Are you familiar with Christopher Caudwell's criticism similar to yours in _Crisis in Physics_ ?
Charles
>>> cburford at gn.apc.org 09/06/00 02:14AM >>>
At 18:48 04/09/00 -0400, you wrote:
>Chris Burford wrote:
>
>>>Einstein was a member, sponsor, or affiliated with
>>>thirty-four communist fronts between 1937-1954. He also
>>>served as honorary chairman for three communist
>>>organizations.
>>
>>
>>I still think there is an idealist streak to his thinking.
>
>Huh?
>
>Doug
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.
Chris Burford
London