From the Editorial Board

This issue publishes materials devoted to the memory of the outstanding physicist of our time A. Einstein, the anniversary of whose death occurred last month.

In character, the materials fall into three groups.

The first comprises four reports received by the editors at the session of the Division of Physical and Mathematical Sciences of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (30 November–1 December 1955), devoted to the fiftieth anniversary of the theory of relativity. These are the opening address at the session by Academician I. E. Tamm, “A. Einstein and Contemporary Physics,” the reports by Corresponding Members of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR V. L. Ginzburg and A. A. Mikhailov, and the exposition of the report by Academician V. A. Fock submitted by him to the editors.

The second group of materials consists of translations of articles by A. Einstein. One of them, discussing the causes of the formation of meanders in river channels, was published in 1926 in Naturwissenschaften, but it is little known to the younger generation of Soviet physicists. The other article by A. Einstein is his “Autobiographical Notes,” written by him for a collection issued in the USA in connection with his seventieth birthday. This autobiography is a valuable document for the study of the scientist’s creative path. As is known, Einstein in many respects laid the foundations of modern physics, but in recent decades he followed his own paths and understood the tasks of physics in his own way. It is of undoubted interest to learn the final assessment of these paths and tasks from the scientist’s own lips. The article expresses a number of gnoseological positions incompatible with the scientific dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge (on the origin of concepts, on the arbitrariness of concepts and theories, on the logical criteria of the truth of theories, on the possibility of purely rationalistic knowledge of nature, and others). In publishing A. Einstein’s autobiographical document in full, the editors believe that readers will be able to take a critical attitude toward the erroneous gnoseological statements.

In his “Remarks on the Autobiographical Notes of Albert Einstein,” Academician V. A. Fock expresses his own point of view on the general theory of relativity, in which he sees a theory of gravitation, but not a generalization of the concept of relativity.

From the Editorial Board

The third group of materials consists of articles about A. Einstein by major foreign scholars.

M. Born’s article “Albert Einstein and Light Quanta” is interesting in that it convincingly shows the role played by A. Einstein in the bold turning of our views on the nature of light onto a new path, showing that from an analysis of the facts known by 1905 there emerged the quantum properties of light. Discussing A. Einstein’s first paper on light quanta, M. Born draws attention to the fact that already in it, in implicit form, “the wave-particle dualism is fully contained.” From A. Einstein’s correspondence with the author of the article it is evident, perhaps more clearly than from any publications, what A. Einstein feared when objecting to the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics—the departure from recognition of a “complete regularity in the objectively existing world,” in which A. Einstein unquestionably believed. The Editorial Board expresses disagreement with certain epistemological propositions in M. Born’s article (the assessment of the concept of complementarity as the “theoretical-cognitive foundation” of quantum mechanics, etc.).

In the essay by L. Infeld, a long-standing and close collaborator of A. Einstein, the image of the famous scientist is drawn masterfully and with great warmth. The Editorial Board does not agree with a number of Infeld’s statements in section 13, but considers it inappropriate to enter here into a discussion with him.