Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions 155
Nevertheless, Einstein completed his Ph.D. in physics. Afterwards, he
earned money as a tutor until an influential friend found him an
undemanding job in the Swiss Patent Office in Berne. He held this
position for seven years (1902–1909),during which he published his
most famous papers. In 1905, the year his papers on the Special Theory
of Relativity appeared, he also published two other major works, which,
in themselves, also represented revolutions in physics thinking. It was
for his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect, which established the
existence of the photon, and not for relativity that he received the Nobel
Prize in 1921. In that same year of 1905, he also published his paper
describing Brownian motion, which established the first direct detection
of atoms. Three revolutionary papers in one year were produced and all
the time while working in the patent office in Berne.
It was in 1909, after he had completed his most revolutionary work
with the exception of the General Theory of Relativity that Einstein
began to receive academic acclaim. In the years following 1909, he
accepted professorial chairs from Prague, Zurich and Berlin. In 1932, as
Hitler came to power in Germany, Einstein fled to the United States
where he spent the remainder of his life at the Institute for Advanced
Studies at Princeton. He was also a great humanist devoting much of his
efforts to world peace.
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity caused as large a response in the
non-scientific world as it did in the scientific world. The overwhelming
response of the layman was bewilderment because the notions of
relativity violated their notion of common sense very much as it had
violated the common sense of the physicist, Magie. Relativity for
them was strictly a mathematical model, which they could not relate
to intuitively. One aspect of Einstein’s ideas, however, became very
popular and that was the notion of relativity. If everything is relative in
the physical world, it was argued then that the same must be true of
things in the world of art, morals or ideas. Some people were appalled by
this notion and were opposed to Einstein’s ideas because they considered
them downright immoral. Other thinkers found the aspect of Einstein’s
physical theories extremely liberating. For example, Jose Ortega y
Gasset wrote in his book, The Modern Theme: “The theory of Einstein is
a marvelous proof of the harmonious multiplicity of all possible points of
view if the idea is extended to morals and aesthetics, we shall come to
experience history and life in a new way. It is the same with nations.
Instead of regarding non-European cultures as barbarous, we shall now