Einstein Believed in Replacement Theory

Albert Einstein was the world's most famous physicist, and synonomous with genius. There are many biographies of him.

His political views are not so well known. He was a Communist, and belonged to Communist front organizations when Communism was the world's greatest evil. He assisted the Kremlin by spreading anti-American propaganda.

The biggest Commie tactic was to spread racial and class animosity and division. 2018 Manchester Guardian article:

The publication of Albert Einstein’s private diaries detailing his tour of Asia in the 1920s reveals the theoretical physicist and humanitarian icon’s racist attitudes to the people he met on his travels, particularly the Chinese.

Written between October 1922 and March 1923, the diaries see the scientist musing on his travels, science, philosophy and art. In China, the man who famously once described racism as “a disease of white people” describes the “industrious, filthy, obtuse people” he observes. He notes how the “Chinese don’t sit on benches while eating but squat like Europeans do when they relieve themselves out in the leafy woods. All this occurs quietly and demurely. Even the children are spiritless and look obtuse.” After earlier writing of the “abundance of offspring” and the “fecundity” of the Chinese, he goes on to say: “It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.”

He was a Zionist who considered Jews better than everyone else.

Consider his 1946 essay on the Negro Question. The ethnic groups mentioned are Jews, Whites, Americans, Negroes, and Greeks. He had been living in America for 13 years and had white skin, but does not consider himself either American or White. He says he is a Jew. He did not practice Jewish religious customs, so he is referring to his race and/or nationality.

He badmouths everyone except Jews. He has a low opinion of all non-Jews, and resists admitting that any non-Jew could be better than any other.

You do not see much comment on this, because his views were not that ununusual among Jews. There were many Jewish Commies at the time. Today, our leading Jewish politician is Senator Chuck Schumer. While he is not a Commie, his primary allegiances are to Israel, and he works for racial animosity between Whites and Blacks at every opportunity.

Pope was misquoted again

A front page NY Times story started:

Pope Francis has given hope to gays, unmarried couples and advocates of the Big Bang theory. Now, he has endeared himself to dog lovers, animal rights activists and vegans.

But see also the correction:

He did not say: “One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.” ... The Times should have verified the quotations with the Vatican.

He hasn't really changed those other doctrines either. The Big Bang was discovered by a Catholic priest astronomer, and accepted by the Vatican before Einstein other physicists.

Celebrating abstract nonsense

Berkeley mathematician Edward Frenkel writes in the NY Times:

Alexander Grothendieck, who died on Nov. 13 at the age of 86, was a visionary who captivated the collective psyche of his peers like no one else. ...

Grothendieck’s genius was to recognize that there is a “being” hiding behind a given algebraic equation (or a system of equations) called a scheme. The spaces of solutions are mere projections, or shadows of this scheme. Moreover, he realized that these schemes inhabit a rich world. They “interact” with one another, can be “glued” together and so on. ...

Though one might ask if there are any real-world applications of his work, the more important question is whether having found applications, we also find the wisdom to protect the world from the monsters we create using these applications. Alas, the recent misuse of mathematics does not give us much comfort.

For example, according to published reports, the National Security Agency inserted a back door in a widely used encryption algorithm based on “elliptic curves” — mathematical objects illuminated by Grothendieck’s research. Though that specific algorithm was developed much later, Grothendieck recognized the potential dangers of such misuse of math and sounded the alarm. He was incensed when he learned that IHES, the mathematics institute near Paris where he worked, received funding from the French Ministry of Defense. In protest, he resigned from the institute in 1970 at the height of his power. He had hoped that his colleagues would follow him, but none did.

They did not follow him because he was going crazy. He spent the last 20 years writing unintelligible rants.

Grothendieck’s life story is a wild one. He was the illegitimate son of anarchist parents, and grew up without nationality or parents. He is mainly famous for what mathematicians affectionately call abstract nonsense, and recast the foundations of algebraic geometry in that style. He had a cult-like following of some of the world's smartest men. There are no practical applications, as far as I know, even tho his Wash. Post obituary said:

His contributions to mathematics were often likened to those of Albert Einstein in physics. ... Other scholars came to apply Mr. Grothendieck’s theoretical frameworks to such fields as computer programming, software development, satellite communications, classification systems and the study of biological data.

The analogy to Einstein is strange. Einstein is mainly famous for popularizing relativity theory, and relativity was pivotal for XX century physics. Maybe a better comparison would be to Kurt Goedel, whose work was of pre-eminent foundational importance, but of little consequence to the rest of mathematics or the real world.

