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http://www.american.com/archive/2007/april-0407/the-man-who-made-our-world
"In 1905, Einstein wrote his five famous papers. In the first of
these, the only one he himself called "revolutionary", Einstein
proposed that light consisted not of continuous waves, as had been
thought since the rejection of Newton's particle theory, but rather of
tiny bundles called quanta.....In his 1905 papers, Einstein actually
used two apparently contradictory interpretations of the nature of
light. In the paper on light quanta, Einstein had argued forcefully
for the return to Newton's particulate conception of light. Yet in the
same year, in his development of special relativity, Einstein had
rejected a particulate emission theory of light and had used the
traditional Maxwell wave theory. This striking ability to juggle two
viewpoints apparently at odds was characteristic of Einstein's
thought...."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/homepage/cv.html#forthcoming
"Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and the Problems in the
Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies that Led him to it." in Cambridge
Companion to Einstein, M. Janssen and C. Lehner, eds., Cambridge
University Press. Preprint.
John Norton: "Einstein could not see how to formulate a fully
relativistic electrodynamics merely using his new device of field
transformations. So he considered the possibility of modifying
Maxwell's electrodynamics in order to bring it into accord with an
emission theory of light, such as Newton had originally conceived.
There was some inevitability in these attempts, as long as he held to
classical (Galilean) kinematics. Imagine that some emitter sends out a
light beam at c. According to this kinematics, an observer who moves
past at v in the opposite direction, will see the emitter moving at v
and the light emitted at c+v. This last fact is the defining
characteristic of an emission theory of light: the velocity of the
emitter is added vectorially to the velocity of light emitted....If an
emission theory can be formulated as a field theory, it would seem to
be unable to determine the future course of processes from their state
in the present. As long as Einstein expected a viable theory of light,
electricity and magnetism to be a field theory, these sorts of
objections would render an emission theory of light inadmissible."

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/pdf/files/975547d7-2d00-433a-b7e3-4a09145525ca.pdf
Albert Einstein: "I consider it entirely possible that physics cannot
be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous structures.
Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air, including the
theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of contemporary
physics."

Pentcho Valev