Jürgen Renn
(1965?-)
Jürgen Renn has been a Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin since its founding in 1994. He directs Department I, which studies Structural Changes in Systems of Knowledge.
He describes his study of knowledge in three dimensions, the cognitive, the social, and the material, which corresponds to the classic
dualism of idealism and materialism or mind/body, separated by the human dimension, which combines the two.
His personal research focuses on the history of modern physics, including the origin of the theory of general relativity and quantum physics, so he has written a great deal on
Einstein.
His broader interest is on the evolution of human
knowledge, which at the deepest level coincides with the
sum of information in human minds and their artifacts. Information philosophy sees the growth of knowledge as changes in information structures, especially communications between structures.
Renn has been a strong advocate for open access to information.
He was a contributing editor of the
Collected Papers of Albert Einstein and a major contributor to the 2014
Cambridge Companion to Einstein.
His
Companion article, "Einstein's Copernican Revolution," is one of several that discuss Einstein's quantum mechanics. Important others are
Christoph Lehner's "Realism and Einstein's Critique of Quantum Mechanics,
Olivier Darrigol's "The Quantum Enigma" and
Roger H. Stuewer's "The Experimental Challenge of Light Quanta."
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