Frenkel suggests that Grothendieck might have objected to an NSA-designed random number generator. Maybe so, but that would be more proof of his paranoia. While the news regularly has news of security breeches affecting millions of people, there is no evidence of anyone being adversely affected by that random number generator.

Searching for the math gene

Here is an example of people opposed to knowledge.

Nature mag reports:

Rothberg and physicist Max Tegmark, who is based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, have enrolled about 400 mathematicians and theoretical physicists from top-ranked US universities in a study dubbed ‘Project Einstein’. They plan to sequence the participants’ genomes using the Ion Torrent machine that Rothberg developed.

The team will be wading into a field fraught with controversy. ...

The critics say that the sizes of these studies are too small to yield meaningful results for such complex traits. And some are concerned about ethical issues. If the projects find genetic markers for maths ability, these could be used as a basis for the selective abortion of fetuses or in choosing between embryos created through in vitro fertilization, says Curtis McMullen. A mathematician at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a 1998 winner of the prestigious Fields Medal, McMullen was asked to participate in Project Einstein and declined. ...

There is precedent to the concept of sequencing extreme outliers in a population in the hunt for influential genes. Scientists have used the technique to sift for genes that influence medical conditions such as high blood pressure and bone loss. Some behavioural geneticists, such as Robert Plomin at King’s College London, who is involved with the BGI project, say that there is no reason that this same approach won’t work for maths ability. As much as two-thirds of a child’s mathematical aptitude seems to be influenced by genes (Y. Kovas et al. Psychol. Sci. 24, 2048–2056; 2013).

This project may be a failure, as most attempts to relate genes to behavior have been.

Some people are irrationally scared of genes and IQ. This is just a research project looking for medical knowledge.

The name "Einstein" is an odd choice, if they are looking for mathematical talent. Einstein made very little contribution to mathematics. He is famous for relativity and that is a mathematical theory, but nearly all of the mathematics was worked out by others, and not Einstein.

Freudianism as Pseudoscience

Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci has a podcast on Freudianism as Pseudoscience. They cite Frank Cioffi and others who showed that Freud was not scientific:

Mr. Cioffi’s essay, “Freud and the Idea of a Pseudo-Science,” published in 1970, was rediscovered a decade later by a cadre of thinkers challenging Freud’s theories of the mind. Delighted to have a respected logician on their side, the anti-Freudians cited the essay as one of the historic opening salvos in their war against Freudian orthodoxy. Mr. Cioffi became a sort of cult hero.

He died on Jan. 1 at his home in Canterbury, England, his nephew, Frank Cioffi, said. He was 83.

An Oxford-trained philosopher who taught at the University of Essex, Mr. Cioffi (pronounced ch-AW-fi), claimed no stake in the internecine warfare that divided Freudian analysts after the death of Sigmund Freud in 1939. He said he had simply read Freud’s famous case studies with a logician’s eye and had reached the conclusion that Freud had manipulated his patients and fudged the evidence to suit his ideas.

Mr. Cioffi’s essay on Freud was little noticed mainly because it appeared in a philosophy journal. It was further obscured by the publication that year of Kate Millett’s best seller, “Sexual Politics,” which made the feminist case against Freud (and others) for what she called his “male supremacist bias.”

But historians of science and Freud revisionists consider Mr. Cioffi’s early work to be seminal.

Frank Cioffi said:

Advances in neurology will vindicate the amorphous and figurative speculations of Freud in the same sense in which the major events of the last few centuries vindicate the prophetic powers of Nostradamus.

They point out that Freudians only abandoned their ideas about homosexuality and penis envy because they because politically incorrect, not because of any data or scientific analysis. Furthermore, exposing Freud is not new, as he was exposed as a phony in his lifetime.

At about 32:00, they start to distinguish the origin and testability of ideas. As an example, Pigliucci talks about the origin of relativity being Einstein's thought experiments about riding light waves, and deducing that the speed of light is constant.

This is nonsense. All of the main ideas of relativity were published by Lorentz and Poincare before Einstein, as explained in my book. But no need to take my word for it. Einstein said that he borrowed the constant speed of light from Lorentz.

