of Personality in Science”, in The Natural History of Paradigms: Science and the Process of Intellectual Evolution , John H. Langdon and Mary E. McGann (eds.), Indianapolis: University of Indianapolis Press, 1994, 111–138.
• –––, 1996. “Relativity, Eindeutigkeit, and Monomorphism: Rudolf Carnap and the Development of the Categoricity Concept in Formal Semantics”, in Origins of Logical Empiricism (Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume 16), Ronald N. Giere and Alan Richardson (eds.), Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 115–164.
• –––, 1997. “A Peek behind the Veil of Maya: Einstein, Schopenhauer, and the Historical Background of the Conception of Space as a Ground for the Individuation of Physical Systems”, in The Cosmos of Science: Essays of Exploration (Pittsburgh-Konstanz Series in the Philosophy and History of Science, Volume 6), John Earman and John D. Norton, (eds.), Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press; Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 87–150.
• –––, 1998. “Astride the Divided Line: Platonism, Empiricism, and Einstein’s Epistemological Opportunism”, in Idealization in Contemporary Physics (Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities: Volume 63), Niall Shanks (ed.), Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 143–163.
• –––, 1999. “Point Coincidences and Pointer Coincidences: Einstein on Invariant Structure in Spacetime Theories”, in History of General Relativity IV: The Expanding Worlds of General Relativity (Based upon the Fourth International Conference, Berlin, Germany 31 July-3 August 1995), Hubert Goenner, Jürgen Renn, Jim Ritter, and Tilman Sauer (eds.), Boston: Birkhäuser, 463–500.
• –––, 2014. “Einstein and the Development of Twentieth-century Philosophy of Science”, in The Cambridge Companion to Einstein , Michel Janssen and Christoph Lehner (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 354–376.
• Howard, Don and Norton, John, 1993. “Out of the Labyrinth? Einstein, Hertz, and the Göttingen Answer to the Hole Argument”, in The Attraction of Gravitation. New Studies in the History of General Relativity (Einstein Studies: Volume 5), John Earman, Michel Jannsen, and John Norton (eds.),Boston: Birkhäuser, 30–62.
• Howard, Don and Stachel, John (eds.), 1989. Einstein and the History of General Relativity (Einstein Studies: Volume 1), Boston: Birkhäuser.
• Janssen, Michel, 2009. “Drawing the Line between Kinematics and Dynamics in Special Relativity”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics , 40 (1), 26–52.
• Janssen, Michel and Jürgen Renn, 2007. “Untying the Knot. How Einstein Found His Way Back to Field Equations Discarded in the Zurich Notebook”, in: The Genesis of General Relativity Jürgen Renn et al. (eds.), 4 volumes, Dordrecht: Springer 839–925.
• Lange, Marc, 2014. “Did Einstein Really Believe That Principle Theories Are Explanatorily Powerless?”, Perspectives on Science 22 (4), 449–63.
• Lehmkuhl, Dennis, 2014. “Why Einstein Did Not Believe That General Relativity Geometrizes Gravity”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics ,, 46: 316–326.
• Le Roy, Édouard, 1901. “Un positivisme nouveau”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 9: 138–153.
• Lorentz, Hendrik Antoon, 1900. “Electromagnetische theorieën van natuurkundige verschijnselen” Jaarboek der Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden , Bijlagen; repr. in Leiden: Brill 1900; German translation in Physikalische Zeitschrift , 1 (1900): 498–501, 514–519.
• –––, 1905. “La thermodynamique et les théories cinétiques.“ Bulletin des séances de la Société française de physique , 35–63.
• Mach, Ernst, 1886. Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen , Jena: Gustav Fischer.
• –––, 1897. Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwickelung historisch-kritisch dargestellt , 3rd impr. and enl. ed. Leipzig: Brockhaus.
• –––, 1900. Die Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältniss des Physischen zum Psychischen , 2nd edition of Mach 1886, Jena: Gustav Fischer; English translation of the 5th edition of 1906, The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical , Cora May Williams and Sydney Waterlow, trans. Chicago and London: Open Court, 1914. Reprint: New York: Dover, 1959.
• –––, 1906. Erkenntnis und Irrtum. Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung , 2nd ed. Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth; English translation, Knowledge and Error: Sketches on the Psychology of Enquiry , Thomas J. McCormack and Paul Foulkes, (trans.), Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel, 1976.
• Meyerson, Émile, Meyerson, 1925. La déduction relativiste , Paris: Payot; Eng. tr. Meyerson 1985.
• –––, 1985. The Relativistic Deduction.Epistemological Implications of the Theory of Relativity , Eng. tr. by David A. and Mary-Alice Sipfle, Dordrecht: Reidel.
• Norton, John, 1984. “How Einstein Found His Field Equations”, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 14: 253–316. Reprinted in Howard and Stachel 1989, 101–159.
• –––, 2000. “’Nature is the Realisation of the Simplest Conceivable Mathematical Ideas’: Einstein and the Canon of Mathematical Simplicity”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 31B: 135–170.
• Petzoldt, Joseph, 1895. “Das Gesetz der Eindeutigkeit”, Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie und Soziologie 19: 146–203.
• Poincaré, Henri, 1901. “Sur les Principes de la Mecanique”, Bibliotheque du Congrès Internationale de Philosophie , Sec. 3, Logique et Histoire des Sciences , Paris: A. Colin. Reprinted as: “La Mécanique classique”, in La Science et l’Hypothese , Paris: Flammarion, 1902, 110–134; English translation: “The Classical Mechanics”, n Science and Hypothesis , W. J. Greenstreet (trans.), London and New York: Walter Scott, 1905, 89–110. Reprint: New York: Dover, 1952.
• –––, 1904. “The Principles of Mathematical Physics”, in Congress of Arts and Science, Universal Exposition, St. Louis, 1904 ( Philosophy and Mathematics : Volume 1), Howard J. Rogers, (ed.), Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1905, 604–622.
• Quine, Willard van Orman, 1951. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, Philosophical Review , 60: 20–43; reprinted in From a Logical Point of View , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953, 20–46.
• Reichenbach, Hans, 1920. Relativitätstheorie und Erkenntnis Apriori , Berlin: Julius Springer; English translation: The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge , Maria Reichenbach (trans. and ed.), Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965.
• –––, 1924. Axiomatik der relativistischen Raum-Zeit-Lehre ( Die Wissenschaft : Volume 72), Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn; English translation: Axiomatization of the Theory of Relativity , Maria Reichenbach (trans.), Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969.
• –––, 1928. Philosophie der Raum-Zeit-Lehre , Berlin: Julius Springer; English translation, The Philosophy of Space & Time , Maria Reichenbach and John Freund (trans.), New York: Dover, 1957.
• –––, 1949. “The Philosophical Significance of the Theory of Relativity”, in Schilpp 1949, 289–311.
• Rey, Abel, 1907. La théorie de la physique chez les physiciens contemporains , Paris: Alcan.
• –––, 1908. Die Theorie der Physik bei den modernen Physikern , Ger. tr. of Rey 1907, by Rudolf Eisler. Leipzig: Klinkhardt.
• Ryckman, Thomas, 2005. The Reign of Relativity. Philosophy in Physics 1915–1925 , Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2017. Einstein , New York: Routledge.
• Sauer,Tilman, 2014. “Einstein’s Unified field Theory Program” in The Cambridge Companion to Einstein , Michel Janssen and Christoph Lehner (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 281;–305.
• Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.), 1949. Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (The Library of Living Philosophers: Volume 7), Evanston, IL: The Library of Living Philosophers.
• Schlick, Moritz, 1910. “Das Wesen der Wahrheit nach der modernen Logik”, Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie und Soziologie 34: 386–477; English translation, “The Nature of Truth in Modern Logic”, in Schlick 1979, vol. 1, 41–103.
• –––, 1915. “Die philosophische Bedeutung des Relativitätsprinzips”, Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 159: 129–175. English translation: “The Philosophical Significance of the Principle of Relativity”, in Schlick 1979, vol. 1, 153–189.
• –––, 1917. Raum und Zeit in den gegenwärtigen Physik. Zur Einführung in das Verständnis der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie , Berlin: Julius Springer; English translation of the 3rd edition, Space and Time in Contemporary Physics: An Introduction to the Theory of Relativity and Gravitation , Henry L. Brose (trans.), London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1920; reprinted in Schlick 1979, vol. 1, 207–269.
• –––, 1921. “Kritizistische oder empiristische Deutung der neuen Physik”, Kant-Studien 26: 96–111. English translation: “Critical or Empiricist Interpretation of Modern Physics”, in Schlick 1979, vol. 1, 322–334.
• –––, 1979. Philosophical Papers , 2 volumes, Henk L. Mulder and Barbara F. B. van de Velde-Schlick (eds.), Peter Heath (trans.), Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel.
• Seth, Suman, 2010. Crafting the Quantum , Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Stachel, John, 1980. “Einstein’s Search for General Covariance, 1912–1915” (paper delivered at the Ninth International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation, Jena, Germany (DDR), 17 July 1980), in Howard and Stachel 1989, 63–100.
• Study, Eduard, 1914. Die realistische Weltansicht und die Lehre vom Raume. Geometrie, Anschauung und Erfahrung ( Die Wissenschaft : Volume 54), Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn.
• van Dongen, Jeroen, 2002. Einstein’s Unification: General Relativity and the Quest for Mathematical Naturalness , Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Amsterdam.
• –––, 2010. Einstein’s Unification , Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press

