From Patrick Traill
Michael Brooks lends credence to the story that Einstein’s theory of relativity was a response to the alleged failure of the physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley to measure the ether drift (23 October, p 32). The physical chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, in his book Personal Knowledge, exposes this as a myth, quoting Einstein’s autobiography and a reply to Polanyi explicitly denying influence by Michelson and Morley. Einstein had already developed the theory by reflecting, from the age of 16, on paradoxes such as the view of a light wave for an observer travelling at the speed of light.
Polanyi believed that the true story undermines the “positivist” view that science is restricted to a dispassionate search for formal systems that make predictions testable against experience. He argues that science depends on a conviction that there are rational structures in nature. “Verification of a scientific statement,” he wrote, “requires the same powers for recognising rationality in nature as does the process of scientific discovery [though] at a lower level.” He suggests that philosophers of science confuse demonstration with critical verification.
Nettetal-Leuth, Germany
