16
DOC.
3
INAUGURAL
LECTURE
Doc.
3
Inaugural
Lectures and
Responses
[The inaugural
lectures of those members who
newly
entered the
Academy
since the
Leibniz-Session
of
1913
followed this
lecture.]
Inaugural
Lecture of Mr. Einstein
[p. 739]
Most honored
colleagues!
Please
accept
first
my
heartfelt
gratitude
for the
greatest
favor
you
could have
bestowed
upon
a
person
such
as
I.
By calling
me
into
your Academy you
have
put
me
into
a
position
that allows
me
to
devote
myself wholly
to
scientific studies and
[1]
frees
me
from the distractions and tribulations
of
a
practical profession.
I ask
you
to
believe in
my feelings
of
gratitude
and the assiduousness of
my striving,
even
if
the
fruits
of
my
efforts
may appear
to
you
as
meager
ones.
Allow
me
to
append a
few
general
remarks about the
position
which
my
field of
work,
theoretical
physics,
takes vis-ä-vis
experimental physics.
A
mathematician
friend
recently
said
to me,
half
jokingly,
"The mathematician knows
some
things,
no
[p. 740]
doubt,
but of
course
not
those
things
one
usually
wants to
get
from him." The
theoretical
physicist
is in
a
very
similar
position
when the
experimental
physicist
asks
him for advice.
So,
what
are
the
reasons
for this
strange
lack
of
adaptability?
[2]
The
methodology
of the theoretician mandates
implicitly
that he
use as
his basis
general assumptions,
so-called
principles,
from which he
can
then deduce conclusions.
His
activity,
therefore,
has
two
parts:
first,
he has to ferret
out
these
principles,
and
second,
he has
to
develop
the conclusions that
can
be deduced from these
principles.
His school
provides
him
with excellent tools with which
to
fulfill the second-named
task.
Consequently,
when the first
one
of his tasks is
already
solved for
some
area,
or
rather
some
complex
of
phenomena,
then sufficient
diligence
and
insight
assure
that
success
will
not
be denied
to
him. But the former
task, namely
to
establish these
principles
which
can serve
as
the basis of his
deductions,
is
one
of
a
completely
different kind. Here there
is
no
learnable,
systematically applicable
method which
would led him
to
the
objective.
The researcher must rather
eavesdrop
on
nature to
become
privy
to
these
general principles, by recognizing
in
larger
sets of
experiential
facts certain
general
traits that
can
then be
strictly
and
precisely
formulated.
Once this formulation is
achieved,
a
chain
of
conclusions
sets in,
often with
unforeseen
connections,
far
transcending
the
domain of facts from which the
principle
has been wrested.
However,
as long as
the
principles
that
must
serve as
the basis for
the deduction remain
undiscovered,
the
individual
experimental
fact is
of
no
help
to
the theoretician. In
fact,
he
cannot
even
do much with individual
empirically