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This I Believe

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Albert Einstein

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Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity in 1916, profoundly affecting the study of physics and cosmology for years. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his work on the photo-electric effect. Einstein taught for many years at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Yousef Karsh hide caption

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NPR's Robert Krulwich reads Albert Einstein's This I Believe essay, which first aired circa 1954.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the Mysterious — the knowledge of the existence of something unfathomable to us, the manifestation of the most profound reason coupled with the most brilliant beauty. I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, or who has a will of the kind we experience in ourselves. I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with the awareness of — and glimpse into — the marvelous construction of the existing world together with the steadfast determination to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature. This is the basis of cosmic religiosity, and it appears to me that the most important function of art and science is to awaken this feeling among the receptive and keep it alive.

I sense that it is not the State that has intrinsic value in the machinery of humankind, but rather the creative, feeling individual, the personality alone that creates the noble and sublime.

Man's ethical behavior should be effectively grounded on compassion, nurture and social bonds. What is moral is not the divine, but rather a purely human matter, albeit the most important of all human matters. In the course of history, the ideals pertaining to human beings' behavior towards each other and pertaining to the preferred organization of their communities have been espoused and taught by enlightened individuals. These ideals and convictions — results of historical experience, empathy and the need for beauty and harmony — have usually been willingly recognized by human beings, at least in theory.

The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us westerners in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal: free and responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind.

The pursuit of recognition for their own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice and the quest for personal independence form the traditional themes of the Jewish people, of which I am a member.

But if one holds these high principles clearly before one's eyes and compares them with the life and spirit of our times, then it is glaringly apparent that mankind finds itself at present in grave danger. I see the nature of the current crises in the juxtaposition of the individual to society. The individual feels more than ever dependent on society, but he feels this dependence not in the positive sense — cradled, connected as part of an organic whole. He sees it as a threat to his natural rights and even his economic existence. His position in society, then, is such that that which drives his ego is encouraged and developed, and that which would drive him toward other men (a weak impulse to begin with) is left to atrophy.

It is my belief that there is only one way to eliminate these evils, namely, the establishment of a planned economy coupled with an education geared towards social goals. Alongside the development of individual abilities, the education of the individual aspires to revive an ideal that is geared towards the service of our fellow man, and that needs to take the place of the glorification of power and outer success.

Translation by David Domine. Essay courtesy of the Albert Einstein Archives at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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Essay on Albert Einstein: The Father of Modern Physics

• Updated on  
• Nov 30, 2023

Science is a vast field in which thousands of scientists contributed to exploring and discovering new theories. One of the most renowned and influential scientists is Albert Einstein . He was a German theoretical physicist popularly known as the “ Father of Modern Physics ”. Albert Einstein was born on 14 March 1879 and devoted his life to studying physics. He is famous for the theory of relativity which explains the effect of speed on mass, time, and space. He included the speed of light in the formula of the theory of relativity. Stay tuned and read this article to get a sample essay on Albert Einstein and learn more about his life and contributions to the field of physics!

Table of Contents

• 1 Short Essay on Albert Einstein in 100 Words
• 2 Essay on Albert Einstein in 150 Words
• 3 Essay on Albert Einstein in 300 Words

Also Read: Greatest Scientist of All Times

Short Essay on Albert Einstein in 100 Words

Albert Einstein is the greatest scientist in the world. His theories are still studied in all the academic institutions. He laid the foundation of Modern physics through his famous discoveries. Albert Einstein was born on 14 March 1879 in Ulm. His family ran a shop there and his father Herman Einstein wanted him to run a business but he was strongly inclined and fascinated by the science.

His family shifted from Munich to Milan in 1890, where Einstein received Technical High School Education. At school, he used to have fights with the authority because of the teaching pattern. He believed that due to strict rules and teaching patterns, students could not think creatively and their growth could have been improved. Due to this behavior, he left the academic institutions without the completion of his degree many times. 

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Essay on Albert Einstein in 150 Words

Albert Einstein was an intelligent person. At the age of 12 he started learning Calculus on his own and in no less than 2 years he mastered the concepts of Integral and Differential Calculus. Post completion of his degree in engineering, he got a job in the Swiss Patent Office in 1902. He worked there as a patent clerk and devoted most of his time to theoretical physics. Along with work he also finished his Postdoctoral degree and became a professor at the University of Zurich . 

In 1905, Albert Einstein published 4 papers that had a revolutionary impact on the history of physics, that are Brownian motion, special relativity, photoelectric effect, and equivalence of mass and energy. The famous theory of relativity is referred to as the E=mc 2 equation.

His theory of relativity was used in making the atomic bomb that was dropped on Japan. However, Albert Einstein was against violence and war. He proposed a new theory of relativity which neglects the relativity rules formulated by Isaac Newton.

According to the new Einstein theory of relativity, light and time are not constant. He proposed that time travel can be done if we follow the speed of light. Although, no spacecraft has been designed to date which can travel with the speed of light.

Also Read: How to Become a Physicist in India?

