172 RELATIVITY, THE SPECIAL THEORYstein's death. The task of speaking about Lorentz and Poincare fell to Born (who
had attended Poincare's Goettingen lecture). He did not acquit himself well.**
Two months before his death, Einstein gave his fair and final judgment:
'Lorentz had already recognized that the transformations named after him are
essential for the analysis of Maxwell's equations, and Poincare deepened this
insight still further ...' [E18].- Coda: The Michelson-Morley Experiment. In concluding this account of
the history of special relativity, I return to its origins. Toward the end of Section
6a, I promised to comment further on Einstein's reticence in acknowledging the
influence of the Michelson-Morley experiment on his thinking. I now do so.
In a letter to an historian, written a year before his death, Einstein expressed
himself for the last time on this subject: 'In my own development, Michelson's
result has not had a considerable influence. I even do not remember if I knew of
it at all when I wrote my first paper on the subject (1905). The explanation is
that I was, for general reasons, firmly convinced that there does not exist absolute
motion and my problem was only how this could be reconciled with our knowledge
of electrodynamics. One can therefore understand why in my personal struggle
Michelson's experiment played no role, or at least no decisive role' [E19].
Why this need not to remember or, at best, to underplay this influence?
Just over twenty years before Einstein wrote this late letter, just under twenty
years after his creation of the special theory, he gave a lecture at Oxford entitled
'On the Method of Theoretical Physics' [E20], in the course of which he said, 'It
is my conviction that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the
concepts and the laws connecting them, which give us the key to the understanding
of the phenomena of Nature.' It seems to me that here Einstein grossly overesti-
mates the capabilities of the human mind, even of one as great as his own. It is
true that the theoretical physicist who has no sense of mathematical elegance,
beauty, and simplicity is lost in some essential way. At the same time it is dan-
gerous and can be fatal to rely exclusively on formal arguments. It is a danger
from which Einstein himself did not escape in his later years.
The emphasis on mathematics is so different from the way the young Einstein
used to proceed. What wrought this change? Obviously, his realization that Rie-
mannian geometry lay waiting for him as he groped his way to general relativity
must have deeply affected his subsequent thinking. Could it be, however, that the
conviction expressed in Oxford had even earlier roots?
Stepping beyond the edge of history, I offer the thought that, just barely visible,
the origins of Einstein's later attitude toward the discovery of concepts by purely
mathematical thinking may go back to 1905. The kinematic part of his June paper
has the ideal axiomatic structure of a finished theory, a structure which had
**'The reasoning used by Poincare was just the same as that which Einstein introduced in his first
paper of 1905. ... Does this mean that Poincare knew all this before Einstein? It is possible. ..'
[B6],