Author: Paul Ratner / Source: Big Think
- Einstein had a large library and was a voracious reader.
- The famous physicist admitted that some books influenced his thinking.
- The books he preferred were mostly philosophical and scientific in nature.
Undoubtedly considered one of the brightest individuals who ever lived, Albert Einstein did not become so accomplished in a vacuum.
The physicist learned from the best minds of the time, as is evidenced by his voracious appetite for reading and his extensive personal book collection.In “Einstein for the 21st Century,“ the authors describe the famous scientist’s library. It contained “much of the canon of the time,” write the editors Peter Galison, Gerald J.Holton, and Silvan S. Schweber, referring to the great collection of German books. Among these were such names as Boltzmann, Buchner, Friedrich Hebbel, two editions of the works of Heine, Helmholtz and von Humboldt. There were also many books by the philosophers Immanuel Kant, Gotthold Lessing, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.
But what were Einstein’s favorite books? Perhaps there’s no one simple answer to that but we do know which works the creator of the theory of general relativity seemed to come back to over and over.
Here are his 5 favorite books and writers, as we know it.
5. “Analysis of Sensations” by Ernst Mach
Einstein’s development of the theory of relativity was by his own admission influenced by the work of Ernst Mach – a 19th-century Austrian philosopher and physicist. In his Analysis of Sensations,” Mach wrote about the elusive nature of the human senses and the mutability of the ego.
Mach’s work also included criticism of Newton’s theories of time and space – another source of inspiration for Einstein’s own ideas. In fact, Einstein named a hypothesis that he derived from Mach as ‘Mach’s Principle’ – the idea that inertia is originated in an interaction between bodies, which was an idea Einstein himself saw as instrumental.
In a 1915 letter he wrote to Moritz Schlick, Einstein explained what writers influenced his thinking in coming up with the theory of relativity, saying:
“You have also correctly seen that this trend of thought [positivism] was of great influence on my efforts, and specifically E. Mach and still much more Hume, whose treatise on understanding I studied with fervor and admiration shortly before the discovery of the theory of relativity. It is very well possible that without these philosophical studies I would…
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