Essay on Albert Einstein in 300 Words

Albert Einstein, the famous and most influential scientist of the 19th century revolutionized the understanding of space, time, energy, and mass. His equation of relativity E=mc 2 equation has a great impact on the development of nuclear science .

He was born in Ulm and devoted his entire life to studying and exploring science. During his childhood, he faced some difficulty in understanding languages and it is believed that he suffered from dyslexia.  

He developed a strong inclination toward science after his father gifted him a compass whose magnetic needle pointed toward the North.

When he was in college, he used to oppose the way of teaching and was suspended from the institute many times. He believed that strict rules and regulations restrict the thinking ability of the students which kills creativity.

In 1905, he completed his PhD degree from the University of Zurich. Initially, he worked as a Patent clerk in Bern Switzerland, and later became a professor.

He made several discoveries and published 4 papers in the journal Annalen der Physik. His papers marked a revolution in Modern Physics. In 1921, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for photoelectric effect. 

His most famous work is the Theory of Relativity. This theory explains about the connection between space and time and how gravity is caused by the curvature of spacetime. It has applications in the fields of particle physics, cosmology, and astronomy.

In 1515, Albert Einstein proposed the General theory of relativity which is a complete version of the theory of relativity he made some modifications, and this theory has its proof through the results obtained from many experiments. 

Brownian motion is also one of the discoveries made by Albert Einstein which tells about the random motion of particles in the fluid. 

Albert Einstein was one of the four signatories who were against World War II. He was against Nazis and opposed Hitler in Germany. Due to this, he had to emigrate to the United States in 1933. 

He died on 18 April 1955 in Princeton, New Jersey, and worked till his last time. His discoveries have a great impact on the world today. The theories he proposed is still taught in academic institution and he is remembered as the greatest scientist of all time. 

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Ans: Albert Einstein, the famous physicist who gave the famous theory of relativity, and the photoelectric effect won the Nobel Prize in 1921 for Physics. He was awarded the prize, especially for the photoelectric effect. Einstein had inspired the entire world to think creatively and follow the lead to discover something new.

Ans: Albert Einstein was a German theoretical physicist who was born on 14 March 1879 in Ulm, Germany . He proposed the famous theory of relativity and the theory of photoelectric effect. Einstein started working as a patent clerk and initially after completing PhD became a Professor at the University of Zurich. In 1921, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. 

Ans: 10 facts about Albert Einstein: -Albert Einstein was born in 1879 in Germany but lived in Italy, Switzerland and Czechia. Later he moved to the US due to World War II . -He built a strong inclination towards science after receiving a compass as a gift from his father. -In his childhood, he faced difficulty with understanding languages.  -Albert Einstein suffered from dyslexia but overcame it and made some of the famous discoveries in science.  -At the age of 16, he wrote his first scholarly paper that explained magnetism. -He published 4 papers in 1905. -Einstein won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. -In 1933, he shifted to the US, in Princeton, New Jersey because of the World War II condition. -Hitler was against Einstein, and the Nazis seized power in Germany. -Albert Einstein worked till his last breath and died at the age of 76 on 18 April 1955.

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History allbert einstein: the gentle touch of genius.

In 1944, shortly before I came to Princeton as a photographer with the University, I was driving along Mercer Street at dusk when half-way down the block, at street level, I saw a bodiless head—just two arms out-stretched and a strangely familiar mop of shaggy white hair. Acting on professional instinct, I jumped out of the car, camera in hand, and snapped a picture. Only then did I hear the croaking sounds he was making, and see the strained expression on his face. I rushed over, grabbed him under the arms, and hauled out one of the greatest scientists the world has ever known. Albert Einstein had fallen down an open manhole.

Off and on for the next 11 years of our curious association, Professor Einstein reminded me of my promise about the manhole picture. It got to be a kind of joke between us; but I could never bring myself to tell him that the last laugh was on me. I was ashamed to—partly, I think, because of old Pow Edwards, a geometry teacher who had made me feel a hopeless failure when I was a schoolboy back in England. At my age, I didn’t want to be tagged a dunce all over again, and I was still leary of mathematicians.

I was appalled. This was to be an official birthday portrait. I wondered why, since he hadn’t done anything about the rest of his face, he had bothered to shave. I could hardly suggest that he spruce himself up for my camera, though on several occasions later I did try surreptitiously to brush his hair back behind his ears—accidentally, as it were, while arranging the lights behind his chair. But the unruly swatch always sprang forward again with a stubbornness of its own.

I gave up on his hair, but his feet continued to bother me. I am an Englishman by birth, with perhaps too rigid ideas about proper apparel—and Professor Einstein seldom wore socks. Though I tried taking all his pictures from the knees or waist up, it was difficult to keep my eyes off those bare ankles. I even considered sending him an anonymous gift of a pair of socks, thought that would have been not only insulting but useless.

Once when I brought him a dozen extra prints of a particularly good portrait to give to his friends, he flipped through them, then shoved the whole batch aside. “I hate my pictures,” he said. “Look at my face. If it wasn’t for this,” he added, clapping his hands over his mustache in mock despair, “I’d look like a vooman .”

On another occasion, when a young couple at whose wedding he had been best man brought their son—a little boy of 18 months—to meet him, the child took one look and burst into a screaming fit. The parents were speechless with embarrassment, but Einstein’s eyes lighted up. He smiled approvingly, patted the youngster on the top of his head, and crooned: “You’re the first person in years who has told me what you really think of me.”

I was convinced that it would be extremely difficult to keep the cooperation of a man with so little vanity. At the same time I kept expecting him to change into my private notion of the way a world genius should be—proud, brilliantly erudite, perhaps somewhat impatient with men of lesser intellect.

But he didn’t change. Instead, I think he changed me a little. Gradually I lost my awe of him. So much so that one day I blurted: “Professor Einstein, why don’t you wear socks?”

The way he said it—humorous, but sad too—made me realize that his sloppy sweat-shirt and uncombed hair and sockless shoes were somehow right for him. They truly reflected the humility of the man. If I’d taken his picture any other way I would have gotten my own image of how a great mathematician ought to look.

Thus Einstein taught me something about photography: that I must approach a subject with an open mind as well as an open shutter.

Besides humility, I began to sense another factor behind Einstein’s unkempt appearance: a profound simplicity that allowed him to ignore superficiality and go directly to the heart of things. Where most of us are like kites caught in the branches, entangled with our concerns for such things as comfort, success, the impression we are making on others, Einstein’s mind soared free. I doubt that he even knew what he ate. Certainly, he didn’t watch where he walked, of he wouldn’t have fallen down that manhole. Once when some company had sent him a very sizeable consulting fee, he used the check for a bookmark and lost the book.

I remember the afternoon that I watched helplessly as a newspaper photographer rudely backed him off the sidewalk and into the bushes, taking pictures and firing impertinent questions. When I told Einstein how mortified I was that any professional colleague of mine should behave that way he said, “Oh, I don’t pay any attention to those things. Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.”

Another time he was at his desk when I entered his study, feverishly jotting in his notebook, not even aware that there was a cut on his face and that two bright streams of blood were running down his check. I was so alarmed that I interrupted to suggest that he put on a bandage. He muttered, “It’s not a matter,” and went on writing.

