Einstein's Implicit Theory of Relativity - of Cognitive Property? Unexamined influence of patent office procedures

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The argument here is that there is a case for exploring the extent to which it was the discipline required of a patent examiner that moulded or predisposed Albert Einstein's thinking to the formulation of the theory of relativity. Of relevance to the argument developed separately (From Patent Rights to Patent Responsibilities: obligations incumbent on owners and licensors of intellectual property, 2007) is the extent to which Einstein (as a patent clerk) was involved in determining the framing of unique "property", arising from "invention", relative to other such properties -- and claims made with regard to them over a period of time.

His interests may well have predisposed him to generalize both from physical property and from intellectual property to invariant frameworks of space-time. The question of interest is whether the special theory of relativity has unexplored implications for intellectual property and for a more general sense of responsibility in relation to it.

Einstein worked in the Swiss Patent Office in Berne from 1902 to 1909, eventually promoted to the position of technical expert (second class). During this period he completed a surprising set of theoretical physics publications, written in his spare time without the benefit of close contact with scientific literature or colleagues. These included On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies (1905) containing what became known as the special theory of relativity.

Central to Einstein's special theory of relativity was the realization that all measurements of time and space depend on judgments as to whether two distant events occur simultaneously. His theory is based on two postulates: the principle of relativity, that physical laws are the same in all inertial reference systems, and the principle of the invariance of the speed of light, that the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant. These enabled him to provide a consistent and correct description of physical events in different inertial frames of reference without making special assumptions about the nature of matter or radiation, or how they interact.

In commenting on the fact that virtually no one understood his arguments, one explanation offered [Albert Einstein] is that:

The difficulty that others had with Einstein's work was not because it was too mathematically complex or technically obscure; the problem resulted, rather, from Einstein's beliefs about the nature of good theories and the relationship between experiment and theory. Although he maintained that the only source of knowledge is experience, he also believed that scientific theories are the free creations of a finely tuned physical intuition and that the premises on which theories are based cannot be connected logically to experiment. A good theory, therefore, is one in which a minimum number of postulates is required to account for the physical evidence. This sparseness of postulates, a feature of all Einstein's work, was what made his work so difficult for colleagues to comprehend, let alone support. 

During his final years at the Patent Office, Einstein initiated his life-long work on extending and generalizing the theory of relativity to all coordinate systems. He began by enunciating the principle of equivalence, a postulate that gravitational fields are equivalent to accelerations of the frame of reference.

The continuing puzzle to many historians of science and researchers on creativity is how a patent office clerk (third class) could elaborate a theory of such profound significance to the future of physics in the absence of any conventional interaction with physicists. John Stachel (How Did Einstein Discover Special Relativity?, 1983) provides an excellent account in support of conjectures on how this may have been possible.

Curiously, it would appear that no consideration is given to the effect of the disciplines and preoccupations of the Patent Office on Einstein's creative thinking, whether these influences were explicit -- or implicit and unacknowledged in some way. His time at the Patent Office has often been described as a complete waste of his talents (see "Moonlighting in the Patent Office" in Gary F. Moring, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Einstein, Alpha Books, 2004) or as a temporary job with no connection to his interests in physics. Reference is however made to Einstein's own account of the vagaries of the creative process, which presumably may be considered a form of recognition by him of the catalytic potential of such influences. He himself considered that time to be the most creative/productive in his life.

It is intellectually offensive to physicists, representing one of the purest and most noble of the fundamental sciences, that anything of significance should emerge from the relatively ignoble context of a patent office. Yet curiously both contexts have similar concerns with defining domains of invariance in space and time and with clarifying the "lawful" or "legal" relationship between them.

It is also the case that physicists themselves are most anxious to ensure the priority of their claims to discovery and to guarantee their rights of ownership to any associated intellectual property. Curiously the process of filing and examining a patent for validity (discussed below) bears a strong systemic resemblance to the process of submitting a paper to a reputable journal necessitating peer review prior to acceptance. This similarity may even extend to the manner in which property rights are subsequently (re)assigned.

Suppose therefore that, contrary to general assumption, the patent office procedures were indeed fundamental to Einstein's creative process. In the case of Ludwig Wittgenstein, such a seemingly "ridiculous" possibility has been extensively argued by the philosopher Susan G. Sterrett (Wittgenstein Flies a Kite: a story of models of wings and models of the world, 2006). This "nurture" perspective may prove more fruitful than the "nature" perspective which, as noted by Steve C. Wang (In Search of Einstein's Genius, Science, 289, 5484, 1 September 2000, p. 1477), resulted in the 240 pieces of his brain, removed at his autopsy in 1955, being finally examined in 1985 and with new neuroanatomical tools in 2000. And as Wang remarks:

The most important question may be why we perform these analyses at all, and what we really hope to find. Just as Einstein captured the essence of energy and matter in his famous equation, so we seek to capture the essence of genius. Our pursuit perhaps reveals more about ourselves than about the nature of genius.

There is therefore a case for exploring the extent to which it was the discipline required of a patent clerk that -- to some degree at least -- moulded or predisposed Einstein's thinking to the formulation of the theory of relativity. Although his responsibility was evaluating patent applications for electromagnetic devices, and this is recognized as having influenced his subsequent interest (as argued by Peter Galison), the possibility as yet to be explored is that it was the mindset involved in considering the essentials of a valid patent application that influenced the generalization which is considered the mark of his own originality.

In the light of the legal concepts of patenting (see United States Patent and Trademark Office, consider some of the potential or suggestive parallels to the status of "property" (and its "properties") in the most generic sense:

• an invention, understood as intellectual property and recognized and defined by some form of patent, can be understood as an invariant frame of reference (from the perspective of a particular observer or claimant). It is a particular pattern or configuration of elements, perhaps fruitfully to be seen through the perspectives of a constructivist or enactivist epistemology through which the process of "invention" occurs.
• a patent application must typically include one or more claims defining the invention. The pattern may therefore be partly composed of other patterns or frames of reference defined within it. Such an application may therefore be considered a form of request for recognition, or registration, of a particular frame of reference or perspective.
• the application, to be acc

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