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No scientific breakthrough really happens
by chance. A theory of relativity demands more than an Einstein,
says Lewis Feuer. It takes a certain intellectual climate,
a decisive tension within the very fabric of society, to
spur one man's potential genius into world-shaking achievement.
It is Dr. Feuer's provocative thesis that
intergenerational conflict plays a key role in scientific
creativity. And in Einstein and the Generations of Science,
he vividly recreates the unique social, political, and philosophical
milieux in which the extraordinary promise of Einstein --
and scientific contemporaries -- took root and flourished
into greatness.
In this absorbing intellectual history,
we come to know Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, de Broglie,
and many others not as formidable theoreticians, but as
men of high imaginative powers -- influenced by and influencing
the social worlds in which they lived. Dr. Feuer portrays
them locked in generational conflict with tradition -- bound
fathers and a rigid scientific establishment. They emerge
as men endowed with rare talents, strong emotions, and very
personal ideas about the nature of social and physical reality.
Entering the exhilarating world of Zurich
at the turn of the century, we meet the young Einstein engaged
in debate with comrades of the anti-establishment "Olympia
Academy" -- among them the son of a socialist leader
(who would later assassinate the Austrian prime minister),
a down-at-the-heels Rumanian, and an Italian engineer (to
whom Einstein first expounds his theory of relativity),
We encounter Neils Bohr among sons of the Danish elite;
Werner Heisenberg as a member of the nationalistic, anti-Semitic
German Youth Movement; Louis Victor, Prince de Broglie,
allied to the young Bergsonians of the Third French Republic.
Each of these restless, brilliant young men were fired by
the works of great philosophers -- Mach, Kierkegaard, Plato,
Bergson -- and Dr. Feuer shows precisely how they turned
the most profound ideas of these thinkers into fuel for
scientific advancement.
Einstein and the Generations of Science
displays the towering scientists of our century in their
most human detail. It is also a revealing cross-section
of the early 20th century itself -- and of the crucial discoveries
and ideas that hurtled us into a new world.
Lewis S. Feuer is Professor of Sociology
at the University of Toronto. His previous works include
The Conflict of Generations (1969) and The Scientific
Intellectual (1963). Writing of Feuer in The New
York Times Book Review, Bernard Cohen hailed him as "a
challenging questioner and a raiser of doubts concerning
many generally accepted points of view."
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