I think he was a logical positivist to the end.
> Einstein, who had admired Mach and
> gotten some inspiration for
> relativity theory from Mach's ideas, broke with Mach
> on this issue, saying
> atoms are objectively real.
>
But not mainly on philosophical grounds. Einstein's paper on Brownian motion was an empirical proof of the existence of atoms.
I have always thought
> the postmods are a new incarnation of the
> philosophical types Lenin
> criticized then. He even specifically mentions
> "French symbolists" in M and
> EC.
Oh, no, not mainly. Mach and Averarius were serious thinkers who knew science. Mach was a first rate scientist. The pomos are pretty much frauds and obscurantists.
On the
> other hand, Einstein never believed quantum
> mechanics. Maybe Les can help us
> see objective reality of qm.
Actually it is really hard to be realistic about QM.
>
> Then I'm trying to figure whether Lenin and Einstein
> were in Switzerland at
> the same time :>): Switzerland, land of banks and
> clocks, finance capital
> and absolute time.
They may have overlapped. Depends on when Einstein left Switzerland:
Albert Einstein worked from 1902 through 1909 in the patent office in Bern where he was appointed technical expert. While in this office he completed an astonishing range of theoretical physics publications and announced his special theory of relativity, which required a fundamental revision in the traditionally held Newtonian views of space and time, and introduced the celebrated equation E = mc2. In 1905, Albert Einstein earned his doctorate at the University of Zurich.
Einstein sought to extend the special theory of relativity to phenomena involving acceleration. The key appeared in 1907 with the principle of equivalence, in which gravitational acceleration was held to be indistinguishable from acceleration caused by mechanical forces. Gravitational mass was therefore identical with inertial mass.
In 1908 Einstein became a lecturer at the University of Bern after submitting his Habilitation thesis. The following year he became professor of physics at the University of Zurich, having resigned his lectureship and his job in the patent office in Bern. In 1912 Einstein took up a chair at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich before leaving Switzerland in 1914
-
> From Lenin Timeline:
August-September 1914: Outbreak of World War I (1914-1918); Lenin leaves Poland for Switzerland.
March 8, 1917: Beginning of Revolution in St. Petersburg.
March 15, 1917: Nicholas II abdicates, Provisional Government formed.
April 1917: Lenin takes "sealed train" through Germany back to Russia.
>
> Einstein , living in Germany with most
> physicist-colleagues doing work for
> the military,
Like who? Before the Manhattan project, no one thought that physics had any militray applications at all. And of course Einstein signed the famous letter that helped get Roosevelt's support for the Manhattan Project . . .
jks
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