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THE LIFE 9out of the room and slammed the door (UQ: 123). But less stormyminds were also present, including Bertrand Russell, and he moved onto argue that there are genuinely philosophical problems which cannot allbe reduced to language mistakes. Popper’s relations with Wittgensteinwere always rather argumentative—indeed, one writer has seen in hiswork an attempt to refute the thought of his fellow-Austrian. Butaccording to Sir Karl himself, he had formulated all his major problemsby the fateful year of 1919, long before he became acquainted withWittgenstein and his doctrines around 1925 (OGOU: 37–38). On theother hand, he was quite willing to recognize the influence exerted onhim not only by members of the Vienna Circle, but also by leadingfigures of the previous generation: he even regarded Boltzmann as anintellectual father because of his clash with Mach over the question ofrealism (OGOU: 64). Despite this admiration for two ‘Titans’ ofViennese philosophy, we shall see that Popper distanced himself fromboth to keep faith with his own realist commitment (OGOU: 45–47, 51–54).In 1949 Popper became professor of logic and scientific method inthe University of London. The next year he stopped living in thecapital, of which he was never very fond, and moved to Penn,Buckinghamshire where he lived until his wife’s death in 1985. Also in1950 he made his first trip to the United States, where he met a numberof old friends, such as Kurt Gödel, whom he had not seen since 1936.America made a good impression on him for the ‘feeling of freedom, ofpersonal independence, which did not exist in Europe; (UQ: 128), butthe real highlight was at Princeton where Einstein attended one of hislectures together with Bohr. He had three meetings with the greatscientist, all mainly focused on Popper’s theory of indeterminism.Against Einstein’s view that ‘the world was a four-dimensionalParmenidean block universe in which change was a human illusion, orvery nearly so’ (UQ: 129), Popper argued that if it was possible toexperience change and temporal succession, they could not be just anillusion. (In the years to come he would never give up his realism evenwhen it meant quarrels not only with Einstein or Gödel but also with hisfriend Schrödinger, with whom he regularly corresponded after theymet again in England in the late 1940s.) Thomas Kuhn also attendedPopper’s lectures in America, and not long afterwards he went to visithim in England. Subsequently, of course, Kuhn became famous for hiscritique of Popper’s methodology, in his book published in 1962, TheStructure of Scientific Revolutions.