The deterministic world view of force at a distance between point particles from the Newtonian era was the accepted view of reality in the realm of physics. Faraday, Lorentz and Maxwell with their ideas of electrodynamics and field theory of forces posed a conceptual and practical problem to Newtonian mechanics. During the last decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the twentieth century, Newtonian mechanics and Maxwellian electrodynamics were in constant conflict with each other. Even as most scientists were adhering to one side or the other, Albert Einstein came up with the theory of Special relativity combining the two ideologies. He followed it with General relativity which revolutionized Newtonian gravitation and laid down the fundamentals for the modern understanding of space and time. This paper explores the philosophical and sociological roots of relativity and the nature of the scientific community within which the view of the relativistic world was conceived. An attempt is also made at understanding Einstein’s creative empiricism and his unique approach to doing science.
A proper understanding of the ideological constructs that led to the breakdown of the Newtonian deterministic world view is essential in grasping the motivations that created the need for the relativistic world view. Even before Faraday and Maxwell’s ideas of “force as a field” and the treatise on electromagnetism, intellectuals were discussing the absurdity of the absolute space construct. George Berkeley regarded widely as the father of modern idealism said, “there was indeed no real knowable object behind one's perception, that what was real was the perception itself” (Wikipedia), therefore “for Berkeley it was absurd that space could be anything but relative” (Cushing). This concept of a subjective sensory frame of experience being the only acceptable truth wasn’t the accepted idea in 17th century science; however in another 150 years it would become the avant garde of physics. However due to Newton’s draconian hold on the scientific establishment for almost a century after his death the growth of the understanding of force and motion strayed little from the conventional view. The discovery of “lines of force” and more importantly the synthesis of electricity and magnetism proved to be the nemesis of Newtonian mechanics.
The real challenge to Newtonian Ideology came from Maxwellian electrodynamics. As presented by James Clerk Maxwell, forces instead of affecting the accelerations of objects (as propagated by Newton), affected their velocities. Thus electrodynamics postulated the existence of a finite velocity of propagation. This was the velocity of light. Maxwell’s equations posed major philosophical and scientific problems which Newtonian mechanics could not account for. The only way to settle this dispute was “to interpret Maxwellian electrodynamics as a theory which presupposes the existence of the aether, states of the electromagnetic field being states of the aether” (Maxwell). Even though the ad-hoc concept of the aether helped Maxwell understand electromagnetism it was experimentally refuted and proved to be useless in understanding the propagation of the continuous electromagnetic field. Thus the fundamental problem in 19th century physics was the mutual disagreement between Newtonian dynamics and Maxwellian electrodynamics. The institutional change which created a unifying system of ideology that formulated both schools of thought was brought about by both physicists and philosophers.
Immanuel Kant, arguably the greatest German philosopher of the enlightenment, published A Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. In it Kant made a divergence between empiricism and rationality. According to him the reality that was available to us was simply our perception of what the true nature of reality was. Therefore logical explanations of truth proved nothing until empirical sensory data confirmed its existence. A universal world view which created subjective reality based on the nature of the observer was influential in the development of relativity. Thus Kant’s ideas affected the perception of space, motion and most importantly time. The roots of simultaneity which was the “very starting point of special relativity” (Gödel) came from Kantian ideals that “deny the objectivity of change and consider change as an illusion or an appearance due to our special mode of perception” (Gödel) Other than providing the nature of thought and reality within a rather broad frame of understanding Kant’s contributions to the specific development of relativity is negligible. Kant’s writings which became fundamental to the western philosophical structure, deeply affected an Austrian boy born to a tutor in the village of Moravia.
Ernst Mach, born in 1838 in Austria, was the forerunner of the theory of relativity. A student of little promise he barely passed school and “complained to his father of the tedious religious exercises” (Feuer). Mach viewed the history of ideas as changing myths of reality and believed that the time had come when “a dynamic mythology was overcoming a mechanistic” (Feuer). According to Mach, time and space were the “devourer” and the “separator” respectively and it was time for a change of their basic natures. Mach’s rather poignant childhood memories and subsequent forays into the practice of loneliness evoked in him the desire to conceptualize “the relativized world in which there was no privileged frame of reference, no absolute...” (Feuer). Mach and his followers were phenomalists – they depended on natural phenomena to help them construct the true nature of truth and reality. Thus for Mach the world was a “coherent mass of sensations” (Feuer). As a scientist and thinker Mach believed in simplicity and always tried to find the least complex answer to a problem (hence his disregard for the atomic theory). Europe during the last decade of the 19th century was enthralled by Machian ideals of scientific knowledge. The new generation of scientists was essentially enraptured by the Machian ideology which according to them complemented Karl Marx’s concept of social change. Since reality was “social forms for organizing experience”(Feuer) and not objective as the older world view propagated, the Marxists found that Machian beliefs would help them discover “a new scientific truth , a new social form for organizing experience”(Feuer). Another redeeming factor of the Machian school of thought was its critique and dismissal of absolute space and time which ran parallel to the Marxian conceptual expulsion of “unobservable (and) idealistic principles from social science”(Feuer). Even as the Austrian school of science was entering a period of revolutionary growth the writings of an English philosopher were taking the more conservative English scientific establishment by storm.
