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Philosophical Interpretations of Relativity Theory: 1910-1930

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Klaus Hentschel
Klaus Hentschel*
Affiliation:
University of Göttingen
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Extract

This paper is a summary of my doctoral dissertation on philosophical interpretations of Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity, submitted to the Dept. for History of Science, Univ. of Hamburg, in 1989, which was recently published in the Series Science Networks at Birkäuser.2 After a brief overview of its content I will focus on a discussion of the method employed to analyse philosophical interpretations of a physical theory.

My analysis is based

- firstly on about 2500 contemporary published texts about the theories of relativity written both by scientists and philosophers. These texts have not been of particular interest to historians or philosophers of science up to now; this is understandable from the fact that many of diem contain gross oversimplifications, misinterpretations and incorrect statements about the theories of relativity.

Type
Part IV. History of Philosophy of Science
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 169 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1991

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Footnotes

1

First of all, many thanks for the invitation to the organizers of the PSA meeting and to Prof. Don Howard (Univ. of Kentucky, Lexington), who had initiated the Colloquium on “Recent Work in the History of the Philosophy of Science”. My dissertation was supervised by Prof. Dr. Andreas Kleinert (Institut fur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Hamburg) and Prof. Dr. Lothar Schäfer (Philosophisches Seminar, Univ. Hamburg). The editors at the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein in Boston and many archivists and librarians elsewhere have supported my research. Miss Ann M. Lehar helped me a lot in improving my English for the written version of this paper.

References

Notes

2 Interpretationen und Fehlinterpretationen der speziellen und der allgemeinen Relativitdtstheorie dwch Zeitgenossen Albert Einsteins, Birkhauser, Basel, 1990; ca. 800 pp., more than 3000 bibliographic entries, many figures and tables.

3 See also Chr. Ray: The Evolution of Relativity, Hilger, Bristol, 1987, for a similar view of relativity theory.

4 See also section 4.8. of my thesis (fn. 2).

5 Einstein later reflected about alternative names, such as ‘theory of absoluta’ or ‘theory of invariants’ to distinguish his theory from what was commonly refered to as ‘relativism’ - see sect. 2.4. of my thesis (fn.2).

6 When Einstein made c a variable dependent on the gravitational potential in his Prague theory of 1911, several Machians (and I would also expect Mach himself) regarded this (erroneously) as a fulfillment of their demand of rigorous relativization.

7 A recipe that Heisenberg later tried to implement in quantum mechanics.

8 Vaihinger’s pupils declared it as merely a convenient fiction; Dingler’s certicism repeatedly declared relativity theory as stillborn and portrayed himself in the role of a high priest ringing its death knell; see sections 4.4. and 4.5.4. of my thesis, (fn.2).

9 In my thesis, I treated the discussion between Kraus, Urbach and Frank in more detail (sect. 5.3.) and I also studied one person (Reichenbach) in the context of a multiple front war (sect. 3.4.3.). But other figures such as Dingier and Reichenbach are worth studying in more detail.

10 For example, the neo-Kantian journalist Drill wrote angrily in reply to Max Born: “I’m not willing to talk about Einstein and I’m not competent to do so. […]. But nobody has to accept it, when a scientific theory tries to cheat common sense, whoever may have formulated it.” And many professional philosophers did not react much better.

11 The Kantian Drill emphatically wrote against the reformist wing: “A philosopher should know that physics can’t lead the way for philosophy. It is the latter’s task to find out the necessary conditions for all knowledge, including all sciences.“

12 Somehow according to the principle: one sees what one expects to see. Note that theory-ladenness of observation was emphasized by Duhem and Quine!

13 See sect . 5.1. and 5.2 of my thesis.