In the introduction that Albert Einstein wrote for Jacques Hannak’s posthumous biography of Emanuel Lasker, “Emanuel Lasker, The Life of a Chess Master” (Berlin, 1952), the Nobel Prize in Physics briefly sketched some of the composite and multifaceted personality of the “philosopher” Lasker and also replied, for the first time, to his objections to the theory of relativity. As Piergiorgio Odifreddi writes in his article “The Ideal Chessplayer”:
As might be expected of a man of such breadth of mind, Lasker’s interests extended as far as philosophy, with which even his chess books are imbued. In a critical essay aimed at refuting the relativity of time, he objected that it could not be excluded that the velocity of light in a complete vacuum was infinite, since no experiments could be done in a really complete vacuum. Einstein replied that, albeit sensible, the objection forced us to assume that the velocity of light was infinite in a vacuum, but finite and constant in the presence of any (even minimal) traces of matter. And he concluded, in his usual oracular way: a strong mind cannot take place of delicate fingers. Idem to say: speculative theories cannot be separated from practical experiments. Thus spoke the greatest physicist in the history. |
The original hand-written text (in German language) of Einstein’s introduction is kept in the Albert Einstein Archives:
