• About
  • Photography

The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

The Bully Pulpit

Tag Archives: Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe

Hitler Kicks out Einstein

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Science

≈ Comments Off on Hitler Kicks out Einstein

Tags

A.N. Wilson, Academia, Academics, Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe, Anti-Semitism, Atom Bomb, Biography, Eduard Fraenkel, Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, Ernst Gombrich, Eugene Wigner, Final Solution, Germany, Hans Bethe, Jews, Joseph Goebbels, Judaism, Leó Szilárd, Lise Meitner, Max Born, Max Planck, Nazism, Niels Bohr, Otto Stern, Philipp Lenard, Psychics, science, Third Reich, Victor Weisskopf, Walter Isaacson, World War Two

Adolf Hitler in Color

“Early in April 1933, the German government passed a law declaring that Jews (defined as anyone with a Jewish grandparent) could not hold an official position, including at the Academy or at the universities. Among those forced to flee were fourteen Nobel laureates and twenty-six of the sixty professors of theoretical physics in the country. Fittingly, such refugees from fascism who left Germany or the other countries it came to dominate — Einstein, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf, Hans Bethe, Lise Meitner, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Otto Stern, Eugene Wigner, Leó Szilárd, and others — helped to assure that the Allies rather than the Nazis first developed the atom bomb.

Planck tried to temper the anti-Jewish policies, even to the extent of appealing to Hitler personally. ‘Our national policies will not be revoked or modified, even for scientists,’ Hitler thundered back. ‘If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!’

Among those fleeing the Nazi purge was Max Born, who with his tart-tongued wife, Hedwig, ended up in England. ‘I have never had a particularly favorable opinion of the Germans,’ Einstein wrote when he received the news. ‘But I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise.’ Born took it all rather well, and he developed, like Einstein, a deeper appreciation for his heritage.

The Germans were all a bad breed, Einstein insisted, ‘except a few fine personalities (Planck 60% noble, and Laue 100%).’ Now, in this time of adversity, they could at least take comfort that they were thrown together with their true kinsmen. ‘For me the most beautiful thing is to be in contact with a few fine Jews — a few millennia of a civilized past do mean something after all.’

Having found himself deposited in Belgium… [Einstein] rented a house on the dunes of Le Coq sur Mer, a resort near Ostend, where he could contemplate, and Mayer could calculate, the universe and its waves in peace…

Peace, however, was elusive. Even by the sea he could not completely escape the threats of the Nazis. The newspapers reported that his name was on a list of assassination targets, and one rumor had it that there was a $5,000 bounty on his head. Upon hearing this, Einstein touched that head and cheerfully proclaimed, ‘I didn’t know it was worth that much!'”

Albert Einstein at Princeton

__________

From Walter Isaacson’s biography Einstein: His Life and Universe.

Today marks the 69th anniversary of Hitler’s suicide and the Allies’ final push on Berlin. In his short biography of the Führer, A.N. Wilson establishes the bogus philosophical underpinnings of the Final Solution, reflecting on the ways in which these deranged justifications wound up backfiring in unexpected ways:

[Hitler] often discoursed upon… the fact that ‘the Jew’ was always on the look-out to destroy ‘the natural order’ by ‘sleight of hand’: ‘The Jew introduced Christianity into the ancient world — in order to ruin it — re-opened the same breach in modern times — this time taking as his pretext the social question. It’s the same sleight of hand as before. Just as Saul was changed into St. Paul, Mordechai became Karl Marx…’ He had decided that ‘the people that is rid of the Jews returns spontaneously to the natural order.’

Already, by the middle of the war, Germans were beginning to recognize what it felt like to be on the way towards achieving natural order. For one thing, they had toothache, since most of the dentists in Germany had been deported or gone into exile. For another, they had very few nuclear physicists left, and those who had gone were helping the Americans pioneer nuclear weaponry. The fortunate universities of Britain and America now had their Albert Einstein, their Ernst Gombrich, their Eduard Fraenkel to adorn their faculties, thanks to the German Leader’s belief that such individuals were undermining the natural order.

