> ...
G*rd*n:
> >I'd suggest that Einstein's motivation for constructing
> >Special and General Relativity was probably religious...
Brad De Long:
> No. His motivation for constructing Special Relativity was the same
> as Poincare's, Minkowski's, and Lorentz's motivation for undertaking
> the same project: they were all trying to figure out the consequences
> of simultaneously believing (a) that the laws of physics look the
> same in all inertial reference frames, and (b) that Maxwell's
> equations are a good description of electromagnetic phenomena.
>
> You can look at Abraham Pais's _Subtle Is the Lord_ and conclude that
> Poincare, Lorentz, or somebody else would have gotten there within
> the decade had Einstein not written his "On the Electrodynamics of
> Moving Bodies." Indeed, much of the language we use to talk about
> Special Relativity--"spacetime", "Lorentz transformations",
> "invariance of the spacetime interval"--doesn't come from Einstein,
> but from the others working on the same problem at the same time...
Yes, but why did they care? I don't know about Poincare or Lorenz, but Einstein was definitely on about God. I think his very hostile reaction to QM, and the theological reason he gave for it, reveal one facet of this passion.
Whether his religious ideas extended to geometry I don't know; I've never read anything of his on the issue. I suppose the orderly Master Architect of the cosmos could be expected to provide a supernal framework, but like many kinds of mathematics, geometry is _empirically_ useful aside from its ontological status. One can think that geometry is just something human beings do, and still believe in the M.A., who could be doing something quite different which geometry just happens to match up to here and there.
My belief in Einstein's religiousness is of course interpretive, but so is a disbelief in it. I think it makes sense, but it's a literary kind of sense.