Footnote:

A main theme in Elkana's article mentioned in the previous notes is to depict Einstein's own world-view ("a very complex world-view") as that of the "epic theater" perspective (Elkana does not claim, of course, that Einstein understood this in the terms used in the article). Thus for instance on p. 208: "Einstein was a genuine sage, his world an epic theater. There  is no inevitability about the order of nature: ever again an unpredicted and unexpected new reality could emerge. ... So too in the moral sphere. Einstein did not believe in any predetermined moral order of the world that all humans were required to follow." While this way to look at Einstein and his world offers interesting insights, I think that the Einstein scholarship of recent years (precisely that kind of scholarship that follows the "epic theater" approach to the history of science) has come to offer an even more complex picture of Einstein in which also "dramatic " aspects are clearly manifest. In fact, Elkana himself admits (p. 245, n. 9) that "if there was dramatic inevitability about anything in Einstein's conceptual world, it was about his epistemology. Human knowledge had to be deterministic, had to be predictable."

 

Calculating the Limits of Poetic License:
Fictional Narrative and the History of Mathematics

Leo Corry - Tel Aviv University