More on Einstein:

  • Young Albert breaks up with his first girlfriend
  • Einstein expounds his theory that God doesn’t play dice
  • Einstein, Orwell, and Steinbeck denounce the evils of militarism

(Below: Einstein with some other unnaturals)

Albert Einstein and Scientists

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Does the Beauty of the Gospel Story Attest to Its Truth? (Einstein, C.S. Lewis, and Others Answer)

18 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe, Alistair McGrath, beauty, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, C.S. Lewis, Caravaggio, Christian Apologetics, doubt, Faith, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, Julian Barnes, Luke, Mark, Matthew, Narrative, Nothing to Be Frighted Of, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, religion, Resurrection, Storytelling, The Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus, the gospels, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Thomas Cahill, truth, Walter Isaacson

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio

Does the aesthetic splendor of the four Gospels, when considered like works of literature, emit the ineffable whiff of something genuine? Is there a patina of truth — truth endorsed by beauty — coating the Biblical account of the Nazarene? Cahill explained the concept; Einstein flirted with the idea; C.S. Lewis, through his buddy Tolkien, was converted by it; and Julian Barnes paid it some provocative thoughts. You can decide for yourself.

From the pen of Thomas Cahill, writing in his even-handed historical survey The Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus:

What especially makes the gospels — from a literary point of view — works like no others is that they are about a good human being. As every writer knows, such a creature is all but impossible to capture on the page, and there are exceedingly few figures in all literature who are both good and memorable. Yet the evangelists, who left no juvenilia behind them — no failed novels, rhythmless poems, or other early works by which we might judge their progress as writers — whose Greek was often odd or imprecise, and who were not practiced writers of any sort, these four succeeded where almost all others have failed. To a writer’s eyes, this feat is a miracle just short of raising the dead.

As retold in Walter Isaacson’s biography, Albert Einstein had grappled with the question, too:

Shortly after his fiftieth birthday, Einstein gave a remarkable interview in which he was more revealing than he had ever been about his religious thinking. It was with a pompous but ingratiating poet and propagandist named George Sylvester Viereck… For reasons not quite clear, Einstein assumed Viereck was Jewish…

Viereck began by asking Einstein whether he considered himself a German or a Jew. ‘It’s possible to be both,’ replied Einstein. ‘Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.’

Should Jews try to assimilate? ‘We Jews have been too eager to sacrifice our idiosyncrasies in order to conform.’

To what extent are you influenced by Christianity? ‘As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.’

You accept the historical existence of Jesus? ‘Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.’

In Alistair McGrath’s biography of C.S. Lewis, there is an account of how, ultimately, the great medievalist don was swayed after studying the Gospels according to J.R.R. Tolkien’s conception of them as “True Myths”.

To understand how Lewis passed from theism to Christianity, we need to reflect further on the ideas of J. R. R. Tolkien. For it was he, more than anyone else, who helped Lewis along in the final stage of what the medieval writer Bonaventure of Bagnoregio describes as the ‘journey of the mind to God.’…

Tolkien argued that Lewis ought to approach the New Testament with the same sense of imaginative openness and expectation that he brought to the reading of pagan myths in his professional studies. But, as Tolkien emphasized, there was a decisive difference. As Lewis expressed in his second letter to Greeves, ‘The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.‘

The reader must appreciate that the word myth is not being used here in the loose sense of a ‘fairy tale’ or the pejorative sense of a ‘deliberate lie told in order to deceive.’… For Tolkien, a myth is a story that conveys ‘fundamental things’—in other words, that tries to tell us about the deeper structure of things. The best myths, he argues, are not deliberately constructed falsehoods, but are rather tales woven by people to capture the echoes of deeper truths. They are like splintered fragments of the true light…

In his somberly comic study of mortality, Nothing to Be Frighted Of, Julian Barnes imagines a moment in which some unnamed future generation could look back and evaluate the history of the now-disappeared Christian religion:

It lasted also because it was a beautiful story, because the characters, the plot, the various coups de théâtre, the over-arching struggle between Good and Evil, made up a great novel. The story of Jesus—high-minded mission, facing-down of the oppressor, persecution, betrayal, execution, resurrection—is the perfect example of that formula Hollywood famously and furiously seeks: a tragedy with a happy ending. Reading the Bible as ‘literature,’ as that puckish old schoolmaster was trying to point out to us, is not a patch on reading the Bible as truth, the truth endorsed by beauty.

__________

The painting is Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1602).

Explore on:

  • Eric Metaxas answers the droll question – Would Jesus be a Republican or a Democrat?
  • Lewis, Wittgenstein, and Updike address whether we can assume the existence of God
  • Cahill contrasts the Greek and Christian worldviews

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

‘We Don’t March’: Einstein, Orwell, and Steinbeck on the Evils of Militarism

28 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, History, Political Philosophy, War

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe, America and Americans, Bertrand Russell, conflict, democracy, England Your England, Eugene Debs, Fascism, Genus Americanus, George Orwell, Government, John Steinbeck, March, Marching, Military, nonfiction, Pacifism, Patriotism, peace, politics, protest, Rosa Luxemburg, Socialism, Spectacle, Walter Isaacson, War, Why I Write

Albert Einstein

“When troops would come by, accompanied by fifes and drums, kids would pour into the streets to join the parade and march in lockstep. But not Einstein. Watching such a display once, he began to cry. ‘When I grow up, I don’t want to be one of those poor people,’ he told his parents. As Einstein later explained, ‘When a person can take pleasure in marching in step to a piece of music it is enough to make me despise him. He has been given his big brain only by mistake.'”

