The Young Einstein and the Old Einstein

Abstract

In 1911 Einstein, then thirty-two years old, held the post of Professor of Theoretical Physics in the German University at Prague. He had indicated to his friend and former classmate Marcel Grossmann his interest in returning to Zürich to teach at the Polytechnic (The Federal Institute of Technology).

Fashionable ‘sociologists of knowledge’ — or ‘psychologists of knowledge’ — tend to explain positions in purely social or psychological terms when, as a matter of fact, they are determined by rationality principles. A typical example is the explanation of Einstein’s opposition to Bohr’s complementarity principle on the ground that ‘in 1926 Einstein was forty-seven years old. Forty-seven may be the prime of life, but not for physicists.’ (I. Lakatos in ‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’.)