What struck me was that he automatically ignored the trivial, whether it happened to be a stranger’s rudeness or a cut on the cheek. He simplified his concerns in order to spend his brain wisely. But it wasn’t just a matter of withdrawing, or being “absent-minded-professorish.” For this same uncluttered attitude allowed him to speak directly with unaffected kindness and respect to every human being he met, child or adult, ignoring externals.

One afternoon a little girl of about seven, who also lived on Mercer Street in Princeton, rang Dr. Einstein’s doorbell and asked to see him. Miss Dukas said it would be impossible to disturb the professor. Just then Einstein happened to come down the front stairs. When he asked the youngster what she wanted, she took a hand from behind her back and offered him a sticky square of fudge which she said she has made herself. Einstein thanked her and ate the candy, whereupon she pulled the other hand from behind her back, showed him her arithmetic homework, and asked for help. He took her on his knee, explained that he couldn’t help her, that it would be unfair both to her teacher and to herself. Then he sent her off with a few cookies, to balance the non-returnable candy gift.

The gentle touch of his genius quickened my own life as it must have that little girl’s, and so many others with whom he had even the slightest contact. It would be silly to claim that Einstein and I ever became friends. Now and then he would call me “Hans”—names, like appearances, were unimportant to him. But he always knew who I was, and sometimes he would stroke my arm, delighted to see me. I think he liked and trusted me. It made me feel almost protective about him; yet so direct and compassionate was his perception, I felt that he understood more about me than I did myself.

One morning in his study at the Institute for Advanced Study, after a tiring picture session, I caught sight of his blackboard, covered with little chalk hieroglyphs. I don’t know why, but for the first time the mathematical equations seemed to mock me. I stood glazing at them blankly, then the chalk marks went blurry and I shut my eyes. For that fraction of a second I was being kept after class and Pow Edwards was standing just behind me, glowering, knowing perfectly well I was stumped, all ready to call me stupid.

I shook my head and turned around. Instead of Pow Edwards, there was Albert Einstein, quietly watching me. “Professor,” I said, with an attempt at flipness, “You and I are opposite poles — you’re the world’s best mathematician, and I’m the world’s worst.”

What he said was not only intimate and kind, but so true that it was uncanny. For a moment I was stunned by the thought that this mathematical genius should be the only person who ever suggested that it might not have been my fault entirely; that I might not have been so stupid after all. Through the most direct kind of illumination, he had dispelled a dark cloud that had followed me for 30 years. And he hadn’t even called me by my right name.

It was then, I think, that I first made the connection between those equations on the blackboard and his several kinds of simplicity: the uncluttered quality of his vision; the directness of his perceptions; his disregard for appearances and material trivia. His famous Theory of Relativity, which altered all our ideas about the universe and led to the splitting of the atom, was a product of insight rather than of complex computation. He arrived at it almost completely by himself. He was not part of a collective laboratory effort. He had only his own mind, working with pencil and paper, chalk and blackboard, and humble patience, piercing through the surface incidentals to the underlying principles.

There is no record to show that he observed any particular liturgy or recognized any particular dogma, yet I too had the feeling that he was a devout man. “The Lord is sophisticated, but not malicious,” are words inscribed in German on the mantelpiece in one of the mathematical rooms in Princeton’s Fine Hall. Those were the words of Albert Einstein.

There were fewer people at his funeral than at his birth. The world of science and many laymen would have jammed the road to his place of the rest had there been such a spot. But his wish was granted—there is no cemetery, no shrine, no marker, no urn. Albert Einstein has only one monument—his work.

This was originally published in the March 17, 1964 issue of PAW.

Albert Einstein: The Life of a Genius Essay (Biography)

Albert Einstein is arguably one of the most influential individuals in the modern world. He played a role in the development and physics, and also dabbled with the politics of his day-even though at a small scale level. During the period around the First World War, Einstein was among the individuals that were against the usage of violence in resolution of conflicts. This was one of the ethical standpoints that have made him receive credence, years after his death.

Albert Einstein was born in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879 (Meltzer 2). Less than two months after his birth his family relocated to Munich where he started his education. As years passed by, Einstein and his family again relocated, this time to Switzerland, where the young Albert gained a diploma in physics and mathematics (Lakin 20). After his graduation, Einstein tried to find a job as a teacher but instead landed a position in Switzerland’s patent office (Frisch 12).

In 1905, at just 26, Einstein received a doctoral degree. It was during this period that he published most his remarkable theories. By 1911 he had been declared Professor Extraordinary and Professor of Theoretical Physics in different cities across Switzerland (Frisch 23). Einstein was fundamentally a pacifist when it came to conflict resolution and this was well manifested in the First World War.

During this time, 93 German professors supported a manifesto for the conduct of the nation in war, while Einstein and three other intellectuals gave their support to an anti-war counter manifesto (Calaprice and Lipscombe 121).

Einstein played a critical role in the establishment of a non-partisan coalition that fronted the idea of just piece and international cooperation in the prevention of wars in the future. During his stay in Switzerland, Einstein spent his days as a theoretical physicist but also dedicated some time to uniting the warring factions. He even once declared his stand thus:

“My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of men is disgusting. My attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred ” (Calaprice and Lipscombe 55.)

In 1914, he moved back to Germany where he stayed as a citizen for the next nineteen years, only to renounce his citizenship on political grounds. He moved the United States where he stayed for seven years before acquiring American Citizenship. In the meantime, he continued teaching Theoretical Physics at Princeton University.

After the Second World War, Albert Einstein was a key official in the World Government Movement. He was even accorded the presidency of Israel but he turned down the offer instead choosing to spearhead the establishment of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

When it came to science, Einstein had a proper knowledge of the challenges in the field and also had a well developed way of dealing with them. His was a methodological approach with clear-cut steps towards the attainment of the goal. According to Einstein, any of his achievements was merely seen as a stepping stone to even more achievements.

In his early professional years, Albert Einstein hypothesized that the right explanation of the special theory of relativity should also inform the theory of gravitation (McPherson 21). In 1916 he published his paper on the general theory of relativity (McPherson 26). It was around this period that he took time to find solutions to the challenges of the theory of radiation. In the 1920’s, Einstein started working on the unified field theories but still continued his work on the quantum theory (Calaprice and Lipscombe 92). By the time he was retiring, Einstein had made substantial achievements in relativistic cosmology and unification of basic concepts of Physics.

Owing to his accomplishments, Einstein was awarded several honorary doctorate degrees in various scientific fields by many European and American universities (Lakin 33-35). A number of prestigious societies also accorded him awards, most notably the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London in 1925 (Lakin 43). Because of his involvement in research, Einstein spent a lot of time in solitude and his only form of recreation was listening to music. In 1903, he got married and had two children before filing for a divorce sixteen years later only to marry his cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, who passed away in 1936 (Meachen 13). Einstein died in New Jersey, 19 years after Elsa’s death

Einstein’s theories survived the test of time primarily because of two reasons. One, because most of his work was based on the findings of scholars that became before him, and two because the field in which he was involved had no room for more advancement without scholars taking his findings into consideration.