Albert Einstein, as described in chapter 2 (“Childhood, 1879-1896”) of Walter Isaacson’s biography Einstein: His Life and Universe.

George Orwell

“One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren’t laugh at me’, like the bully who makes faces at his victim.

Why is the goose-step not used in England? In the British army… the march is merely a formalized walk. It belongs to a society which is ruled by the sword, no doubt, but a sword which must never be taken out of the scabbard.”

George Orwell, reflecting in a segment from his essay “England Your England,” which is published in his collection of essays Why I Write.

John Steinbeck

“It is a strange thing how Americans love to march if they don’t have to. Every holiday draws millions marchers, sweating in the sun, some falling and being carted away to hospitals. In hardship and in some danger they will march… but let the Army take them and force them to march, and they wail like hopeless kelpies on a tidal reef, and it requires patience and enormous strictness to turn them into soldiers.

Once they give in, they make very good soldiers; but they never cease their complaints and their mutinous talk. This, of course, does not describe our relatively small class of professional soldiers: they are like professionals in any army; but national need calls up the citizen soldier, and he is a sight. He kicks like a steer going in, bitches the whole time, fights very well when he is trained and properly armed…”

John Steinbeck, writing in his essay “Genus Americanus,” which can be found in his last published book, America and Americans.

__________

If you have additional references or ideas relating to this topic, please send them my way or post them in the comments section.

During the First World War, prominent public figures in all three of these men’s home countries were jailed for not marching in lock-step into the conflict. Because she opposed the war and had become one of the figureheads of the German socialist movement, Rosa Luxemburg spent most of the war in prison and was eventually murdered by German soldiers in 1919. In England, Bertrand Russell was thrown into Brixton Prison for six months for “passive resistance to military or naval service.” And in the United States, the famous union leader and five-time presidential candidate Eugene Debs was charged with ten counts of sedition for making an anti-draft speech on June 16th, 1918. He was eventually sentenced to ten years in prison and was disenfranchised for life.

If you’d like to read more from Steinbeck, check out another selection from America and Americans, in which he points out a curious paradox at the heart of how Americans appraise their presidents: “The President must be greater than anyone else, but not better than anyone else…”

Steinbeck

Or, see more from Isaacson’s biography of A.E., including a page describing Einstein’s obsession with identifying the causality behind the laws of nature. “When I am judging a theory… I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way?”

Albert Einstein

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Einstein and the God that Doesn’t Play Dice

30 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Science

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe, atomic physics, Banesh Hoffmann, Baruch Spinoza, Benedict Spinoza, chance, deism, Einstein, Faith, God, laws of nature, Max Born, metaphysics, philosophy of science, quantum mechanics, reality, science fiction, Spinoza, theism, Walter Isaacson

Albert Einstein

“In his maturity, Einstein more firmly believed that there was an objective ‘reality’ that existed whether or not we could observe it. The belief in an external world independent of the person observing it, he repeatedly said, was the basis of all science.

In addition, Einstein resisted quantum mechanics because it abandoned strict causality and instead defined reality in terms of indeterminacy, uncertainty, and probability. A true disciple of Hume would not have been troubled by this. There is no real reason—other than either a metaphysical faith or a habit ingrained in the mind—to believe that nature must operate with absolute certainty. It is just as reasonable, though perhaps less satisfying, to believe that some things simply happen by chance. Certainly, there was mounting evidence that on the subatomic level this was the case.

But for Einstein, this simply did not smell true. The ultimate goal of physics, he repeatedly said, was to discover the laws that strictly determine causes and effects. ‘I am very, very reluctant to give up complete causality,’ he told Max Born.

His faith in determinism and causality reflected that of his favorite religious philosopher, Baruch Spinoza. ‘He was utterly convinced,’ Einstein wrote of Spinoza, ‘of the causal dependence of all phenomena, at a time when the success of efforts to achieve a knowledge of the causal relationship of natural phenomena was still quite modest.’ It was a sentence that Einstein could have written about himself, emphasizing the temporariness implied by the word ‘still,’ after the advent of quantum mechanics.

Like Spinoza, Einstein did not believe in a personal God who interacted with man. But they both believed that a divine design was reflected in the elegant laws that governed the way the universe worked.