Einstein is always the example of someone who dreamed up a revolutionary new scientific theory out of pure thought, while ignoring previous theory and experiment. For example, here is a philosopher making the argument:

But Polanyi devotes only a few pages to these matters, for his main proof depends on what he calls “the story of Relativity.” That theory was indeed taken by the positivists to show that through instrumentalist thinking Einstein had freed l9th-century physics from its metaphysical underpinnings, and thereby made the breakthrough to modern science. Polanyi correctly points out that every textbook of physics tried to present the rise of relativity as the necessary response to an experimental situation, namely the supposed null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment searching for an ether drift in l887 -- fully in accord with the sensationist or positivist view of how theories must proceed. (As well, we should add, the easiest pedagogic method of convincing students that they must take seriously what otherwise would be so counter-intuitive.) But, Polanyi declares, “the historical facts are different.”54 He noted that Einstein, in his publication, had not mentioned the Michelson-Morley experiment at all, and concludes from it that this theory was proposed “on the basis of pure speculation, rationally intuited by Einstein before he had ever heard about it.”55

No, the facts are not different. The rise of relativity was indeed the necessary response to an experimental situation. See my book for details. Or see this 1972 Herbert Dingle rebuttal. Einstein did not pay much attention to Michelson-Morley because Lorentz already invented the theory to explain it.

Coyne attacks Christian discoverer of Big Bang

Leftist-atheist-evolution Jerry Coyne attacks Michael Coren, a Christian scholar:

He even argues that secularism has held back science, because the Big Bang theory, proposed by the priest Georges Lemaître,

was opposed by the secular, scientific world when it was first discussed, because it sounded too Christian. Who, then, had the open minds and who the closed?

That’s bogus. Hubble had already produced evidence for an expanding universe around the time Lemaître proposed the Big Bang, and the physics community was divided for a few decades between the steady-state and Big Bang theories.  Fred Hoyle, who coined the name “big bang” as a derisive phrase, may have disliked it partly because of his atheism, but it’s simply not true that the “secular, scientific world” opposed Lemaître’s theory because it implied a creator.

Coyne should stick to biology. There is overwhelming evidence that Lemaitre discovered the Big Bang, with both theory and data, as explained here, here, here, and in my book. Lemaitre's data was inaccurate, but so was Hubble's. I would comment on Coyne's blog, but I have been banned there for correcting him previously.

Coyne is particularly upset at Coren for saying:

The science aspect of all this is particularly nauseating, not only because it is fundamentally untrue, but that it is thrown at Christianity at a time when society is arguably experiencing one of its most credulous and naïve stages and is only too willing to embrace any and every kind of non-scientific or anti-scientific nonsense, from alien invasion stories to ghost myths, and from conspiracy theories to supernatural animals. To paraphrase the great Christian writer G.K. Chesterton, when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in something else, they believe in anything else.

There is something to this. Almost everyone believes in things that are contrary to the teachings of science. Including Coyne.

Christians usually believe in miracles, and they are, by definition, contrary to the teachings of science. Christians are not anti-science like the people who will believe in anything. Even the Pope considers scientific evidence when deciding whether something was a miracle. Christianity has always encouraged science.

I do not know whether Hubble is popularly credited out of some anti-Christian prejudice. Maybe Hubble got better press because he was an American. But what is Coyne's excuse? He is uncomfortable with the fact that many famous scientists have been Christians.

Female boxer wants to wear shorts

The current SciAm says that you are likely to be a moral relativist if you can solve this problem:

The green blocks problem
There are five blocks in a stack. In this stack, the second block from the top is green, and the fourth is not green. Is a green block definitely on top of a non-green block?

A) Yes
B) No
C) Cannot be determined

This seems like just a typical IQ test question to me.

Meanwhile, Yahoo sports reports:

Women will get a chance to box in the Olympics for the first time in 2012. If the Amateur International Boxing Association has anything to say about it, they will be wearing skirts. ... Unsurprisingly, many top female boxers are against this plan. Three-time world champion Katie Taylor from Ireland does not want to wear something that she would find uncomfortable while fighting:
"It's a disgrace that they're forcing some of the women to wear those mini-skirts. We should be able to wear shorts, just like the men.
"I won't be wearing a mini-skirt. I don't even wear mini-skirts on a night out, so I definitely won't be wearing mini-skirts in the ring."

Weird. Are they afraid that they might look feminine? Not too much chance of that.

Marital entanglement

Quantum mechanics is not known to be significant for macroscopic objects, but here is an attempt:

For the ultimate in a nondenominational wedding ceremony, consider a quantum entanglement. The ceremony, developed by conceptual artist, Jonathon Keats, is borrowed from quantum physics, where when two or more subatomic particles become entangled, they behave as one.