His ethical views regarding the war have long been overshadowed by the entry of other more popular individuals, most of them being politicians. As a pacifist, his political views did not initially find popularity with the rulers of his time because most of them believed in national supremacy. As a matter of fact, most individuals dismissed his and his associate’s viewpoints as the ranting of mad scientists.

Various life lessons can be picked from how Einstein conducted himself. First is the commitment to one’s job. Most individuals always complain of how bad their current job is without even making an effort to attain their best in what they do. For instance, with the global boundaries becoming more and more irrelevant owing to increasing international migration, the United States is gradually becoming multicultural. Individuals from all over the world have over time appreciated the United States as the land of opportunity.

Hence, most persons ranging from professionals to unskilled individuals are looking for ways to gain an entry into America where they earnings are thought to be better than in other regions around the world.

The search for jobs and better livelihoods has resulted in an increased diversification of the American workforce which in turn calls for institutions to adopt and develop strategies for strengthening the relationship between individuals of varied socio-cultural backgrounds. What most individuals fail to notice, is that if they commit themselves to what they are good at, they can end up making notable achievements in their lives.

Another ethical lesson that can be picked from Einstein’s life is his belief in peaceful resolution of national and international conflicts. This is something that Einstein directly linked to leadership whereby leadership is the definite role assigned to each and every president/country.

The most common and wrong presumption by most presidents is that since their job title puts them in a position of leadership, the individuals who work under them will automatically be subject to their every word. In actual sense, however, the title presidency is not necessarily directly linked to leadership.

Einstein believed in proper communication among communities as a way of reaching amicable solutions to disagreements. Community communication is the practice of sharing information amongst individual of a given society. Communication has always been hailed as one of the key unifiers of members of particular communities. The easier it is for individuals to share what is in their minds, the easier it is for them to relate with one another.

Communication as a social aspect is multi faceted in the sense that it comprises various different aspects working both independently and in conjunction with other components to maintain a harmonious understanding between parties. In most societies around the world business is regarded as the mainstay. All activities within a given community generally tend to be under the influence of economic activities both directly and indirectly.

In order for effectiveness to be achieved in leadership, the person in charge must constantly ensure that his/her influence to the people subordinate to him/her is always positive and intended to achieve the unique goals of the country. Furthermore, and in line with Einstein’s beliefs, it has been proven that the leadership style adopted can make people in governmental control either excellent or terrible leaders. In this regard, if the leaders of two nations are pacifiers, then there is a reduced likelihood of international wars.

Another trait that made Einstein a great person was his belief in giving everyone a chance to be heard. Good listenership has been given immense appreciation amongst the most successful communities in the world. The doctrines of these societies propose that for anyone to have a meaningful conversation and particularly in business, he or she must be in a position to take time and listen to what the other person is saying. It is quite unlikely that communication can occur if both of the parties involved talk at the same time.

Communication is a two way event that calls for one of the parties to stay quite and receive the message and then respond as the other party stays quiet. At national levels, if all the leaders sit down and agree to communicate sanely, then there is little likelihood of disagreements occurring on account of misunderstanding.

Einstein’s persona and ethical beliefs redefined the meaning of the word school as a place where people spend time with an aim of becoming more knowledgeable. According to him, it is in schools that students are exposed to basic political values particularly of their country as well as going through extensive studies of how political systems operate.

As a result, the students are able to come up with independent opinions regarding politics and the political elites. This is fundamentally the root of conservatism which has a number of assumptions. One of these sensible assumptions is the imperfection of the human nature. This is because human beings are inherently selfish and will generally be driven to act in ways that are only beneficial to them.

Human imperfection also reveals in the corruptible nature of persons. Another sensible assumption of conservatism, and which was also reflected in Einstein’s persona, is the belief that people basically get their individual identity from their nation and family.

This is practically true because the learning process demands that persons learn from the people closest to them as well as from their country of habitation. The traditionalism ideology based on the fact that institutions which have existed for long periods of time have most credibility also makes a lot of sense. This is a self-explanatory concept especially since it is well known that experience makes the best teacher.

Einstein also put strong emphasis on respect of the rule of law by citizens. This is a very sensible conservative assumption as it is by individuals observing established regulations and trusting the various arms of government to implement such regulations that stability can be obtained now and in the future.

Annotated Bibliography

Calaprice, Alice and Trevor Lipscombe. Albert Einstein: A biography. Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005. Print.

Selecting this book for research was practically easy owing to the usage of online library catalogues. The search word used was Einstein which was a straight forward choice and it listed this book as one of the favorite choices. The authors of this book recognize Einstein as one of the most recognizable scientists of all time. They however go on to point out that most people do not know much about Einstein’s life outside his profession.

This book provides a clear evaluation of his life beginning with his birth going all the way to his marriage and children. The authors, in this book, confirm that aside from being a genius, Einstein was just an average person with weaknesses. This is clearly presented in the way Einstein comfortably went through school only to fail to get a job, ending up as a government clerk.

His difficult marriages and family life as well as his use of his international acclaim to fight from world peace has also been given a critical review in the book. This book also carries a bibliography of publications that can be used to properly analyze Einstein’s life and this is one of the fundamental reasons as to why it was selected to inform the research.

Frisch, Aaron. Albert Einstein. Minnesota: The Creative Company, 2005. Print.

In this book, the author also looks at the entire life of Albert Einstein. As far as his younger life was concerned, Aaron tries to dispel the myth that Einstein had learning difficulties.

The failures of his marriages and his inappopriate relation with his children have also been well described. Aaron also goes a step further to analyze the scientists life in peace activism while emphasizing the importance of the theoretical findings that Einstein made as far as the development of physics is concerned. The search word was Einstein and this book was listed among the most appropriate publications to guide any research into the life of the scientist

Lakin, Patricia. Albert Einstein: Genius of the Twentieth Century. North Carolina: Baker & Taylor, 2009. Print

This book was easy to find in the library especially by using the online catalogues. The search words were Albert Einstein, and this book was listed among the most appropriate volumes that fitted the description. In this publication, the author looks at younger life of the world renowned scientist and the challenges that he went through on his way to gaining international acclaim in science.

The author analyzes both the public and private lives of Einstein giving particular emphasis to his overshadowed family life. This book covers almost every aspect of the scientist’s life and this is the primary reason as to why it has been selected for the bibliography of this essay.

McPherson, Stephanie S. Albert Einstein. Minnesota:Lerner Publications, 2004. Print.

In identifying this book, a library was visited and the online catalogue utilized to list the most recent and relevant publication as far as the topic of research was concerned. The search words used were Albert Einstein and this publication showed up among the ideal choices. This book analyzes the life and times of Albert Einstein with particular focus on his lifetime achievements. The authors provide a timeline listing the particular periods around which the great scientist made certain discoveries.

The author also looks at the younger years of Einstein while dispelling the myth that he had learning difficulties. His short-lived marriages and his poor relation with his children has also been well highlighted. The strength of Albert Einstein’s scientific theories and his entry into world politics through advocating for peaceful resolution of conflicts have also been well addressed in the publication.

Towards the end of the book is a bibliography listing all the books and journals that have been consulted by this particular author hence making it an ideal starting point for any research into Einstein’s life.

