Einstein as Interpassive Subject

Here is an answer to the question Where Have All Einstein Opponents Gone?

Slavoj Zizek decribes the interpassive subject as a fictional subject or Other supposed to carry a belief we may have, as a substitute of ourself as believer. The Other could also carry our emotions in the form the "canned laugh" of a TV show, or as the "weepers" of a funeral ceremony.

Zizek makes a distinction between knowing and believing noting that belief is symbolic and knowledge is real:

• knowledge does not require any other who know,
• belief presupposes belief of some other.

According to Zizek:

• From the very outset, the speaking subject displaces his belief onto the big Other qua the order of pure semblance, so that the subject never "really believed in it"; from the very beginning, the subject refers to some decentered other to whom he imputes this belief.
• All concrete versions of this "subject supposed to believe" (from small children for whose sake parents pretend to believe in Santa Claus, to the "ordinary working people" for whose sake Communist intellectuals pretend to believe in Socialism) are stand-ins for the big Other.
• So, what one should answer to the conservative platitude according to which every honest man has a profound need to believe in something, is that every honest man has a profound need to find another subject who would believe in his place…

Can we find such an interpassive subject (as opposed to an interactive subject carrying emotions or beliefs under external input) also in science? Is there an interpassive scientific fictional subject which carries a scientific theory which scientists have chosen to decenter away from themselves?

Yes, Einstein´s theory of relativity is an example:

• All scientists act as if there is a correct theory in relativity, acknowledged by all scientists, but no scientist claims to carry this theory in the sense of understanding that it is a correct scientific theory.
• All scientists act as if there is a Santa Claus (relativity) which everybody believes in, but no scientist de facto believes in Santa Claus (relativity).

Note that you cannot debate with an interpassive subject and question the beliefs carried by the subject, because an interpassive subject is symbolic and you cannot debate with a symbolic subject only with a real subject. You cannot debate with Santa Claus about facts of Christmas.

Neither can you debate with Einstein about relativity theory.

This explains the difficulty of debating relativity theory, which anyone who has tried has experienced. The belief that relativity theory is rock solid is total, yet it is impossible to find

any relativity scientist open to debate. If you do not believe this is true, try it yourself.

There are several examples where dead scientists are assigned beliefs, which they never acknowledged themselves, but which have become established truths not questioned by any

living scientist. One example is the resolution of d'Alembert's paradox assigned to Prandtl,

which cannot be found in the scientific work by Prandtl, as shown in Dr Faustus of Modern Physics. As before debating with a dead scientist is impossible, and so the truth cannot be questioned.