Keats has designed an entangling apparatus, which, when situated in a sunny window and exposed to the full spectrum of solar radiation divides pairs of entangled photons and translates them to the bodies of a nearby couple. ...

According to Keats, the couple won't know to what extent they've become entangled, because any attempt to measure a quantum system disturbs it.

"The quantum marriage will literally be broken up by skepticism about it," he said.

This is pretty wacky, but it is not too far off of what some interpretations of quantum mechanics allow.

Language influences thoughts and feelings

Here is some new research on linguistic relativity:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 17, 2010) — The language we speak may influence not only our thoughts, but our implicit preferences as well. That's the finding of a study by psychologists at Harvard University, who found that bilingual individuals' opinions of different ethnic groups were affected by the language in which they took a test examining their biases and predilections. ...

"It was quite shocking to see that a person could take the same test, within a brief period of time, and show such different results," Ogunnaike says. "It's like asking your friend if he likes ice cream in English, and then turning around and asking him again in French and getting a different answer." ...

Linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf first posited in the 1930s that language is so powerful that it can determine thought. Mainstream psychology has taken the more skeptical view that while language may affect thought processes, it doesn't influence thought itself. This new study suggests that Whorf's idea, when not caricatured, may generate interesting hypotheses that researchers can continue to test.

It is better for Americans to not learn any foreign languages. If you learn French, you might end up eating some inferior ice cream flavors. Or worse.

Big stones fall faster

The NY Times science section explains:

Q. I’ve heard that if a penny is dropped from the Empire State Building it could kill someone. But what about hail? It’s often much larger and falls from much higher, so why do I never hear about any deaths caused by it?

No, the penny will not kill anyone, as explained here and here.

The friction with other precipitation deforms a hailstone from a perfect sphere, making its velocity hard to calculate when it does become heavy enough to fall to earth. One estimate is that a half-inch stone falls about 30 feet a second, while a three-inch stone falls nearly 160 feet a second.

Occasionally I hear someone tell how Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment proved Aristotle wrong about heavier rocks falling faster. Well, as the story explains, bigger hail stones do fall faster than smaller ones.

Rational preferences

Economist Steve Landsburg has explained the Allais paradox.(Update: His latest is here.) It is an argument that people make choices that are contrary to what is considered rational under common economic models. Allais won the Bank of Sweden prize (aka Nobel for economics) for the work, and died recently, and was also known for anti-relativity views.

Here is a variant of the paradox. Suppose I give you $10 if a coin toss gives heads. Before tossing the coin, I offer you two choices for additional money:

A. I give you another $10 is that coin toss is tails.
B. I give you $5 regardless.

Apparently rational utility theory says that your choices should be independent of what you already have, so you should just compare A and B. Both choices give you $5 on average if we did this many times, but B is a sure thing and should therefore be preferred by the rational person.

But people would normally prefer A. Choice A, combined with the previous offer, implies that you will get a sure $10. Under Choice B you could end up with either $5 or $15, depending on the coin toss. It is an unnecessary gamble.

I do not think that this proves that people are irrational. It only shows that economic models are deficient if they assume that people do not change their preferences after acquiring assets. A man might prefer a dog to a cat, but once he has a dog, he might not want another one. In the above case, one of the choices is correlated with what you have already been offered.

I think Landsburg disagrees with me, so you might want to read his analysis and decide for yourself.

Update: Apparently the object was to find a counterexample to the Independence Axiom in the Von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theorem. The above example does not quite do it. But there are still situations where people make choices contrary to the axioms.

Denying the self

Slate says that science has now abolished the self:

This pervasive belief in individualism can be traced to the idea most forcefully articulated by René Descartes. ...

In other words, the way we experience ourselves is inextricably linked to the way we experience others—so much so that, on close view, it's hard to draw a concrete distinction between the other and the self. (This in turn raises questions about what the "self" actually is.)

The sensation of "mirror neurons" helped further dissolve the distinction. About 10 years ago, a team of Italian researchers showed that certain neurons that fire during actions by macaque monkeys—when they pick up a peanut, for example -— also fire when they watch someone else pick up the peanut. It's probably overblown to say -— as many have -— that this phenomenon can explain everything from empathy and altruism to the evolution of human culture. But the point is that our brains register individual and social experience in tandem. ...

"We're ready for a Copernican revolution in psychology," Cacioppo says. If it comes, the era of the self will yield to something that may be much more interesting.