Meachen, Dana R. Albert Einstein. Minneapolis: Compass Point Books, 2003. Print

Dana Meachen Rau writes about Albert Einstein’s life. The book is in light of the scientist’s private and public eventful life. The author elicits that Einstein, after graduation, missed an opportunity to be a teacher, as he had wished, and had to settle for a job as a government clerk.

In later pages, Rau looks at how Einstein continued studying and became a professor at various universities in Germany, Switzerland and in the United States of America, as well as how he came up with the quantum theory in physics and contributed greatly in the science field. One fact that have been presented in the book and which is very little known is that Einstein married and had three children with his first wife. He divorced after seventeen years and married his cousin.

They never had children. He had a stint in politics which did not last long. Einstein thought governments should use peaceful means to solve conflicts rather than always going to war. This publication is very relevant in the investigation of Einstein’s life as it clearly analyzes his life as a person and as a celebrity physicist.

Meltzer, Milton. Albert Einstein: A Biography. New York: Holiday House, 2007. Print

In this publication, the author defines Albert Einstein as a man who always questioned and provided answers. He notes the fact that aside from being a well-known physicist, Einstein also doubled up as a peace activist. The author studies the entire life of Einstein, from the time of his birth, all the way to his death while giving appropriate details pertaining to his private life.

This book contains numerous pictures of the scientist and this makes it an even more interesting piece of literature for the research. In looking for the book, a library was visited and the online catalogue utilized. The search word was Einstein and this publication showed up among the most recent and ideal publications.

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Albert Einstein

By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 16, 2019 | Original: October 27, 2009

The German-born physicist Albert Einstein developed the first of his groundbreaking theories while working as a clerk in the Swiss patent office in Bern. After making his name with four scientific articles published in 1905, he went on to win worldwide fame for his general theory of relativity and a Nobel Prize in 1921 for his explanation of the phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect. An outspoken pacifist who was publicly identified with the Zionist movement, Einstein emigrated from Germany to the United States when the Nazis took power before World War II. He lived and worked in Princeton, New Jersey, for the remainder of his life.

Einstein’s Early Life (1879-1904)

Born on March 14, 1879, in the southern German city of Ulm, Albert Einstein grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Munich. As a child, Einstein became fascinated by music (he played the violin), mathematics and science. He dropped out of school in 1894 and moved to Switzerland, where he resumed his schooling and later gained admission to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich. In 1896, he renounced his German citizenship, and remained officially stateless before becoming a Swiss citizen in 1901.

Did you know? Almost immediately after Albert Einstein learned of the atomic bomb's use in Japan, he became an advocate for nuclear disarmament. He formed the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists and backed Manhattan Project scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer in his opposition to the hydrogen bomb.

While at Zurich Polytechnic, Einstein fell in love with his fellow student Mileva Maric, but his parents opposed the match and he lacked the money to marry. The couple had an illegitimate daughter, Lieserl, born in early 1902, of whom little is known. After finding a position as a clerk at the Swiss patent office in Bern, Einstein married Maric in 1903; they would have two more children, Hans Albert (born 1904) and Eduard (born 1910).

Einstein’s Miracle Year (1905)

While working at the patent office, Einstein did some of the most creative work of his life, producing no fewer than four groundbreaking articles in 1905 alone. In the first paper, he applied the quantum theory (developed by German physicist Max Planck) to light in order to explain the phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect, by which a material will emit electrically charged particles when hit by light. The second article contained Einstein’s experimental proof of the existence of atoms, which he got by analyzing the phenomenon of Brownian motion, in which tiny particles were suspended in water.

In the third and most famous article, titled “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” Einstein confronted the apparent contradiction between two principal theories of physics: Isaac Newton’s concepts of absolute space and time and James Clerk Maxwell’s idea that the speed of light was a constant. To do this, Einstein introduced his special theory of relativity, which held that the laws of physics are the same even for objects moving in different inertial frames (i.e. at constant speeds relative to each other), and that the speed of light is a constant in all inertial frames. A fourth paper concerned the fundamental relationship between mass and energy, concepts viewed previously as completely separate. Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2 (where “c” was the constant speed of light) expressed this relationship.

From Zurich to Berlin (1906-1932)

Einstein continued working at the patent office until 1909, when he finally found a full-time academic post at the University of Zurich. In 1913, he arrived at the University of Berlin, where he was made director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. The move coincided with the beginning of Einstein’s romantic relationship with a cousin of his, Elsa Lowenthal, whom he would eventually marry after divorcing Mileva. In 1915, Einstein published the general theory of relativity, which he considered his masterwork. This theory found that gravity, as well as motion, can affect time and space. According to Einstein’s equivalence principle–which held that gravity’s pull in one direction is equivalent to an acceleration of speed in the opposite direction–if light is bent by acceleration, it must also be bent by gravity. In 1919, two expeditions sent to perform experiments during a solar eclipse found that light rays from distant stars were deflected or bent by the gravity of the sun in just the way Einstein had predicted.

The general theory of relativity was the first major theory of gravity since Newton’s, more than 250 years before, and the results made a tremendous splash worldwide, with the London Times proclaiming a “Revolution in Science” and a “New Theory of the Universe.” Einstein began touring the world, speaking in front of crowds of thousands in the United States, Britain, France and Japan. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize for his work on the photoelectric effect, as his work on relativity remained controversial at the time. Einstein soon began building on his theories to form a new science of cosmology, which held that the universe was dynamic instead of static, and was capable of expanding and contracting.

Einstein Moves to the United States (1933-39)

A longtime pacifist and a Jew, Einstein became the target of hostility in Weimar Germany, where many citizens were suffering plummeting economic fortunes in the aftermath of defeat in the Great War. In December 1932, a month before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Einstein made the decision to emigrate to the United States, where he took a position at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey . He would never again enter the country of his birth.

By the time Einstein’s wife Elsa died in 1936, he had been involved for more than a decade with his efforts to find a unified field theory, which would incorporate all the laws of the universe, and those of physics, into a single framework. In the process, Einstein became increasingly isolated from many of his colleagues, who were focused mainly on the quantum theory and its implications, rather than on relativity.

Einstein’s Later Life (1939-1955)

In the late 1930s, Einstein’s theories, including his equation E=mc2, helped form the basis of the development of the atomic bomb. In 1939, at the urging of the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, Einstein wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt advising him to approve funding for the development of uranium before Germany could gain the upper hand. Einstein, who became a U.S. citizen in 1940 but retained his Swiss citizenship, was never asked to participate in the resulting Manhattan Project , as the U.S. government suspected his socialist and pacifist views. In 1952, Einstein declined an offer extended by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s premier, to become president of Israel .

Throughout the last years of his life, Einstein continued his quest for a unified field theory. Though he published an article on the theory in Scientific American in 1950, it remained unfinished when he died, of an aortic aneurysm, five years later. In the decades following his death, Einstein’s reputation and stature in the world of physics only grew, as physicists began to unravel the mystery of the so-called “strong force” (the missing piece of his unified field theory) and space satellites further verified the principles of his cosmology.

HISTORY Vault: Secrets of Einstein's Brain

Originally stolen by the doctor trusted to perform his autopsy, scientists over the decades have examined the brain of Albert Einstein to try and determine what made this seemingly normal man tick.

