Chris Burford wrote:
>>>I still think there is an idealist streak to his thinking.
Doug:
>> Huh?
Chris Burford:
> Yes perhaps that was a bit too brief.
>
> The FBI summary of his politics is a courageous and impressive record,
> given the limitations of his time.
>
> However Einstein's science I suggest has significant idealist features.
>
> His reliance on thought experiments presupposes an ideal simple logical
> structure to the universe. His lifelong search for a unified field theory
> is of the same character.
>
> His difficulty in accepting empirical evidence in support of quantum theory
> is essentially idealist. "God does not play dice", is an arbitrary
> rejection of the evidence that the universe is probabilistic.
>
> The proprositions that time can run backwards is not unique to him but is
> common to the simplistic mathematical modelling of that approach to
> science, and I suggest is a fundamentally idealist, non-materialist
> assumption. (i.e. I suggest that along with a basic assumption that reality
> exists, a materialist approach needs to posit that time runs forwards, and
> cannot run backwards.)
>
> His assertion that the speed of light never changes is arbitrary and
> strange. It seems to me linked to the idealist thread I am suggesting
> existed in his thinking.
That the speed of light is the same in all directions and does not change over time is an empirical fact. There's nothing arbitrary about it (except perhaps from the point of view of the Creator, if any). It can be demonstrated in an (material) experiment.
I'd suggest that Einstein's motivation for constructing Special and General Relativity was probably religious, as evidenced in such remarks as the aforesaid disbelief in God as a gambler, or the famous "Subtle is the Lord, but he is not malicious!" I don't know if religious belief or emotions make him an idealist in the philosophical sense, though.
Einstein was troubled by the possibility that, as more and more sophisticated methods and instruments were brought to bear on the world, we would begin to get in the way of our own perceptions. Telescopes, computers, particle accelerators and so on are built according to elaborate assumptions about the physical world which may affect the results they obtain. "It is the theory that tells us what we can observe" was the way Einstein put it. To me, this seems opposed to the notion that ideas are what are really real, which is one meaning of _idealism_, and instead regards the material universe (God's handiwork) as the real and important item, in which ideas are only ancillary tools of perception.
On the other hand, he hung out with Platonist Goedel. Maybe they argued about it.