The Comparative Reception of Relativity PDF
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THE COMPARATIVE RECEPTION OF RELA TIVITY BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Editor ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University Editorial Advisory Board ADOLF GRUNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh SYLV AN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University JOHN J. ST ACHEL, Boston University MARX W. WARTOFSKY, Baruch College of the City University of New York VOLUME 103 THE COMP ARA TIVE RECEPTION OF RELATIVITY Edited by THOMAS F. GLICK Department of History, Boston University D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY A MEMBER OF THE KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP DORDRECHT/BOSTON/LANCASTER/TOKYO Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Comparative reception of relativity. (Boston studies in the philosophy of science; 103) "The present volume grew out of a double session of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science held on March 25, 1983"-Pref. Includes bibliographies and index. 1. Relativity (Physics)-Congresses. 2. Science-Philosophy-Congresses. 3. Einstein, Albert, 1879-1955-Influence-Congresses. 4. Europe-Intellectual life-20th century-Congresses. 5. United States-Intellectual life-20th century Congresses. I. Glick, Thomas F. II. Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science (1983: Boston, Mass.) III. Series: Boston studies in the philosophy of science; v. 103. Q174.B67 vol. 103 [QC173.5] 001 '01 s 87-23388 ISBN-13: 978-94-0 I 0-8223-5 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-3875-5 001: 10.1007/978-94-009-3875-5 Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, P.O. Box 17,3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland. Sold and Distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, Holland. All Rights Reserved © 1987 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1987 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface VB STANLEY GOLDBERG/Putting New Wine in Old Bottles: The Assimilation of Relativity in America 1 JOSE M. SANCHEZ-RoN /The Reception of Special Relativity n ~Gre~B~~ LEWIS PYENSON / The Relativity Revolution in Germany 59 MICHEL P AT Y / The Scientific Reception of Relativity in France 113 MICHEL BIEZUNSKI/ Einstein's Reception in Paris in 1922 169 BARBARA J. REEVES / Einstein Politicized: The Early Reception of Relativity in Italy 189 THOMAS F. GLICK/Relativity in Spain 231 V.P. VIZGIN AND G.E. GORELIK/The Reception of the Theory of Relativity in Russia and the USSR 265 BRONISLAW SREDNIA WA / The Reception of the Theory of 3n Relativity in Poland TSUTOMU KANEKO/Einstein's Impact on Japanese Intellectuals 351 THOMAS F. GLICK / Cultural Issues in the Reception of Relativity 381 Index 401 r et es hs ca oG K a y Linga n, rte eiO EinstJose orian), haler, strt hihe rt oc aK sio (no et). CosKuass G uel B. orian), y ega ManhistOrt Left to right: Cazurla (art undaci6n Jose 923. uisa (F 1L 4, a h ri ca rM a M Spain, rthaler, o, che do eK ol To n in Juli nsteialer, Eith PREFACE The present volume grew out of a double session of the Boston Collo quium for the Philosophy of Science held in Boston on March 25, 1983. The papers presented there (by Biezunski, Glick, Goldberg, and Judith Goodstein!) offered both sufficient comparability to establish regulari ties in the reception of relativity and Einstein's impact in France, Spain, the United States and Italy, and sufficient contrast to suggest the salience of national inflections in the process. The interaction among the participants and the added perspectives offered by members of the audience suggested the interest of commissioning articles for a more inclusive volume which would cover as many national cases as we could muster. Only general guidelines were given to the authors: to treat the special or general theories, or both, hopefully in a multidisciplinary setting, to examine the popular reception of relativity, or Einstein's personal impact, or to survey all these topics. In a previous volume, on the comparative reception of Darwinism,2 one of us devised a detailed set of guidelines which in general were not followed. In our opinion, the studies in this collection offer greater comparability, no doubt because relativity by its nature and its complexity offers a sharper, more easily bounded target. As in the Darwinism volume, this book concludes with an essay intended to draw together in comparative perspective some of many themes addressed by the participants. The cost of translating chapters from French and Russian was kindly provided by the Dean of the Boston University College of Liberal Arts and its Humanities Foundation and by the Dean of the Graduate School. THOMAS F. GLICK Boston, October 1986 ROBERT S. COHEN NOTES 1 Judith Goodstein, 'The Italian Mathematicians of Relativity,' Centaurus 26 (1983), 241-261. 2 Thomas F. Glick, ed., The Comparative Reception of Darwinism (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1974; new ed., University of Chicago Press, 1988). Vll STANLEY GOLDBERG PUTTING NEW WINE IN OLD BOTTLES* The Assimilation of Relativity in America NATIONAL STYLES OF SCIENCE At the beginning of the twentieth century, J.T. Merz reviewed the development of intellectual thought in Europe in the nineteenth century and argued that one of the changes that took place in the course of that century was the gradual universalization of scientific knowledge. 