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Essay on Albert Einstein

Science reached a high peak with the great scientist Albert Einstein. He is known as one of the greatest thinkers and scientists of the twentieth century. He is the one who advanced the pillar of Modern Physics. Albert Einstein is best known for introducing the theory of relativity in Physics, which helped us to understand time, universe, gravity, and space. Here are a few sample essays on Albert Einstein.

100 Words Essay on Albert Einstein

200 words essay on albert einstein, 500 words essay on albert einstein.

Published in 1905, Einstein's first article established him as one of the world’s premier scientists. Einstein admired the environment much more compared to other children and wished to spend more time with nature as the sounds and sights fascinated him. While employed in the patent office, Einstein did not miss the opportunity to solve the beam light problem, which he had been fascinated with since he was 16. Albert Einstein spent his entire life working for harmony and abominated war. Albert was in support of the American Civil Right Movement, and he was totally against violence. For his law of photoelectric effect, Einstein received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921.

Born on March 14, 1879, Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist. Albert studied in a Catholic Elementary School in Munich. He was then transferred to the Luitpold Gymnasium (today known as Albert Einstein Gymnasium) at 8, where he received primary and secondary education. Albert Einstein was not much of a fan of education, yet he enjoyed learning and reading independently. Einstein had these two ‘wonders’ in his early years, which affected him greatly. At age five, an encounter with a compass mystified him that the invisible forces could divert the needle. Secondly, at age 12, he found a book of geometry, which he devoured, and gave it the name “sacred little geometry book”.

Contribution To Physics

He significantly contributed to Physics in 1905 when he developed the Theory of Special Relativity. From a young age, Einstein excelled in Physics and Maths and even discovered his original Pythagorean theorem at age 12. His father wanted him to go with Electrical Engineering, but Einstein did not agree with him and resented the school’s regiment and the teaching method. Einstein was much ahead of his peers in Maths and Physics and excelled in them. His passion for algebra and geometry convinced everyone that nature could be understood as a mathematical structure. He was also awarded a Federal Teaching Diploma.

Einstein was one of the founding members of the German Democratic Party in 1918. He was critical of capitalism and was a socialist. Impressed by Mahatma Gandhi, Einstein described him as a role model for future generations and exchanged written letters with him. Einstein was totally in support of non-violence. He was also a Nobel Prize winner.

Childhood Issues | Einstein was unable to speak in his childhood because his skull was larger than the rest of his body. Slowly and gradually, his head began to improve and take shape. Still, everyone believed him to be sick until that time.

Religious Beliefs | Albert Einstein did not believe in any personal God for all the fates, destiny and actions. He also clarified that he was not an atheist and instead called himself a deeply religious non-believer. He observed and admitted that without ethical culture, there is no stand for salvation for humanity.

Stint With Music | Einstein’s mother played the piano quite well and wanted her son to learn the same, so he could develop a love for music. At age 5, Einstein began to play the piano, though he did not enjoy it much. He discovered the violin sonatas of Mozart at age 13, and at that time, he started to enjoy music. Einstein played Chamber music for his friends and family.

Contribution To Physics | He received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the Photoelectric Effect. He also launched the new science of Cosmology. A Nobel Prize was awarded in 1993 to the discoverers of gravitational waves predicted by Einstein.

Death | Einstein died in the University Medical Centre of Princeton and Plainsboro, after his death, during an autopsy, the pathologist removed Einstein’s brain without the permission of his family and preserved it to know the real cause of Einstein’s intelligence. Einstein’s legacy was passed on to other scientists.

An Incident From Einstein’s Life

In 1919, at the University of Berlin, while working as a theoretical physics professor, Einstein theorised that an impending solar eclipse would provide a rare opportunity to observe gravity’s effect on light. The reports proved his observation to be correct. This observation of Einstein sent a shock wave through the scientific community and the world. Einstein spent the next few years travelling, speaking engagements, and receiving awards. He also founded the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1921 and won the Nobel Prize in the same year.

What Do We Learn From Einstein?

Albert Einstein had the ability to think outside of the square and apply great imagination and creativity to science. This ability of his influenced many people to think outside their comfort zone, explore chances and the world around them. Einstein gave way to many younger generations to think and rethink what they want to do and focus on it, to give their hundred percent in achieving their desired goals. Einstein also taught us not to blindly believe in whatever is being told but to question everything and look for reasons. Albert Einstein taught us to live in the moment and to keep going in the right direction, and success will automatically follow. One should make mistakes but also learn from them, as one who does not commit mistakes practically does not do anything.

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Albert Einstein’s Role in the Atomic Bomb Was the “One Great Mistake in My Life”

Einstein and his colleague Leo Szilard played a crucial role in encouraging the United States to create an atomic bomb.

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Although acquainted with physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer , Einstein never worked on the Manhattan Project that led to the development of nuclear weapons, nor was he aware of plans to drop the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Einstein and his colleague Leo Szilard played a crucial role in encouraging President Franklin D. Roosevelt to pursue the bomb in the first place.

A Startling Visit from a Friend

It all started with a visit by Szilard, a Hungarian-German physicist who previously studied with Einstein in the 1920s. Their research led to the creation of a refrigerator pump that required no moving parts, resulting in what is most commonly called the Einstein refrigerator, according to Genius in the Shadows , a Szilard biography by William Lanouette.

After their collaboration, Szilard conceived the idea of a nuclear “chain reaction” while working in London in 1933. The next year, he convinced the British government to make his chain reaction patent a military secret, according to Lanouette, successfully forestalling a nuclear arms race with Adolf Hitler , who by then was the Chancellor of Germany.

However, after scientists in Germany experimentally split the uranium atom in 1938, Szilard became deeply concerned about idea of Hitler obtaining an atomic bomb first and began raising alarm bells among his personal connections. In Lanouette’s words, he “worked frantically to start the very arms race he had feared.”

In 1939, Szilard visited his old friend Einstein, stunning the fellow physicist by describing the nuclear chain reaction concept. “I haven’t thought of that at all,” Einstein admitted, according to Lanouette. Einstein immediately agreed to warn his friends in the Belgian Royal Family that Nazi Germany might have eyes on the Belgian Congo, which contained the world’s largest uranium supply.

But after that initial meeting, Szilard became convinced that U.S. officials should be warned about Germany’s intentions as well. Szilard and Einstein met for a second time three weeks later, discussing how to get word to President Roosevelt and starting work on one of the most impactful and historic letters in the 20 th century.

The Einstein-Szilard Letter

Through friends, Szilard met with Alexander Sachs, a Wall Street banker with access to the White House. Sachs said he had already spoken with Roosevelt about uranium but that the government decided not to pursue uranium research because Columbia University physicists had told them the prospects of an atomic bomb were minimal, according to The New World 1939/1946: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission .

Sachs felt Roosevelt might be persuaded by someone of Einstein’s reputation, according to the book. Einstein—who was also encouraged by Hungarian physicists, including refugees Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller— sent a letter dated August 2, 1939, urging Roosevelt about the possibility that Nazi Germany could develop an atomic bomb.

“In the course of the last four months it has been made probable… that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated,” the letter read . “Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.”

Warning that this phenomenon could also lead to the construction of particularly devastating bombs, Einstein encouraged Roosevelt to consider a similar program in the United States and urged him to make contact with physicists working on chain reactions in the United States, according to the letter.