It says that the lone genius is a myth, because Einstein talked to his buddy Besso, and Tiger Woods depends on his caddy.

Beware of grand theories when the examples are wrong. Einstein is famous for what he stole from Lorentz, Poincare, Grossmann, and Hilbert, not Besso. Woods would have won a lot of tournaments with any caddy.

Yes, it is trendy and overblown to say that mindreading explains everything.

Examples of linguistic relativity documented

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says:

The linguistic relativity principle, or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,[1] is the idea that differences in the way languages encode cultural and cognitive categories affect the way people think, so that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it. A strong version of the hypothesis holds that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. A weaker version states that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behaviour.

The idea was first clearly expressed by 19th century thinkers, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt who saw language as the expression of the spirit of a nation.

This became very politically incorrect, because of the possible implication that some nationalities could be superior to others in some respects. Eg, Ronald Reagan claimed that the Russian language had no word for "freedom." The whole idea that Russians might be less free because of some linguistic limitation was very offensive to some people.

Now the NY Times reports:

Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.

The article goes on to describe examples, including color, gender, and direction.

Here is one striking difference:

These two sets of directions may describe the same route, but they rely on different systems of coordinates. The first uses egocentric coordinates, which depend on our own bodies: a left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal to it. The second system uses fixed geographic directions, which do not rotate with us wherever we turn.

The terminology is misleading. The difference is really between relative and absolute coordinates. The relative coordinates depend on the context, which may or may not be your own body. Most languages have grammars that allow phrases to have a meaning that is relative to the context. Apparently language limitations make it hard for some people to understand directions that are relative to a context.

Another article in the same paper gives other psychological evidence that people from "Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic" nations think differently. They have different perceptions and values.

Dyslexia a cruel fiction leading to crime

A London UK Times article reported last year:

A Labour MP has provoked anger among literacy campaigners by calling dyslexia a “cruel fiction” that can often lead to criminal behaviour.

Graham Stringer, the Labour MP for Manchester Blackley, wrote in his column for Manchester Confidential magazine: “Dyslexia is a cruel fiction, it is no more real than the 19th-century scientific construction of ‘the aether’ to explain how light travels through a vacuum.”

Bad analogy. The term aether went out of favor in the early 20th century, but since about 1940 the concept has been essential to understanding how light travels thru a vacuum. Quantum field theory teaches that there is no such thing as a vacuum, and what we call the vacuum is actually filled with particles that are essential to the propagation of light.

In the same column, Mr Stringer argued: “The reason that so many children fail to read and write is because the wrong teaching methods are used.” He accused Ed Balls, the Education Minister, of wasting nearly £80million in disability benefits given to dyslexic children, when government policy should target an overhaul of the way that children are taught to read.

Mr Stringer pointed to the synthetic phonics method of teaching, whereby children were taught to associate letters with their phonetic pronunciation (reading “ee” for “y”, for example).

He said: “It is time that the dyslexia industry was killed off and we recognised that there are well known methods for teaching everybody to read and write.”

He has a point there. Phonics has been shown to be a superior method for teaching reading, but most schools don't use it.

Prize for Poincare conjecture solution

Today's math news:

The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) announces today that Dr. Grigoriy Perelman of St. Petersburg, Russia, is the recipient of the Millennium Prize for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture.

Math is the only academic subject who people get credited for what they actually do, and not for self-promotion. Perelman has dropped out, and done nothing to promote his work. He just posted it, and lectured on it.

Poincare discovered and published relativity theory before Einstein, and most physicists refuse to credit him to this day.

Update: Pravda claims that Perelman does not want the money. He is not talking, so nobody really knows.

Update: As of July 2, 2010, Perelman has refused the prize.

Popular Science

Popular Science (Monthly) magazine has put its old issues online. Popular Science (Monthly) magazine has put its old issues online.

A 1952 letter confronts Einstein with his bogus claims about creating a unified field theory. Einstein. Einstein denies any responsibility for his publicity-seeking behavior, and then gives some doubletalk excuses. His theories were garbage.

A 1929 story updates an experiment that led to relativity theory. The trouble with this is that Einstein denied that the experiment had anything to do with his work on relativity. It was only used by those who actually invented relativity.

The magazines are complete with the original ads, which are unlike any ads today.

Poincare was correct about the aether

Steve Sailor and John Hawks comment on the top scientists in history. It is good to see credit to 20th century geniuses like R. A. Fisher (invented much of modern statistics),  Leo Szilárd (invented the A-bomb by first conceiving the idea of a nuclear chain reaction), John von Neumann (helped create quantum mechanics and electronic computers), and Claude Shannon (invented information theory).