David Hume was the fountainhead of the English and Scottish enlightenment. His propagated style of approaching knowledge was called “skepticism”. However it was his Treatise on Human Nature which most affected the growth of the relativistic school of thought. As propagated by Hume, “time and space are not to be regarded as self-subsistent entities; rather one should speak of the temporal and spatial aspects of physical processes”(Stachel). Therefore his ideology almost mirrored the one taught by Mach. Hume’s statement that “time is nothing but the manner, in which some real object exists"(Stachel), was instrumental in providing a fundamentally new outlook on time.
Even though Hume and Mach were influential in providing an epistemological and conceptual framework for the construction of relativity they failed to provide concrete and specific arguments that would help unify the Newtonian world with the newly established Maxwellian ideas of electromagnetism. Mach propagated for a total rejection of Newtonian ideals of space, time and motion. Thus the two descriptions of reality were in conflict and there seemed to be little done in the manner of synthesis. The scientific community needed a theory or a set of laws that would be able to explain Newton’s laws of motion which had seemed to work so precisely for so long while maintaining the integrity of Maxwell’s laws which had been immaculately proven by empirical data. Two people provided the creative assimilation that was required for this endeavor. However just one of them is truly attributed as the author of the theory of special relativity. It is interesting to debate and analyze why the “other” isn’t. The controversy surrounding the true creator of special relativity mirrors the great argument that marred the discovery of calculus.
The credit for coming up with the system of “fluxions” or calculus is usually given to Newton , however Leibniz, as contemporary research has shown. deserved just as much renown and acceptance. A similar situation developed around relativity between French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincare and Jewish physicist Albert Einstein. Even though devoid of the unprofessional acts of abuse which Newton employed against Leibniz, there is definite lack of recognition involved in this situation. At the International Congress of Arts and Sciences in 1904, more than a year before Einstein’s revolutionary paper was published, Poincare “used the expression ‘the principle of relativity’” (Feuer). Poincare had at this address had mentioned the finite and unsurpassable value of the velocity of light being central to the theory of relativity, expressed a need to create “electrodynamics of moving bodies”(Keswani) and pointed out that such a theory would utilize the Lorentz transformations. He had even described the same “light and clock” experiments that would later appear and be immortalized by Einstein’s paper. More importantly in the June of 1905, before Einstein’s paper had been published, he “discovered a complete covariance between Maxwell’s equations under Lorentz transformation including correct transformational formulae for the case when space for which Maxwell’s equations are given is occupied by electric charges” (Keswani).Another interesting and vital point Poincare suggested was that the effects of gravity “were propagated at the velocity of light” (Keswani). However Poincare’s publications in this field go back to his publication of Science and Hypothesis(1902), in which he talks about the “theory of relative motion” (Keswani) In the light of this revelation about Poincare and the factual evidence of his work it seems conducive to agree that he deserves to be just as celebrated as Einstein. The question remains why wasn’t he?
