"A scientific realist"

“IN his special relativity theory, Einstein avoided assuming the existence of such things as absolute time and absolute distance, because it seemed meaningless to say they “really” existed in nature when they couldn’t be observed. But henceforth, during the more than four decades in which he would express his discomfort with quantum theory, he increasingly sounded like a scientific realist, someone who believed that an underlying reality existed in nature that was independent of our ability to observe or measure it.”

~Walter Isaacson: Einstein: His Life and Universe, p. 169.

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