Poincare surely belongs on the list also, for creating the theory of special relativity, but a commenter repeats this canard:

Poincare formulated what is called the principle of relativity, but I don't think he devised special relativity before Einstein. (But maybe you know something I haven't heard about.) Lorentz came damn close and predicted many of the effects of special relativity. Unfortunately his theory did not discard the idea of ether and didn't quite pan out experimentally.

This is a common error. A special relativity textbook (pdf) says:

It has become popular to credit Henri Poincaré with the discovery of the theory of Special Relativity, but sadly Poincaré got many of the right answers for all the wrong reasons. He even came up with a version of E = mc²! In 1904 Poincaré had gone as far as to enunciate the "principle of relativity" in which "The laws of physical phenomena must be the same, whether for a fixed observer, as also for one dragged in a motion of uniform translation, so that we do not and cannot have any means to discern whether or not we are dragged in a such motion." In 1905 Poincaré coined the term "Lorentz Transformation" for the equation that explained the null result of the Michelson Morley experiment. Although Poincaré derived equations to explain the null result of the Michelson Morley experiment, his assumptions were still based upon an aether. It remained for Einstein to show that an aether was unnecessary, a conceptual leap that thwarts many students even today.

These last two sentences are completely wrong. Let's look at what Poincare actually said about the aether. In 1900, he said:

Our ether, does it really exist? I do not believe that more precise observations could ever reveal anything more than relative displacements. [quote from Whittaker]]

In 1902 Poincare wrote:

Whether the ether exists or not matters little -- let us leave that to the metaphysicians; what is essential for us is, that everything happens as if it existed, and that this hypothesis is found to be suitable for the explanation of phenomena. After all, have we any other reason for believing in the existence of material objects? That, too, is only a convenient hypothesis; only, it will never cease to be so, while some day, no doubt, the ether will be thrown aside as useless.

In other words, the aether is just a philosophical construct with no observable consequences. In 1904, he wrote:

The principle of relativity, according to which the laws of physical phenomena must be the same for a stationary observer as for one carried along in a uniform motion of translation, so that we have no means, and can have none, of determining whether or not we are being carried along in such a motion.

... from all these results there must arise an entirely new kind of dynamics, which will be characterized above all by the rule that no velocity can exceed the velocity of light.

It follows from this principle that it must be impossible to observe the aether, if it exists. Einstein's famous 1905 paper on relativity only says this about the aether:

Examples of this sort, together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the ``light medium,'' suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good. We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the ``Principle of Relativity'') to the status of a postulate, ... The introduction of a ``luminiferous ether'' will prove to be superfluous inasmuch as the view here to be developed will not require an ``absolutely stationary space'' provided with special properties, nor assign a velocity-vector to a point of the empty space in which electromagnetic processes take place.

Einstein always claimed that he never read Poincare and his paper did not cite any references. We know that this is a lie because Einstein copied Poincare's ideas and terminology, and because:

The great French mathematician Henri Poincaré enunciated the principle of relativity at least as early as 1902 in his popular book Science and Hypothesis. We know from Einstein's friend Maurice Solovine that the two pounced on Poincaré's book, indeed that it kept them "breathless for weeks on end." It should have. In Science and Hypothesis, Poincaré declares: "1) There is no absolute space, and we can only conceive of relative motion; 2) There is no absolute time. When we say that two periods are equal, the statement has no meaning; 3) Not only have we no direct intuition of the equality of two periods, but we have not even direct intuition of the simultaneity of two events occurring in two different places." These ideas lie at the heart of relativity, and it is hard to imagine that they did not have a profound effect on Einstein's thinking.

Einstein's description of the aether as "superfluous" is almost identical to Poincare's view. Moreover it was Einstein, not Poincare, who reversed himself and later accepted the aether in a 1920 paper:

Therefore I thought in 1905 that in physics one should not speak of the ether at all. This judgment was too radical though as we shall see with the next considerations about the general theory of relativity. It moreover remains, as before, allowed to assume a space-filling medium if one can refer to electromagnetic fields (and thus also for sure matter) as the condition thereof.

Other commenters on Sailor's blog list various other character flaws that are known about Einstein. I am just addressing the origin of special relativity. Credit belongs to Poincare (and Lorentz), not Einstein. Pretty much everything Einstein said on the subject was published earlier by Poincare. You can find more details on Poincare's theory here.