The answer exposes a rather subtle yet crucial difference in ideology and attitude which makes the final difference. Poincare believed that fundamentally the lack of sufficient human ability to understand natural phenomenon led to the “Invariable relativity” (Feuer). He regarded relativity to be only “empirically true of uniform motion, but not absolutely true” (Keswani). Therefore it was possible that with added learning and newer perspective this idea about the nature of space and motion would change. Therefore Poincare exhibited pure Kantian ideals of reality being merely a construct of our idea of what was actually real. Due to our inadequacy in evaluating observable phenomenon and discrepancies that arose as a result of the subjectivity of the observer, the theory of relativity was needed. This was a very different view of relativity from the one that Einstein possessed, for him the principle of relativity “became a foundation, an ultimate, underived fact of the physical world” (Feuer). In essence relativity to Einstein was a basic principle which had to be followed under all circumstances, even if that meant a re-invention of the existing fundamentals of science. Thus even as relativity became synonymous with the revolutionary new view of the physical world for Einstein , Poincare was still tied to older more restraining concepts of Newtonian dynamics. In Poincare’s agnosticism towards the theory of relativity lay his central nature – “he was a man of the establishment” (Feuer). Tied to constitutional ideals of learning and knowledge he found it a lot harder to change his philosophical outlook to correspond with his incredibly brilliant and progressive work in the pure natural sciences. Added to the philosophical limitations that afflicted Poincare was the lack of a social climate conducive for the growth of relativity. Even as social upheavals and dynamic revolutionary ideas were infused within the Zurich-Berne group of scientists , a “classical Voltairean skeptic”(Feuer) like Poincare was socially bereft and often politically and institutionally stifled by the “French Administrations centralized control”(Feuer), the draconian relationship shared by students and professors in France and “the gerontocracy in the Academy of Sciences”(Feuer). The Polytechnic represented a very different atmosphere. It was pregnant with ideas of social and ideological revolution and also had the advantage of being kept on their feet by constant arguments and threats from the existing and more traditional world view. In more ways the stage was set for a young, passionate and dynamic physicist to publish the single most important work in the history of science.
Einstein was 26 years old, full of rebellion and ready for a “brave new world”, when he wrote the four papers in 1905 that would forever change the nature of scientific thought. Most intellectuals of the early 20th century believe that three of those papers – On Brownian Motion, the Photoelectric effect and Special Relativity – were individually worthy of Nobel Prizes. However it is ironical that his Noble Prize achievement was on the Photoelectric effect which being a quantum field idea would be something that would disturb him in the future. It should be noted however that among the people on the Nobel committee that awarded him the prize was Lorentz, who believed that Poincare was the rightful source of special relativity, thus due to his non-assent the committee finally awarded Einstein the prize for Photoelectric effect. Being a part of the Austrian Machian school of thought, Einstein was influenced by the empirical rationalists like Kant and the positive empiricists such as Hume, however ideologically it was Mach who altered Einstein’s view of the physical universe. Lorentz, Maxwell and Poincare were the more scientific influences and Einstein paid credit to every one of them later on in his life. Einstein’s greatest achievement was possibly moving past a more conservative one sided idea of understanding and doing science. Thus he unified the old with the new – Newtonian mechanics with Maxwellian electrodynamics – and created system of thought that was a modified version of the two existing ones. This has been called “aim-oriented empiricism” (Maxwell) by scholars.
Aim-oriented Empiricism finds its motivation in developing a scientific theory from using existing ideologies in order to create a practical foundation for the construction of a fundamental physical law. The beginning of this form of empiricism is with Einstein’s formulation of the theory of special relativity. Standard empiricism does not allow for the development of “radically new physical theories that are incompatible with existing theories” (Maxwell). Therefore in order to create a system that can rationally asses a unified theory aim-oriented empiricism was created by Einstein. Due to its nature Special relativity is a “law of laws”, thus it is by itself a “heuristic and methodological rule to be employed in discovering and assessing physical theories” (Maxwell). By coming up with special relativity Einstein conceptually changed a restricting principle – Galilean invariance – to make it compatible with Maxwellian electrodynamics and “he formed a new principle i.e. Lorentz invariance”(Maxwell), thus he created a set of rules that could be used to rectify other rules. While constructing General relativity aim-oriented empiricism helped him unify Newtonian gravitation and special relativity. However due to the nature of normal empiricism when comparing position and Lorentz invariance, only the former is allowed a significance of actual rule , while the later is just viewed as a theoretical construct in physics. This portrays the rather stringent and linear set of rules that govern the principles of standard empiricism and further support the need for an aim-oriented empiricist approach.
A better understanding of the factors that led to the final moment of genius during which Einstein came up with the theory of special relativity is achieved by analyzing the social, philosophical and above all ideological climate that existed in that era. Conceptually relativity seemed to always have been a part of the traditional consciousness but somehow had never gotten a scientific expression. Reflecting the true nature of its creator relativity would have repercussions in not just physics but in essentially every segment of human society. In retrospect it seems that special relativity owes its formal coming to being to not just one person, but to an atmosphere and an era that was ready to break away from the religious drudgery of the past and move onto an ideological plane that was socially equitable and did not propagate the existence of absolute postulates. Along with the conventional rigid ideals of space and time it also meant liberation from the politically and religiously suffocating fabric of western society. The torch bearers of the movement were the new generation that was infused with the revolutionary new ideas of existence and thus provided for a conclusion to the alternative line of thought that had been started by George Berkeley as an opposition to the religiously motivated and naturally hegemonic Newtonian world view that had arrested growth of the western ideology for nearly a century.
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