Preoccupied with events in Europe, Roosevelt didn’t respond for nearly two months, making the physicists fear he wasn’t taking the threat of nuclear warfare seriously, according to the U.S. Department of Energy . On the contrary, however, Roosevelt felt Hitler achieving unilateral possession of such powerful bombs would pose a grave risk to the nation.

The Letter Spurs Action

Roosevelt wrote back to Einstein on October 19, 1939, informing him about the establishment of a committee of civilian and military representatives to study uranium, according to the Energy Department. Although this was only the first of many such steps and decisions along the way, this committee was ultimately the catalyst for the Manhattan Project.

In 1940, Einstein sent Roosevelt two more letters on March 7 and April 25, recommending additional work on nuclear research, according to An Einstein Encyclopedia by Alice Calaprice and others. He wrote again on March 25, 1945, expressing his growing fears about the possible misuse of uranium, but it wasn’t delivered before Roosevelt’s death a little more than two weeks later.

The more famous 1939 letter, however, came to be known as the Einstein-Szilard letter and is widely considered to be the key stimulus for the United States developing the atomic bomb, according to Lanouette.

Einstein never worked on the Manhattan Project and had no prior knowledge of plans to use the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. A pacifist who despised war, Einstein came to deeply regret his role in the development of the bomb, later saying : “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing.”

Einstein harbored these regrets for this rest of his life. In 1954, one year before his death, Einstein discussed the matter in a letter to his friend, chemist Linus Pauling. Although he cited the fear of Germany developing a bomb as a partial justification, he nevertheless described his letter to Roosevelt as the “one great mistake in my life.”

Einstein Appears in the 2023 Oppenheimer Movie

Oppenheimer , now available for rent or purchase on Prime Video and Apple TV+ , is directed and written by Christopher Nolan . Cillian Murphy stars as J. Robert Oppenheimer , and Tom Conti portrays Albert Einstein . Other cast members include Emily Blunt , Matt Damon , Robert Downey Jr. , Florence Pugh , Rami Malek , Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, and Kenneth Branagh.

Colin McEvoy joined the Biography.com staff in 2023, and before that had spent 16 years as a journalist, writer, and communications professional. He is the author of two true crime books: Love Me or Else and Fatal Jealousy . He is also an avid film buff, reader, and lover of great stories.

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• 13 May 2024

'Einstein’s death shattered Bose — he tore off an unpublished research paper in grief'

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Partha Ghose. Credit: Partha Ghose

Nature India : What inspired you to embark on a career in particle physics?

Partha Ghose : In 1961, I went to Imperial College London wanting to decipher what lies at the deepest core of matter. This was when physicists had already begun smashing atoms in colliders, churning out new transient particles to unveil the secrets of matter.

I was lucky to learn advanced physics from stalwarts in particle physics like Abdus Salam, P. T. Matthews and T. W. B. Kibble. In 1963, an opportunity to work briefly at CERN further spurred my interest in particle physics.

NI : How did you meet S. N. Bose?

PG : It was in mid-1963 that I met Bose, quite by chance. The famous Bengali pote Bishnu Dey, a relative of ours and Bose’s close friend, took me to meet Bose. They were immersed in discussion, and Bose suddenly turned to me and asked, ''Would you like to work with me?''. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. He arranged everything very quickly and within days I joined his research group at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in Calcutta as a junior scientist. I worked on particle physics, mainly on broken SU(3) symmetry which was in vogue at the time.

NI : How did Bose start interacting with Einstein and how was their relationship?

PG : Occasionally, Bose would reminisce about his interactions with Einstein. One day when I went to meet him at his residence, he started talking about the historic paper he sent to Einstein on 4 June 1924 along with a letter .

Bose told me that his deduction of the phase space factor in Planck’s law resulted in a factor of 4π instead of 8π. He went on to propose that the missing factor of 2 was due to the photon spin which could take only two values. In his letter back to Bose, “the old man” [Einstein] had crossed this portion out and said it was not necessary to talk about spin since the factor of 2 comes from the two states of polarisation of light.”

Bose said to me, ”I can understand a spinning particle, but what is the meaning of the polarization of a particle?” I asked him, "Sir, when the photon spin was eventually discovered, why didn’t you tell Einstein that you had already worked it out in 1924?” “How does it matter who discovered it,” he quipped. “It was eventually discovered, wasn’t it?”

In a second paper, which also Einstein translated into German and got published in Zeitschrift fur Physik , Bose proposed a probability law for interactions between matter and radiation. According to Einstein, it was inappropriate. He added a comment to the paper giving some reasons for his disagreement with Bose.

The first paper with Einstein’s strong endorsement made Bose famous. He moved to Paris on a two-year sabbatical from Dhaka University, worked in Maurice de Broglie’s and Marie Curie’s labs and arrived in Berlin in 1925 to finally meet Einstein. They discussed several issues including Bose’s new hypothesis of probabilistic interactions, but Einstein stuck to his point.

Despite their differences, Bose regarded Einstein as his master in physics. On 18 April 1955, Einstein died. The news shocked him into silence. He was writing a paper and was looking forward to discussing it with Einstein at a forthcoming conference in Switzerland to celebrate fifty years of Special Relativity. Bose tore that paper into shreds.

NI : Many say that S. N. Bose missed out on a Nobel Prize for physics.

PG : He deserved the prize for his seminal contribution to quantum theory. It led to the classification of particles into bosons and fermions and the prediction and discovery of Bose-Einstein condensates. Besides, his theories helped us understand superconductivity and superfluidity. Bose’s theories and insights shaped the works of many physicists. Some went on to win Nobel Prizes. But Bose, despite being recommended several times, was never considered for the prize.

NI : Apart from physics, you learned music, and played first-class cricket. Do you think science helps enrich music?

PG : Science can help explain music. The best example of this in India is Sir C. V. Raman who had a keen ear for Indian classical music. He could detect five harmonics in the 'mridangam' and the 'tabla' sounds. He did some experiments with Indian drums and circular membranes with central loads. He sprinkled white powder on them to see the patterns of vibrations formed as he kept changing the loads and the manner of striking. This led to a new understanding of the generation of harmonics in stretched membranes. His research in musical instruments earned him the Fellowship of the Royal Society of London even before he got the Nobel Prize for his work on light scattering.

NI : S. N. Bose advocated popularizing science in Bengali. Is it easier to communicate science through one’s mother tongue?

PG : Science is based on logic and requires precise language for its expression and understanding. Non-native speakers find it difficult to grasp the nuances of scientific terms in English. They often acquire wrong notions when they read science in English.

The language in which one dreams is one's mother tongue. Science can therefore take root and flourish in a country only when its citizens start dreaming about science in their mother tongue.

NI : What is your advice for young Indian students who want to pursue a career in physics?

PG : I will quote Bose’s last advice to me. ''Don't jump onto foreign bandwagons. Try to understand things in your way and say something new.''

Bose read the works of all leading quantum theorists of his time, including Einstein, with a critical mind, identified their shortcomings and went on to propose revolutionary new statistics. These days I see an undue rush to publish papers in reputed foreign journals, increase citations, and get quick recognition and promotion. This leads to derivative science.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d44151-024-00054-2

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