Лекция 11 курса "Альберт Эйнштейн и революции в физике". Весна 2026

This lecture is devoted to Einstein's views on physical reality and the development of alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics. It examines Einstein's philosophical evolution from positivism to realism, demonstrating that the scientist was not a 100% positivist at the outset, and that his scientific realism differed significantly from the generally accepted understanding today. It also demonstrates the influence of the philosopher Pierre Duhem on Einstein, who read Duhem's book, translated into German by Friedrich Adler, while living in the same house with Adler in Zurich in 1909-1910. From the very beginning, Einstein was impressed by Duhem's epistemological holism, which Adler highlighted in the preface to his translation of "The Theory of Physics" as one of the main differences between Mach and Duhem. Einstein rightly considered this holism the key to a kind of empiricism more suited to hypotheses and profound theories than Mach's positivism, since it required empirical verification not of every individual scientific concept and assertion, but only of entire systems of theories. An example is the electric charge of a solid body: there are charges inside the body, but you can't insert a test charge. In other words, there is no direct experimental verification. The entire theory of electricity must be tested. But Duhem's holism has another side. According to Duhem, the fact that theories are tested as a whole, rather than piecemeal, means that any array of empirical data can always be explained by any one of several different, empirically equivalent theories. Einstein was inclined to "theorize" questions concerning issues such as realism and determinism; that is, for Einstein, these were not simply metaphysical questions that needed to be answered with fundamental philosophical arguments. Instead, these were questions about the success of research programs involving realist or deterministic theories. Realism, according to Einstein, means a commitment to a program of theories that satisfy the separability principle, according to which a non-zero space-time separation is a sufficient condition for the individuation of physical systems. This is completely at odds with the reality of the late 20th-century philosophical debates about scientific realism, but this is precisely what reality meant to Einstein, and, as it turns out, this theme runs through virtually all of Einstein's scientific work, from his first paper on the quantum hypothesis in 1905 to his final reflections on unified field theory in 1955. For Einstein, field theories such as general relativity are distinguished by their satisfaction of the separability principle, while quantum theory, in Einstein's eyes, is condemned by its complete denial of this principle. There is a systematic unity in Einstein's epistemology, but the key to it should be sought not in any one philosophical system, but in the close connections between Einstein's philosophy of science and his work in physics. What's wrong with the claim that Einstein was a Machian positivist in his youth? After all, Einstein did read Mach enthusiastically: "In my youth, I was enormously influenced by Mach's epistemological position, a position that today seems to me essentially untenable." The answer is that this interpretation is deeply flawed. First, in 1905, Einstein was writing about more than just relativity. In his works on capillarity, the foundations of statistical physics, Brownian motion, molecular dimensions, and the quantum hypothesis, Einstein reveals no doubt about the reality of atoms and molecules, which constitute the fundamental ontology of the kinetic theory of matter. On the contrary, Einstein himself believed that one of the main achievements of these studies was the proof of the reality of atoms: "My main goal was to find facts that would guarantee as closely as possible the existence of atoms of a certain size. The agreement of these considerations with experiment, as well as Planck's determination of the true size of a molecule from the law of radiation (at high temperatures), convinced the skeptics, of whom there were many at that time (Ostwald, Mach), of the reality of atoms." It was precisely this issue—the tension between Douhem's underdeterminism and a straightforward, realistic interpretation of scientific theories—that was explored in detail in the correspondence and discussions between Einstein and Moritz Schlick between 1915 and 1921. Schlick's numerous discussions of underdetermination prompted a series of thoughtful comments from Einstein, in which he supported the idea that experiment alone is insufficient to unambiguously determine the choice of theory. Einstein agreed that simplicity should guide us when choosing between empirically equivalent theories, but he eventually came to doubt that simplicity is an objective criterion. The lecture also examines the history of Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics, which greatly influence...