Take the openings of two windows, a living room window and a kitchen window.
The result is that different observers will not agree whether two events are simultaneous or not. He then implemented concept empiricism in his argument for the relativity of simultaneity. In the view of John D Norton, professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, Einstein learned an empiricist theory of concepts from Hume (and plausibly from Mach and the positivist tradition). The type of critical reasoning required for the discovery of this central point was decisively furthered, in my case, especially by the reading of David Hume’s and Ernst Mach’s philosophical writings. Clearly to recognise this axiom and its arbitrary character really implies already the solution of the problem. It was necessary to reject the erroneous ‘axiom of the absolute character of time, viz, simultaneity’, since the assumption of absolute simultaneity unrecognisedly was anchored in the unconscious. In Einstein’s autobiographical writing from 1949, he expands on how Hume helped him formulate the theory of special relativity. It is not clear, however, what it was in Hume’s philosophy that Einstein found useful to his physics. This was in the process of devising the special theory of relativity, which Einstein eventually published in 1905. I read him with Konrad Habicht and Solovine in Bern.’ We know that Einstein studied Hume’s Treatise (1738-40) in a reading circle with the mathematician Conrad Habicht and the philosophy student Maurice Solovine around 1902-03. More than 30 years later, his opinion hadn’t changed, as he recounted in a letter to his friend, the engineer Michele Besso: ‘In so far as I can be aware, the immediate influence of D Hume on me was greater.
It is very possible that without these philosophical studies I would not have arrived at the solution.’ Einstein praised it: ‘From the philosophical perspective, nothing nearly as clear seems to have been written on the topic.’ Then he went on to express his intellectual debt to ‘Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature I had studied avidly and with admiration shortly before discovering the theory of relativity. In 1915, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the philosopher and physicist Moritz Schlick, who had recently composed an article on the theory of relativity.
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