Einstein’s Culture Club: The Future of Physics, Science, & Politics

Abstract

Christopher Charles Portosa Stevens

This article is a philosophical dialogue concerning Einstein and the directions of science. Einstein is celebrated. Einstein’s biography is discussed, and instead of traditional and conventional portrayals of Einstein in terms of psycho-biography, Einstein is portrayed as participating in several cultural and social movements in Europe: Kant and Kantianism; socialism, Marxism, and positivism; Poincare and French conventionalism; as being steeped in traditional or ‘conservative’ European cultural patterns, like philosophy and music; as being steeped in cutting edge European ideas of the late 19th and early 20th centuries of the “Olympia Academy,” Einstein’s student reading circle or Culture Club. The dialogue discusses how, contra classic social scientific and Marxist interpretations, Einstein and Heisenberg were culturally and socially polar opposites, though both theoretical physicists were willing to pursue the ‘holy grail’ of unifying all of the forces of physics, like contemporary String Theorists.

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