Quote:
Originally Posted by JustinFromBoise
Good speakablilty (my word) doesn't really measure how smart or dumb someone is. Albert Einstein couldn't even read.
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What are you smoking and could you get me some?
Einstein was typical of his generation of physicists in the seriousness and extent of his early and lasting engagement with philosophy. By the age of 16, he had already read all three of Immanuel Kant's major works, the
Critique of Pure Reason, the
Critique of Practical Reason, and the
Critique of Judgment.
6 (http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-58/iss-12/p34.html#ref - broken link) Einstein was to read Kant again while studying at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zürich, where he attended August Stadler's lectures on Kant in the summer semester of 1897. Stadler belonged to the Marburg neo-Kantian movement, which was distinguished by its efforts to make sense of foundational and methodological aspects of current science within the Kantian framework.
7 (http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-58/iss-12/p34.html#ref - broken link) It was also at university that Einstein first read Mach's
Mechanics (1883) and his
Principles of the Theory of Heat (1896), along with Arthur Schopenhauer's
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851). It was probably also there that he first read Friedrich Albert Lange's
History of Materialism (1873), Eugen Dühring's
Critical History of the Principles of Mechanics (1887), and Ferdinand Rosenberger's
Isaac Newton and His Physical Principles (1895). All those books were, at the end of the century, well known to intellectually ambitious young physics students.
Albert Einstein as a Philosopher of Science - Physics Today December 2005 (http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-58/iss-12/p34.html - broken link)
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