Holton+text

“It is surely significant that these personal ‘odd contrasts’ have their counterparts in polarities that run right through [Einstein’s] scientific work. The most striking of these is the well-known dichotomy between Einstein’s devotion to the thema of the //continuum// – expressed most eminently in the field concept – as the basis for fundamental, scientific explanation, and, on the other side, his role in developing quantum physics in which the key idea is //atomistic discreteness//. This merits some amplification. [...]

We can go back even further when searching for the point where the thematic commitment to the continuum was formed. It is well known that, as a child of four or five, Einstein experienced what he called ‘a wonder’ when his father showed him a simple magnetic pocket compass. It was an experience to which Einstein often referred. His friend Moszkowski reported him in 1922 to have said, ‘Young as I was, the remembrance of this occurrence never left me.’ His biographer Seeling wrote in 1954 that the compass ‘to this day is vividly engraved in his memory, because it practically bewitched him.’ In his autobiography, written at the age of sixty-seven, we read: ‘I can still remember – or at least I believe I can remember – that this experience made a deep and lasting impression on me. Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.’

This scene is most suggestive. There is the mysterious invariance or constancy of the compass needle, ever returning to the same direction, despite the fact that the needle seems free from any action-by-contact of the kind that is usually unconsciously invoked to explain the behaviour of materials things; despite the vagaries of motion one may arbitrarily impose on the case of the compass from the outside; and regardless of personal will or external //Zwang// or chaos. If Einstein remembered it so well and referred to it so often, it may be because the episode is an allegory of the formation of the playground of his basic imagination.”

Source: Holton, G. (1973) //Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought//. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, pp. 357-360.

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