1 Ac cording to Merz, the decided national differences that one might have expected to find in Europe earlier, had been eradicated by improve ments in communication and transportation. Merz notwithstanding, for a number of years I have worked with the notion of national styles of science as a way of understanding, in part, how scientific innovations are received in different scientific cultures. The case I concentrated on was a comparison of the reception of Einstein's special theory of relativity in France, Germany, England and the United States in the years immediately following publication of the theory by Einstein in 1905.2 In this paper I use the concept of national styles of science to examine how Einstein's special theory of relativity was introduced into the American scientific community, how the com munity initially responded to the theory and then how the theory has been assimilated since that time. One of the premises which underlies my analysis of the content of the theory of relativity is that the relationship between evidence and belief in science is precisely like the relationship between evidence and belief in other areas of human endeavor. If that is the case then national difference in science should be no more or no less pronounced than national differences in other spheres. Furthermore, if the social aspects of science, its organization and its relationship to other social institu tions are important to how a particular scientific theory is constructed and propagated, then differences in understanding in different countries should be related to differences in the social organization of science. I am, therefore, skeptical of Merz's claims Vis-iI-vis the disappearance of national styles. With regard to the theory of relativity, I am not suggesting that physicists in a given country acted together, lock-step, 1 Thomas F. Glick (ed.), The Comparative Reception of Relativity, 1-26. © 1987 by D. Reidel Publishing Company. 2 STANLEY GOLDBERG according to a preordained party line. Nor do group traits have mystical origins. Their basis is social in nature. The drawing of national bound aries cannot in and of itself be the important variable that results in different responses to scientific innovation. The situation is very com plex. Physicists do move from one country to another. They are in communication with each other with an ease not earlier thought possi ble. Such experiences will affect individual scientists in different ways. But national boundaries do bespeak differences in social institutions and traditions. Since knowledge in science is no more and no less subject to social processes than knowledge in other spheres of human endeavor, there are many factors that help to shape a scientist's point of view. In the first instance there will be differences which result from genetic inheritance, upbringing, and experiences unique to the individual. There will also be local characteristics identified with local customs or local social struc tures and beliefs. And there will be national characteristics defined by national customs and social institutions - a kind of national intelligence. The reader will have to judge for herself or himself how significant each factor is in any particular case. And though the process is post hoc, that in itself does not mean that the identification of style is not a useful tool. Most historical analysis, like most innovative analysis in science, is post hoc. I am never impressed by the argument that knowledge in science is universal. This is usually based on at least one of two premises: 1. Knowledge about the physical world is not subject to any interpreta tion. It is ultimately confirmed by sense experience. 2. Understanding of concepts in science is universal to the extent that science employs the language of mathematics. It is my contention that empirical evidence never entails or excludes any kind of explanation. For example, it is possible to construct a geocentric theory to account for all the evidence that is now accounted for by assuming that the earth orbits the sun and spins on its axis. Such a theory might look clumsy, appear to be adorned with a myriad of seemingly arbitrary and ad-hoc hypotheses and seem contrary to com mon sense, but judgments such as these are themselves normative and based on criteria which are subject to change over time. And while it is true that there might be universal agreement on how mathematical NEW WINE IN OLD BOTTLES 3 symbols and operators are to be manipulated, in order for the symbols and operations to have meaning outside the universe of mathematics itself, the symbols have to be translated into ordinary language. As you might expect, there is about as much agreement on such translations as there is when musicians attempt to translate a musical score into ordinary language. In fact, one of the interesting features of studying the reception of the theory of relativity is that we are presented with two competing theo ries - the Lorentz theory of the electron and Einstein's special theory of relativity - which have identical formalisms but whose meanings are as different as night and day. The Lorentz theory was a dynamical theory intended to account for the behavior of all matter, radiation and their interactions, using the overarching premises of what has been termed the electromagnetic world view. 3 Einstein's theory, on the other hand, was a kinematical theory, not wedded to the electromagnetic world view at all, but reflecting Ein stein's already well formed convictions that a good theory was a theory which did what it had to do with a minimum number of postulates. Einstein's theory contained only two such postulates: The principle of relativity and the principle of the invariance of the speed of light. Behind those two postulates was the realization that all temporal and spatial measurements involved judgments of simultaneity and that in order to make such judgments, an observer had to stipulate the isotropy of space for at least one finite signal speed.4 Whereas the Lorentz theory was intended to modify and replace Newton's dynamics, Einstein's theory was a critique not of Newtonian dynamics, but of Newton's theory of measurement (contained in the Principia in the Scholium just prior to the Axioms) which implicitly assumed the possibility of an infinite signal speed. 5 RESPONSE TO EINSTEIN'S THEORY IN EUROPE As I suggested earlier, national styles of science, if they exist, are an artifact of differing social institutions. With regard to an innovation such as the theory of relativity, the most obvious social institutions to exam ine outside the scientific community would be the educational systems in the countries being compared. The evidence suggests that there is a close relationship between the nature of the response to the theory of
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