Einstein's revolution: a study in heuristic

Resumo

This book can be regarded as an overambitious attempt to emulate Mach's celebrated Science of Mechanics, avows the author right at the beginning of the preface of this thick and dense book. Zahar adds that Einstein's Revolution is a textbook on relativity written from a historical-methodological point of view', which can also be read by philosophers who are 'primarily interested in methodology and epistemology' but lack the mathematical and physical expertise required for a full understanding of its technical parts. Putting aside the question of how overambitious Zahar's attempt actually is, we should notice that Mach apparently did not hold that his book could play the prima facie conflicting dual role that Zahar ascribes to it. Even a cursory inspection of both books will reveal that they in fact represent historical and conceptual analyses of the development of mechanics (classical, in one case, relativistic, in the other), which are partially used to support, explicitly or not, certain historical, epistemological and methodological theses, or, as Mach says, 'to clear up ideas, expose the real significance of the matter' (Mach 1974, p. xxii). It is hard to conceive how this effective goal of both books could be even imperfectly grasped by someone who, out of necessity, haste or laziness, 'skip[s] the technical parts', as suggested by Zahar (who nevertheless acknowledges that in this cases 'some philosophical loss' would occur). It should also be mentioned that the knowledge of mathematics and physics required by Einstein's Revolution is certainly well beyond what one could reasonably expect from the average philosophical  reader without professional training in these disciplines.