Philosophical Ideas in Einstein’s Physics and Cosmology

Abstract

The present paper deals with the issue of some mutual dependencies between science and philosophy. It turns out that it is not possible easily to separate these two disciplines. All the great physical theories are entangled with notions and ideas which belong to the domain of philosophy. It is well known from the history of science that such notions and ideas very often were an important stimulus that pushed a scholar toward some strictly scientific problem and made him start working on a physical theory which would allow to solve this problem. This subject matter is presented in the article in the context of scientific as well as philosophical achievements of Albert Einstein. It is shown that some philosophical ideas considerably influenced the process of formation of his relativity theory and of his first cosmological model. Special attention is paid to the so called Mach’s Principle, which is a postulate concerning the relativity of mass, and to the idea of staticity of the universe which caused Einstein to change his field equations in such a way that they would produce a static model of the universe.