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Principles of Research
address by Albert Einstein (1918)
(Physical Society, Berlin, for Max Planck's sixtieth birtday)
In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are
they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither.
Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual
power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid
experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be
found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on
this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord
to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out
of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there
would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside.
Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him.

I am quite aware that we have just now lightheartedly expelled in
imagination many excellent men who are largely, perhaps chiefly,
responsible for the buildings of the temple of science; and in many
cases our angel would find it a pretty ticklish job to decide. But of
one thing I feel sure: if the types we have just expelled were the
only types there were, the temple would never have come to be, any
more than a forest can grow which consists of nothing but creepers.
For these people any sphere of human activity will do, if it comes to
a point; whether they become engineers, officers, tradesmen, or
scientists depends on circumstances. Now let us have another look at
those who have found favor with the angel. Most of them are somewhat
odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other,
in spite of these common characteristics, than the hosts of the
rejected. What has brought them to the temple? That is a difficult
question and no single answer will cover it. To begin with, I believe
with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that leads men to
art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity
and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever shifting
desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life
into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be
compared with the townsman's irresistible longing to escape from his
noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where
the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces
out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

With this negative motive there goes a positive one. Man tries to make
for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and
intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to
substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to
overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative
philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion.
Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional
life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he
cannot find in tbe narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

What place does the theoretical physicist's picture of the world
occupy among all these possible pictures? It demands the highest
possible standard of rigorous precision in the description of
relations, such as only the use of mathematical language can give. In
regard to his subject matter, on the other hand, the physicist has to
limit himself very severely: he must content himself with describing
the most simple events which can be brought within the domain of our
experience; all events of a more complex order are beyond the power of
the human intellect to reconstruct with the subtle accuracy and
logical perfection which the theoretical physicist demands. Supreme
purity, clarity, and certainty at the cost of completeness. But what
can be the attraction of getting to know such a tiny section of nature
thoroughly, while one leaves everything subtler and more complex shyly
and timidly alone? Does the product of such a modest effort deserve to
be called by the proud name of a theory of the universe?

In my belief the name is justified; for the general laws on which the
structure of theoretical physics is based claim to be valid for any
natural phenomenon whatsoever. With them, it ought to be possible to
arrive at the description, that is to say, the theory, of every
natural process, including life, by means of pure deduction, if that
process of deduction were not far beyond the capacity of the human
intellect. The physicist's renunciation of completeness for his cosmos
is therefore not a matter of fundamental principle.

The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal
elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure
deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition,
resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them. In
this methodological uncertainty, one might suppose that there were any
number of possible systems of theoretical physics all equally well
justified; and this opinion is no doubt correct, theoretically. But
the development of physics has shown that at any given moment, out of
all conceivable constructions, a single one has always proved itself
decidedly superior to all the rest. Nobody who has really gone deeply
into the matter will deny that in practice the world of phenomena
uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the fact that
there is no logical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical
principles; this is what Leibnitz described so happily as a
"pre-established harmony." Physicists often accuse epistemologists of
not paying sufficient attention to this fact. Here, it seems to me,
lie the roots of the controversy carried on some years ago between
Mach and Planck.

The longing to behold this pre-established harmony is the source of
the inexhaustible patience and perseverance with which Planck has
devoted himself, as we see, to the most general problems of our
science, refusing to let himself be diverted to more grateful and more
easily attained ends. I have often heard colleagues try to attribute
this attitude of his to extraordinary will-power and discipline --
wrongly, in my opinion. The state of mind which enables a man to do
work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the
lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program,
but straight from the heart. There he sits, our beloved Planck, and
smiles inside himself at my childish playing-about with the lantern of
Diogenes. Our affection for him needs no threadbare explanation. May
the love of science continue to illumine his path in the future and
lead him to the solution of the most important problem in present-day
physics, which he has himself posed and done so much to solve. May he
succeed in uniting quantum theory with electrodynamics and mechanics
in a single logical system.