'SUBTLE is THE LORD' 133Einstein's first important creative act dates from his high school days, when he
independently discovered self-induction, a contribution which should, of course,
not be associated with his name. At least twice he had an idea for a new experi-
mental method to measure the aether drift. He intended to perform these exper-
iments himself but did not succeed in doing so, either because his teachers would
not let him [R2] or because he did not have enough free time [El3]. He believed
in an aether at least until 1901 [El3]. Sometime during 1895 or 1896, the thought
struck him that light cannot be transformed to rest [El2]. He knew of the
Michelson-Morley experiment which, however, was not as crucial to his formu-
lation of special relativity as were the first-order effects, the aberration of light,
and the Fresnel drag [S6, Ol]. He knew the 1895 paper of Lorentz in which the
Michelson-Morley experiment is discussed at length. He did not know the Lor-
entz transformations. He did not know any of those writings by Poincare which
deal with physics in technical detail.
It is virtually certain, however, that prior to 1905 Einstein was aware of the
1900 Paris address by Poincare and that he had also read Poincare's remark of
1898 concerning the lack of intuition about the equality of two time intervals.
Before 1905 Einstein, together with his friends of the Akademie Olympia, did
indeed read some of Poincare's general essays on science: 'In Bern I had regular
philosophical reading and discussion evenings, together with K. Habicht and
Solovine, during which we were mainly concerned with Hume. ... The reading
of Hume, along with Poincare and Mach, had some influence on my development'
[E14].
The four collections of Poincare essays—La Science et I'Hypothese, La Valeur
de la Science, Science et Methode, and Dernieres Pensees—first appeared in 1902,
1905, 1908, and 1913, respectively. All three programmatic papers by Poincare
mentioned in Section 6b are contained in one or another of these volumes. His
1898 article, in which he questioned the naive use of simultaneity, and his
St. Louis address of 1904 are found in La Valeur de la Science, his Paris address
of 1900 in La Science et I'Hypothese. This last book, the only one of the four to
appear before 1905, is the one Einstein and his friends read in Bern. I therefore
believe that, prior to his own first paper on relativity, Einstein knew the Paris
address in which Poincare suggested that the lack of any evidence for motion rel-
ative to the aether should hold generally to all orders in v/c and that 'the cancel-
lation of the [velocity-dependent] terms will be rigorous and absolute.' But there
is more. In La Science et I'Hypothese, there is a chapter on classical mechanics in
which Poincare writes, 'There is no absolute time; to say that two durations are
equal is an assertion which has by itself no meaning and which can acquire one
only by convention.. .. Not only have we no direct intuition of the equality of two
durations, but we have not even direct intuition of the simultaneity of two events
occurring in different places; this I have explained in an article entitled "La
Mesure du Temps".' I stress that Einstein and his friends did much more than
just browse through Poincare's writings. Solovine has left us a detailed list of books
which the Akademie members read together. Of these, he singles out one and only