Chapter 16
POSSIBILITIES OF UNAMBIGUOUS INTERPRETATION
B
efore taking up permanent residence in Princeton, Einstein lingered for a few last months in Europe, spending his time mostly in Belgium and England. On June 10, 1933, he delivered a lecture in Oxford on his views of theoretical physics in general and quantum mechanics in particular. The theorist must pay close attention to observational evidence and empirical phenomena, he said, but that was only the first step. In creating theories, the scientist must employ imagination to connect facts into a coherent structure framed according to the rigorous rules of mathematics and logic. That, of course, was how he had arrived so many years before at his theories of special and general relativity. His guiding principle, Einstein said, was the conviction that nature always chooses the simplest solution. “In a certain sense,
