ABSTRACT
The word "relativity" and the expression "the principle of relativity" became emotive symbols of the new generational mode of thought, symbols for the isoemotional line of generational rebellion. Adler's major writing on theoretical physics was published in 1905, the same year as Einstein's classical paper on the special theory of relativity. When young Einstein was at Berne developing his conception of relativity, he used to watch how children developed their ideas of space and time. To understand the social setting that gave sustenance to Einstein's revolutionary mode of thought, we must first recapture the spirit of Zurich, Switzerland, as it was at the turn of the century. The revolutionary student culture of what we might call the "generation of 1905" was a blend of the epistemology of Ernst Mach and the social standpoint of Karl Marx. The logical content of the principle of relativity was indeed an absolutist one, a statement of a principle of invariance.
