Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> Subject: Re:
On Sat, 9 Feb 2002 19:14:40 -0000 P.J.Wells at open.ac.uk writes:
>
> On a slightly different note, is it really true, as Jim suggests,
> that
>
> >much of the Soviet physicists' defense of relativity
> >consisted of their pointing out the degree to which Engels
> >had in fact anticipated the insights of Mach and of Einstein.
>
> Given the pasting which Lenin gave Mach in "Materialism and
> Empirio-Criticism" I should have thought this line was best avoided
> in the
> Stalin era.
Well, the Soviet physicists usually mentioned just Einstein, and avoided referring to Mach. Of course anyone familiar with the history of physical thought, would have realized that the young Einstein was profoundly influenced by Mach. So to say that Engels had anticipated many of Einstein's insights would imply that he probably had also anticipated some of Mach's, but they usually kept quiet about that.
Jim F.
^^^^^^^^^
CB: Actually, Einstein eventually broke with Mach on the direct philosophical point that Lenin criticized Mach for. Einstein believed that atoms actually existed and Mach , following his philosophical line , thought atoms were just aids to thought, ideas. See _Einstein : His Life and Times_ , where the author describes this philosophical break with Mach, upon a meeting with the latter late in Mach's life. Einstein breaks with Mach on the issue of atoms as an objective reality, the objection that Lenin had to Machism.
(Einstein also independently arrived at a position of defeatism for one's own country in WWI, pretty much the same as Lenin's on that war. Einstein was very brave in this in that almost all the other physicists were working for the government in support of the war)