Einstein: His Life and Universe

experimenter, yet subtly circumspect: “You uncovered an insidious defect in the ether theory of light, as it then existed, and stimulated the ideas of Lorentz and Fitzgerald, out of which the Special Theory of Relativity developed.”²¹

Einstein described his thought process in a series of talks with the Gestalt psychology pioneer Max Wertheimer, who later called the Michelson-Morley results “crucial” to Einstein’s thinking. But as Arthur I. Miller has shown, this assertion was probably motivated by Wertheimer’s goal of using Einstein’s tale as a way to illustrate the tenets of Gestalt psychology.²²

Einstein further confused the issue in the last few years of his life by giving a series of statements on the subject to a physicist named Robert Shankland. At first he said he had read of Michelson-Morley only after 1905, then he said he had read about it in Lorentz’s book before 1905, and finally he added, “I guess I just took it for granted that it was true.”²³

That final point is the most significant one because Einstein made it often. He simply took for granted, by the time he started working seriously on relativity, that there was no need to review all the ether-drift experiments because, based on his starting assumptions, all attempts to detect the ether were doomed to failure.²⁴ For him, the significance of these experimental results was to reinforce what he already believed: that Galileo’s relativity principle applied to light waves.²⁵

This may account for the scant attention he gave to the experiments in his 1905 paper. He never mentioned the Michelson-Morley experiment by name, even where it would have been relevant, nor the Fizeau experiment using moving water. Instead, right after discussing the relativity of the magnet-and-coil movements, he merely flicked in a phrase about “the unsuccessful attempts to detect a motion of the earth relative to the light medium.”

Some scientific theories depend primarily on induction: analyzing a lot of experimental findings and then finding theories that explain the empirical patterns. Others depend more on deduction: starting with elegant principles and postulates that are embraced as holy and then deducing the consequences from them. All scientists blend both approaches to differing degrees. Einstein had a good feel for experimental findings, and he used this knowledge to find certain fixed points upon which he could construct a theory.²⁶ But his emphasis was primarily on the deductive approach.²⁷

Remember how in his Brownian motion paper he so oddly, yet accurately, downplayed the role that experimental findings played in what was essentially a theoretical deduction? There was a similar situation with his relativity theory. What he implied about Brownian motion he said explicitly about relativity and Michelson-Morley: “I was pretty much convinced of the validity of the principle before I knew of this experiment and its results.”

Indeed, all three of his epochal papers in 1905 begin by asserting his intention to pursue a deductive approach. He opens each one by pointing out some oddity caused by jostling theories, rather than some unexplained set of experimental data. He then postulates grand principles while minimizing the role played by data, be it on Brownian motion or blackbody radiation or the speed of light.²⁸

In a 1919 essay called “Induction and Deduction in Physics,” he described his preference for the latter approach:

The simplest picture one can form about the creation of an empirical science is along the lines of an inductive method. Individual facts are selected and grouped together so that the laws that connect them become apparent ... However, the big advances in scientific knowledge originated in this way only to a small degree . . . The truly great advances in our understanding of nature originated in a way almost diametrically opposed to induction. The intuitive grasp of the essentials of a large complex of facts leads the scientist to the postulation of a hypothetical basic law or laws. From these laws, he derives his conclusions.

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His appreciation for this approach would grow. “The deeper we penetrate and the more extensive our theories become,” he would declare near the end of his life, “the less empirical knowledge is needed to determine those theories.”³⁰

By the beginning of 1905, Einstein had begun to emphasize deduction rather than induction in his attempt to explain electrodynamics. “By and by, I despaired of the possibility of discovering the true laws by means of constructive efforts based on experimentally known facts,” he later said. “The longer and the more despairingly I tried, the more I came to the conviction that only the discovery of a universal formal principle could lead us to assured results.”³¹

The Two Postulates

Now that Einstein had decided to pursue his theory from the top down, by deriving it from grand postulates, he had a choice to make: What postulates—what basic assumptions of general principle—would he start with?³²

His first postulate was the principle of relativity, which asserted that all of the fundamental laws of physics, even Maxwell’s equations governing electromagnetic waves, are the same for all observers moving at constant velocity relative to each other. Put more precisely, they are the same for all inertial reference systems, the same for someone at rest relative to the earth as for someone traveling at a uniform velocity on a train or spaceship. He had nurtured his faith in this postulate beginning with his thought experiment about riding alongside a light beam: “From the very beginning it appeared to me intuitively clear that, judged from the standpoint of such an observer, everything would have to happen according to the same laws as for an observer who, relative to the earth, was at rest.”

For a companion postulate, involving the velocity of light, Einstein had at least two options:

1. He could go with an emission theory, in which light would shoot from its source like particles from a gun. There would be no need for an ether. The light particles could zoom through emptiness. Their speed would be relative to the source. If this source was racing toward you, its emissions would come at you faster than if it was racing away. (Imagine a pitcher who can throw a ball at 100 miles per hour. If he throws it at you from a car racing toward you it will come at you faster than if he throws it from a car racing away.) In other words, starlight would be emitted from a star at 186,000 miles per second; but if that star was heading toward earth at 10,000 miles per second, the speed of its light would be 196,000 miles per second relative to an observer on earth.

2. An alternative was to postulate that the speed of light was a constant 186,000 miles per second irrespective of the motion of the source that emitted it, which was more consistent with a wave theory. By analogy with sound waves, a fire truck siren does not throw its sound at you faster when it’s rushing toward you than it does when it’s standing still. In either case, the sound travels through the air at 770 miles per hour.

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For a while, Einstein explored the emission theory route. This approach was particularly appealing if you conceived of light as behaving like a stream of quanta. And as noted in the previous chapter, that concept of light quanta was precisely what Einstein had propounded in March 1905, just when he was wrestling with his relativity theory.³³

But there were problems with this approach. It seemed to entail abandoning Maxwell’s equations and the wave