This was not merely some expression of faith. It was a principle that Einstein elevated (as he had the relativity principle) to the level of a postulate, one that guided him in his work. ‘When I am judging a theory,’ he told his friend Banesh Hoffmann, ‘I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way.’

When he posed that question, there was one possibility that he simply could not believe: that the good Lord would have created beautiful and subtle rules that determined most of what happened in the universe, while leaving a few things completely to chance. It felt wrong. ‘If the Lord had wanted to do that, he would have done it thoroughly, and not kept to a pattern . . . He would have gone the whole hog. In that case, we wouldn’t have to look for laws at all.’

This led to one of Einstein’s most famous quotes, written to Max Born, the friend and physicist who would spar with him over three decades on this topic. ‘Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing,’ Einstein said. ‘But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but it does not really bring us any closer to the secrets of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not play dice.’

Thus it was that Einstein ended up deciding that quantum mechanics, though it may not be wrong, was at least incomplete. There must be a fuller explanation of how the universe operates, one that would incorporate both relativity theory and quantum mechanics. In doing so, it would not leave things to chance.”

__________

From Walter Isaacson’s biography Einstein: His Life and Universe.

For related reading, click below:

Albert Einstein

Einstein’s daily routine

Baruch Spinoza

Spinoza’s view of the universe

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Today’s Top Pages

  • "Immortality Ode" by William Wordsworth
    "Immortality Ode" by William Wordsworth
  • Einstein's Daily Routine
    Einstein's Daily Routine
  • "Coming" by Philip Larkin
    "Coming" by Philip Larkin
  • "Provide, Provide" by Robert Frost
    "Provide, Provide" by Robert Frost
  • Robert Nozick on Taxation
    Robert Nozick on Taxation

Enter your email address to follow The Bully Pulpit - you'll receive notifications of new posts sent directly to your inbox.

Recent Posts

  • The Other Side of Feynman
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald on Succeeding Early in Life
  • The Man Who Most Believed in Himself
  • What ’60s Colleges Did Right
  • Dostoyevsky’s Example of a Good Kid

Archives

  • April 2018 (2)
  • March 2018 (2)
  • February 2018 (3)
  • January 2018 (3)
  • December 2017 (1)
  • November 2017 (3)
  • October 2017 (2)
  • September 2017 (2)
  • August 2017 (1)
  • July 2017 (2)
  • June 2017 (2)
  • May 2017 (2)
  • April 2017 (2)
  • March 2017 (1)
  • February 2017 (1)
  • January 2017 (1)
  • December 2016 (2)
  • November 2016 (1)
  • October 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (1)
  • August 2016 (4)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • June 2016 (2)
  • May 2016 (1)
  • April 2016 (1)
  • March 2016 (2)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • January 2016 (4)
  • December 2015 (4)
  • November 2015 (8)
  • October 2015 (7)
  • September 2015 (11)
  • August 2015 (10)
  • July 2015 (7)
  • June 2015 (12)
  • May 2015 (7)
  • April 2015 (17)
  • March 2015 (23)
  • February 2015 (17)
  • January 2015 (22)
  • December 2014 (5)
  • November 2014 (17)
  • October 2014 (13)
  • September 2014 (9)
  • August 2014 (2)
  • July 2014 (1)
  • June 2014 (20)
  • May 2014 (17)
  • April 2014 (24)
  • March 2014 (19)
  • February 2014 (12)
  • January 2014 (21)
  • December 2013 (13)
  • November 2013 (15)
  • October 2013 (9)
  • September 2013 (10)
  • August 2013 (17)
  • July 2013 (28)
  • June 2013 (28)
  • May 2013 (23)
  • April 2013 (22)
  • March 2013 (12)
  • February 2013 (21)
  • January 2013 (21)
  • December 2012 (9)
  • November 2012 (18)
  • October 2012 (22)
  • September 2012 (28)

Categories

  • Biography (51)
  • Current Events (47)
  • Debate (7)
  • Essay (10)
  • Film (10)
  • Freedom (40)
  • History (122)
  • Humor (15)
  • Interview (71)
  • Journalism (16)
  • Literature (82)
  • Music (1)
  • Original (1)
  • Personal (3)
  • Philosophy (87)
  • Photography (4)
  • Poetry (114)
  • Political Philosophy (41)
  • Politics (108)
  • Psychology (35)
  • Religion (74)
  • Science (27)
  • Speeches (52)
  • Sports (12)
  • War (57)
  • Writing (11)

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×
    loading Cancel
    Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
    Email check failed, please try again
    Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
    Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
    To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
    %d bloggers like this: