The Apotheosis of Albert Einstein - Peter Myers, August 27, 2003; update January 23, 2006. My comments are shown {thus}.

You are at http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/einstein.html.

In the late 1979s, when, after my first wife left me, I was looking for a new philosophy around which to rebuild my life, I joined the Theosophical Society and read Hugh Murdoch's article about Albert Einstein (below).

I was so impressed that I adopted Einstein as my "guru", and later named one of my children "Albert" after him.

Since then, I have discovered that Einstein's theories in Physics have been given "sacrosanct" status, placed beyond criticism, as if he was no mere mortal. Deifying him - making him a "secular saint" - is hardly consistent with good science.

It has been alleged that Marx, Freud and Einstein constitute a new "holy trinity", destroying all cultural tradition.

This "trinity" idea is articulated by David Ben Gurion, in his book Recollections (edited by Thomas R. Bransten, Macdonald Unit Seventy-Five, London, 1970):

{p. 17} So many remarkable thinkers have been Jews. Their work and ideas form vast frames of reference that influence the lives of men everywhere ... One can loathe or passionately adhere to Marxist doctrine but one cannot deny the impact of Karl Marx's thought on the world. Equally so with Freudianism and Freud. When I use the star metaphor I am thinking of ... Albert Einstein. So far as I know he remains the greatest scientific theoretician of our age.

{p. 21} ... the Jewish ethic has certainly been responsible for forming individuals who through the ages have made creative contributions ... Those we have already mentioned (Freud, Marx, Einstein and so forth) are cases in point.
{endquote}

All the more reason to subject this "trinity" to the normal processes of criticism.

The concept "Relativity" is akin to "Relational", "Dialectical", "Reflexive" (George Soros' preference: soros2.html), and "Lateral" (as in "lateral thinking").

The basic idea of "dialectical" thinking is that we live in a "bounded" world, in which actions ricochet ... that the human world is more like a squash court than a tennis court ... that you may achieve your goal by proceeding in the opposite direction.

The items here mix "Einstein the Scientist" and "Einstein the Man"; how can the two be separated, given that Einstein used his status for political purposes? The items below are in the order of my own discoveries about him.

(1) Albert Einstein - Universal Man, by Hugh Murdoch (2) Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein (3) Einstein the Communist (4) Ilya Ehrenburg on his meeting with Einstein (5) Einstein and Olinto de Pretto (discoverer of E=mc2) (6) Dissidents against Einstein's theories - Bringing Einstein down to earth (7) Albert Einstein a Plagiarist - Christopher Bjerknes (8) Einstein the Zionist - About Zionism: Speeches and Lectures by Professor Albert Einstein (9) The Einstein-Freud correspondence on ending war (i.e., World Government) (10) (for comparison) Isaac Newton a plagiarist (11) Einstein on Spinoza as formulator of pantheistic Judaism

(1) ALBERT EINSTEIN - UNIVERSAL MAN

HUGH MURDOCH

Theosophy in Australia, December, 1979

This article depicts Einstein as a saintly Theosophist. But there are hints of Einstein the Communist: why did he oppose McCarthy?

{p. 74} In this year of the centenary of the birth of a great scientist who was aIso a great human being, it seems fitting that we should add our tribute.

There is no religion higher than truth. Albert Einstein was one of the greatest truth-seekers of the twentieth cenury, and in the scientific field, one or the greatest of all time. It is fitting that we should pay tribute to him in this year when the centenary of his birth is being widely celebrated at a time when his theories are gaining ever-widening acceptance through more refined experiments. But Einstein was not only a great scientist, he was also a great human being and I hope to portray something of his all round greatness. The philosophical import of his theories has been widely misunderstood by a great many people, scientists included.

EINSTEIN - THE MAN

Einstein was born in Ulm in Germany of Jewish parents on March 14, 1879. His higher education was obtained in Zurich and in 1902 he acquired Swiss citizenship which he retained throughout his life. He showed early signs of brilliance but did not do well at school because he rebelled against learning by rote and the strict discipline of the day, particularly in Germany. He recalls being facinated by a compass given him at the age of four or five and he became totally absorbed in Euclid's geometry when he first discovered it at the age of twelve. At sixteen he asked himself how a ray of light would appear if one could travel along beside it at the same speed. This was the commencement of the train of thought which led to the theory of relativity.

Upon graduation he found trouble obtaining a position partly because he had antagonised his professors through not being sufficiently deferential. (Einstein was transparently honest, and could not stand sham). From 1902 to 1909 he worked in the Swiss patent office at Bern and it was there that his genius flowered. In 1905 alone he published three papers on different subjects, each worthy of a Nobel Prize. He eventually obtained a Nobel Prize in 1921 for the first of these papers, in which he recognised that light consists of small packets of energy known as photons. The third was his famous paper on Special Relativity.

In 1914 he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin where he did some of his most important work during World War 1. As a Swiss citizen and an avowed paciBst, Einstein played no part in the war. When a large number of German intellectuals signed a manifeso justifying Germany's actions, he helped his colleague Nicolai draft a counter manifesto but they could only

{p. 75} induce two others to sign it. Shortly after the war, when Einstein was winning great world-wide acclaim, both he and his theories were strongly attacked in Germany in a wave of anti-Semitism, but Einstein continued to speak his mind. In 1928 he said: I would unconditionally refuse all war service, direct or indirect ... regardless of how I might feel about the causes. Yet when Hitler came to power, Einstein recognised the menace. He was visiting the United States at the time (1933) and never returned, renouncing for the second time German citizenship. Asked to defend two Belgian conscientious objectors, he invited them to contemplatec (and this in 1933) a Belgium occupied by Germany under Hitler and said that whilst he had not abandoned his principles, if he were a Belgian he would feel it his duty to serve in the defence of European civilization.

{Note the implicit opposition, below, between Einstein (on the one hand) and both Hitler and Stalin (on the other)}

He allowed his name to be used in a letter to President Rooseveldt at the beginning of World War II suggesting that the Nazis might be attempting to build an atomic bomb. This was partly responsihle for the eventual deveclopment of the United States bomb but Einstein deplored its use and after the war campaigned vigorously against nuclear armaments. Having been publicly attacked in both Germany and Russia (his theories were not accepted until after the Stalin era), he was now publicly attacked in the United States House of Representatives. He advised non-co-operation (Gandhi style) with the McCarthy committee. On his death-bed in 1955 he signed a long statement with Bertrand Russell which asked: Shall we put an end to the human race or shall mankind renounce war?

Einstein was a strong advocate of world government which he believed was the only way of achieving lasting peace, But he was well aware of the difficulty of achieving it. Asked to write for the New York Times in 1946 on the atomic bomb, his article was entitled "The Problem Lies in the Hearts of Men".

{This is an oblique reference to Einstein's endorsement - along with other physicists, many Jewish - of the 1946 Baruch Plan for World Government, drafted by David Lilienthal and Bernard Baruch, both Jews: http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/baruch-plan.html

The impression given is that any unselfish person would support World Government. Yet, if such a government went wrong, there would be no escape.

Why was Einstein so opposed to McCarthy? Surely McCarthy's error was in seeing Cammunism as controlled from Moscow. On the contrary, the New Left, with its cultural revolution featuring the Green, Feminist, Gay and indigenous movements, was always anti-Stalin and independent of Moscow.}

Einstein was fond of music and was quite an accomplished violinist. His favourite composers were Bach and Mozart. He had a keen sense of humour and loved composing doggerel. His character is well expressed in the following passage which one of his former colleagues, Cornelius Lanczos, quotes from Einstein's Ideas and Opinions:

How strange is the lot of us mortals. Each of us is here for a brief sojourn, for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people - first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. I am strongly drawn to a frugal life and am often oppressively aware that I am engrossing an undue amount of labour of my fellow men. I regard class distinctions as unjustified and, in the last resort, based on force. I also believe that a simple and unassuming life is good for everyone, physically and mentally!

My passianate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with human bneings and human communities. I am truly a "lone sojourner" and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and need for solitude - feelings which increase with the years. One become sharply aware, but without regret, of the limits of mutual understanding and consonance with other people. No doubt, such a person loses some of his innocence and unconcern; on the other hand, he is largely independent of the opinions, habits and judgements of his fellowmen and avoids the temptation to build his inner equilibrium upon such an insecure foundation.

Lanczos comments: These are the words of an extraordinary genius who has contributed more to our world picture than anybody before or after him.

Einstein was a completely humble, even self-effracing man. Lanczos wrote to his daughter Margot, on his death: His greatness was so towering, it made him modest and humble - not as a pose but as an inner necesity. His only interest in his fame was that it made people more willing to listen to his ideas on other subjects. ...

RELIGION

When Einstein as a youth began to read books on popular scicnce, he realised that many of the

{p. 76} stories in the Bible could not he true. This realisation was followed by what he describes as a posiively fanalic orgy of freethinking and a suspicion against every kind of authority. However, Eintein's ideas mellowed and he was ever an atheist. He once listed among those pposed to him "the faithful of the Church of the Atheists". Obviously he felt atheism was an equally dogmatic position to that of orthodox religion. Though he did not believe in a personal God, the following quotations reveal what can only be described as a deep religious conviction.

Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe - a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort.

My religiosity consists of a humble admiration for the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance - but for us, not for God. Again he refers to moral obligations as a purely human problem - the most important of all human problems. Yet he could also say: Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth. What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses and Jesus ranks far higher than all the achievements of the enquiring and constructive mind.

Einstein used the term "God" where most sientists prefer the more non-committal term "nature", for example his famous saying: God does not play dice in which he expressed his objection to quantum theory. He used the word 'God" in this and similar contexts so often that it is quite clear that he chose he word deliberaely but he explained in a letter to a freethinker that he meant not Jahwe nor Jupiter but Spinoza's immanent God. Spinoza obviously made a deep impression on Einsein for he often refers to him in similar context.

Einstein did not believe in personal survival after death. This is quite consistent with the whole of his philosophy. The personal is of little consequence: the universal is all-important. ...

{p. 77} A very important facet of Einstein's theory of the universe is that it abolished absolute space and time in the Newtonian sense of a time and space which would exist independently of the universe. To Einstein the properties of space are determined by the matter which occupies it. Space and the universe are identical. The universe does not expand into a pre-existing space. It is space itself which expands. Furthermore there is now a universal time scale as well as universal space. The implications of this fact are not as widely recognised as they should be. In Special Relativity neither twin could say his time was right. One person's time was as good as another's. But now the twin who is at rest with respect to the universe measures universal time. It is the space-travelling twin whose time measurement is out of kilter with the universe. It has even been suggested by a few bold scientists that the local space metric or cosmological substratum as it is called (and which is determined bv the matter of the whole universe) should be regarded as a new and refined form of the old idea of the ether of space. This suggesion is very logical and is tenable but is still generally regarded as heretical. ...

{p. 78} One also wonders why Einstein, the great universalist, did not give more emphasis to the universal aspects of his cosmology rather than emphasising the relative. Einstein abolished absolute Newtonian space but he did not abolish the universe which, as we have seen, provides a universal reference system. Indeed, recent experiments have succeeded in measuring the velocity of the earth wlth respect to the background radiation. It is purely a matter of semantics whether we now wish to regard motion with respect to the universe as relative or absolute. There is no conflict, as many people imagine, between Einstein's ideas and the concept of an absolute Universe and even of a Great Architect of the Universe who is responsible for its laws and is immanent throughout the Universe. Perhaps the reason Einstein was so restrained ahout cosmology is that it was not a happy experience for him. His preferred version did not appear to fit the facts during his lifetime, but, as mentioned above, that situation has now changed dramatically. ...
{end}

View the article
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(2) Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein

May 1998 Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein

http://www.monthlyreview.org/598einst.htm

This essay was originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949).

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the so-called civilized period of human history has - as is well known - been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature. For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called "the predatory phase" of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future.

Second, socialism is directed towards a social-ethical end. Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and - if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous - are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society.

For these reasons, we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society.

Innumerable voices have been asserting for some time now that human society is passing through a crisis, that its stability has been gravely shattered. It is characteristic of such a situation that individuals feel indifferent or even hostile toward the group, small or large, to which they belong. In order to illustrate my meaning, let me record here a personal experience. I recently discussed with an intelligent and well-disposed man the threat of another war, which in my opinion would seriously endanger the existence of mankind, and I remarked that only a supra-national organization would offer protection from that danger. Thereupon my visitor, very calmly and coolly, said to me: "Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?"

I am sure that as little as a century ago no one would have so lightly made a statement of this kind. It is the statement of a man who has striven in vain to attain an equilibrium within himself and has more or less lost hope of succeeding. It is the expression of a painful solitude and isolation from which so many people are suffering in these days. What is the cause? Is there a way out?

It is easy to raise such questions, but difficult to answer them with any degree of assurance. I must try, however, as best I can, although I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.

Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a solitary being, he attempts to protect his own existence and that of those who are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his innate abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to comfort them in their sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life. Only the existence of these varied, frequently conflicting, strivings accounts for the special character of a man, and their specific combination determines the extent to which an individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can contribute to the well-being of society. It is quite possible that the relative strength of these two drives is, in the main, fixed by inheritance. But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior. The abstract concept "society" means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society - in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence - that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is "society" which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word "society."

It is evident, therefore, that the dependence of the individual upon society is a fact of nature which cannot be abolished - just as in the case of ants and bees. However, while the whole life process of ants and bees is fixed down to the smallest detail by rigid, hereditary instincts, the social pattern and interrelationships of human beings are very variable and susceptible to change. Memory, the capacity to make new combinations, the gift of oral communication have made possible developments among human being which are not dictated by biological necessities. Such developments manifest themselves in traditions, institutions, and organizations; in literature; in scientific and engineering accomplishments; in works of art. This explains how it happens that, in a certain sense, man can influence his life through his own conduct, and that in this process conscious thinking and wanting can play a part.

Man acquires at birth, through heredity, a biological constitution which we must consider fixed and unalterable, including the natural urges which are characteristic of the human species. In addition, during his lifetime, he acquires a cultural constitution which he adopts from society through communication and through many other types of influences. It is this cultural constitution which, with the passage of time, is subject to change and which determines to a very large extent the relationship between the individual and society. Modern anthropology has taught us, through comparative investigation of so-called primitive cultures, that the social behavior of human beings may differ greatly, depending upon prevailing cultural patterns and the types of organization which predominate in society. It is on this that those who are striving to improve the lot of man may ground their hopes: human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.

If we ask ourselves how the structure of society and the cultural attitude of man should be changed in order to make human life as satisfying as possible, we should constantly be conscious of the fact that there are certain conditions which we are unable to modify. As mentioned before, the biological nature of man is, for all practical purposes, not subject to change. Furthermore, technological and demographic developments of the last few centuries have created conditions which are here to stay. In relatively densely settled populations with the goods which are indispensable to their continued existence, an extreme division of labor and a highly-centralized productive apparatus are absolutely necessary. The time - which, looking back, seems so idyllic - is gone forever when individuals or relatively small groups could be completely self-sufficient. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption.

I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor - not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production - that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods - may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.

For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call "workers" all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production - although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. Insofar as the labor contract is "free," what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists' requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of capital is thus characterized by two main principles: first, means of production (capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit; second, the labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in securing a somewhat improved form of the "free labor contract" for certain categories of workers. But taken as a whole, the present day economy does not differ much from "pure" capitalism.

Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an "army of unemployed" almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers' goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?

Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service. {end}

(3) Einstein the Communist

3.1 I found the text below, at the following URL; but later, they changed the text at this URL to one about his science rather than his politics.

Einstein, Albert (1879-1955)

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/e/i.htm

... Further Reading on this matter: Bohr's Report of his Discussions with Einstein and Einstein's Reply.

As the world situation deteriorated, Einstein spent more and more effort in promoting pacifism including the establishment of a War Resisters' International Fund. In a famous exchange of letters with the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, Einstein speculated on the psychological basis for the war and fascism he saw around him. In a discussion of epistemology with the Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore, Einstein defended basic philosophical materialist positions and in particular indicated support for the Pantheism of Spinoza.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, Einstein renounced his German citizenship and emigrated to England, moving to the U.S. in 1935 for a position at Princeton where he lived for the remainder of his life. From this time, Einstein urged Europe to arm and prepare for the inevitable war with Hitler. Most Western nations at this time regarded Hitler as a good anti-communist and Einstein's advocacy of war was given as little heed as had his pacificism.

In 1939, Niels Bohr, told Einstein of Lise Meitner's success in splitting the uranium atom, and speculated on the prospect for the creation of an atom bomb. Though Einstein was sceptical, he was persuaded to write to President Roosevelt to begin atomic-bomb research. He was not included in the team that worked at Los Alamos and did not learn that a nuclear bomb had been made until Hiroshima was razed in 1945. He then joined those scientists seeking ways to prevent any future use of the bomb, his particular and urgent plea being the establishment of a world government under a constitution drafted by the US, Britain, and Russia.

By 1937, after years of failure advocating peaceful attempts to change the world, Einstein became involved with Communism. For the remainder of his life he would be a member, sponsor, or affiliate of at least 34 Communist organisations; and chaired three Communist organisations. Einstein spoke out against capitalism, and it's concentration of power into the hands of the few, and stressed the need for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalist governments. Such ideas did not go unnoticed: the FBI began documenting his activities and speeches, and filed claims against his "communist-anarchist" politics, ammassing into a 1,427 page report by the time of his death. In 1949, Einstein's agitation gained wider attention when he wrote Why Socialism?, explaining that the only way for humanity to rid itself of the evils of capitalism is through the adoptation of Socialism. Einstein did not fully approve of Stalinist Socialism; arguing on several points in letters to Soviet scientists that freedom is necessary for Socialism to work.

{Einstein is closer to the "Trotskyist" camp of Communists}

The rejection of his ideals by bureaucrats on both sides did not break him, however, because his prime obsession still remained with physics. He published his new version of the unified field in 1950, a most meticulous mathematical essay that was immediately criticised by most physicists as untenable.

Compared with his renown of a generation earlier, Einstein was virtually neglected and ostracised in his later years; he said that he felt almost like a stranger in the world. His health deteriorated to the extent that he could no longer play the violin or sail his boat. On April 18, 1955, Einstein died in his sleep at Princeton Hospital. {end}

3.2 FBI Dossier on Einstein

http://foia.fbi.gov/einstein.htm

Albert Einstein 1,427 pages

An investigation was conducted by the FBI regarding the famous physicist because of his affiliation with the Communist Party. Einstein was a member, sponsor, or affiliated with thirty-four communist fronts between 1937-1954. He also served as honorary chairman for three communist organizations.

3.3 The FBI and Albert Einstein - from the Trotskyist wsws website

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/sep2002/eins-s03.shtml

The FBI and Albert Einstein

The Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover's Secret War Against the World's Most Famous Scientist, by Fred Jerome. St. Martin's Press, 2002. 348 pages. ISBN 0-312-28856-5

By Alan Whyte and Peter Daniels 3 September 2002

A 22-year campaign of spying and slander by the FBI against Albert Einstein is traced in this recently published book.

That the FBI spied on prominent personalities, including artists, musicians, scientists and scholars, has been well known for decades. The FBI file on Einstein, perhaps the greatest scientist of the 20th century, first came to light in 1983, when Robert Alan Schwartz, a professor at Florida International University, wrote an article on the subject for The Nation magazine.

Up to 25 percent of the Einstein file was originally blacked out or withheld by the authorities. Author Fred Jerome sued under the Freedom of Information Act and successfully obtained most of the remaining material. The result is a much more detailed examination of the 1,800-page dossier compiled in the decades-long campaign against Einstein.

This book is well worth a full reading. In its own examination of Einstein's activities, The Einstein File reveals to a wider audience what has remained little known in the decades since Einstein's death: the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, whose Theories of Special and General Relativity changed the world and whose name became synonymous with scientific genius, was deeply committed to the fight against war and for democratic rights and civil liberties. He was also an outspoken opponent of social inequality and an advocate of a socialist planned economy.

The Einstein dossier serves as a useful reminder of the scope of FBI spying. Pious and complacent liberals often remark on the "excesses" of the McCarthy era. As the campaign against Einstein shows, these methods long predated the Cold War and McCarthy, although they reached a frenzied pitch in the early 1950s. ...

The popular image of Einstein, cultivated by the media and by and large accepted by his many biographers, is that of the brilliant but somewhat absent-minded scientist, a man at home in the realm of theoretical physics but not in the everyday world. He has been turned into an icon and placed on a pedestal that allows his political views to be safely hidden away. When Time magazine chose him as "Person of the Century" several years ago, it omitted all mention of his socialist views. ...

(4) Ilya Ehrenburg on his meeting with Einstein

Ilya Ehrenburg, Postwar Years 1945-1954: Volume VI of MEN, YEARS - LIFE, translated by TATIANA SIIEBUNINA in collaboration with YVONNE KAPP. LONDON, MACGIBBON & KEE, 1966:

{p. 50} As it grew light I saw a large city: Boston. Skyscrapers were straining towards the plane; I realized that we had indeed crossed the ocean.

Before landing we were given forms to fill in. As well as the usual questions there was one about race. I filled in the forms for all three of us (Galaktionov could speak a little French and Simonov could only exclaim in English 'Wonderful!' and 'I love America'). Instead of replying to the question about race I put a dash. My anti-racism cost us an extra hour in the small passport control building. A member of our embassy told us that the police officer rang up his chiefs: 'The Reds won't state whether they're white or coloured'.

We travelled to Washington by train. I was quite stupid with fatigue but was obliged to go straight to the conference. There were about three hundred people in the hall, proprietors and editors of various newspapers; each wore a badge with his name and that of his paper. Galaktionov represented Pravda, Simonov Red Star and I Ivestia. During the interval the proprietor of a provincial newspaper asked me: 'Is your paper leased to you on a concession from the government or do you work on a yearly salary?' We made our speeches and then answered questions. One editor said that he had lived in Moscow in the thirties and that things had been much easier then for foreign correspondents who could travel anywhere they liked except to Central Asia, and that censorship had been moderate; but now movement was restricted and there was harsh censorship. It fell to me to answer this and I blamed everything on the war, adding that I was a journalist, not a censor. Another editor expressed his indignation at the long delays in granting visas. The general remained silent, and I again had to find a way out. 'I don't grant visas,' I said. 'I'd give them to everybody; I believe that the more journalists travel the better. Perhaps that's why I'm not put in charge of issuing visas.' The Americans laughed and the ice was broken. Galaktionov replied to a question on disarmament. Suddenly a fat journalist with a large cigar (exactly like a poster caricature of a capitalist) stood up and addressed the general: 'I'd like to know, could your paper publish a demand for the resignation of Premier Stalin and his replacement by, say, Molotov or Litvinov?' Galaktionov turned towards me and I read horror on his face: 'Go on, reply, you're used to this sort of thing'. I said as calmly as I could: 'No, that's out of the question. I ought perhaps to remind our colleagues that different countries have different regimes and a

{p. 51} different order of things'. The Americans liked the candour of my reply and the next morning I read in the papers that I was 'a mixture of cynicism and frankness'. Before the banquet we went to the hotel. Galaktionov said several times: 'Ghastly experience'. ...

I soon realized that an old European cannot feel at ease in the New World. ...

I succeeded in making friends with several Americans, yet I must confess that I found it restful to be with Europeans, whether old friends like Julian Tuwim, Chagall, SLcfa, Chcrassi, Roman Jakobson, or people I had come across before, like Le Corbusier, de la Poype, or those whom I was now meeting for the first time, such as Einstein, Koussevitzky, Sholem Asch and Oscar Lange. And when in New Orleans I saw old European houses with balconies, I smiled happily.

{p. 60} ... stayed for a week, there was a police raid during the night; a newly married couple from out of town was arrested because they could not produce a marriage certificate. There were States where people could get married instantly, while the State of Nevada grew wealthy on granting easy divorces. In the dining-car on a train the waiter removed somebody's glass of whisky: 'We're crossing a dry State'.

I went to see the distinguished scientist Vladimir Zworykin, the inventor of the iconoscope. He lived in a beautiful house near Philadelphia. He talked at great length about the rapid strides advanced science was making in America. I knew that Einstein and Fermi owed much to the USA. Roman Jakobson spent a whole night describing to me the future of thinking machines. In Princeton I saw splendid lecture theatres, laboratories and libraries. Yet in Jackson and in Knoxville I had the utmost difficulty in finding a bookshop.

I described my contradictory impressions in my articles. These impressions were naturally often fortuitous and in some cases certainly mistaken, because it is impossible to understand an alien country and way of lifc in so short a time. However, I did not fall for the easy temptation to lampoon America. In 1946 the cold war was gaining ground fast and those Americans who were fostering it eagerly welcomed some of the reports and articles that appeared in our press. Harper's Magaine, which was in the forefront of the anti-Soviet campaign, published a translation of my articles but in its editorial comment admitted that the details did not matter so much as the general impression which the articles would make on the Soviet reader. He would not, the editorial went on, see America as a coarse, greedy, mechanized and soulless monster, as it had been depicted in the past by such European sociologists as, for instance, Andre Siegfried. These articles, it pointed out, had appeared in Izvestia between June and September, at the time of the now famous 'cultural purge' which had victimized many writers and film directors. A leader in Ivestia had said: 'What can the best Soviet citizens, the creators of Soviet culture, learn from the "fashionable" toilers in the field of art in the West and in America today, who express the moral decay and rottenness of the capitalist regime?' Reading this, said Harper's editorial, had given rise to fears and it drew attention to a passage in my fourth article which said: 'We have much to learn from American writers and American architects, and even (in spite of the appalling vulgarity of the average production) from their film directors'. The magazine expressed con-

{p. 61} cern lest these articles had endangered my position. It hoped that I had taken the precaution of removing my tie. (Anti-Soviet journalists hoped that I would be destroyed and to this day they cannot forgive me for having stayed alive.)

However, my articles were not dictated solely by a desire to quell the cold war. I realized that Europeans were beginning to resemble Americans in their attachment to creature comforts, in a certain over-simplification of their inward life and in the cult of technology and sport. I wanted to reassure myself and, bearing in mind the representatives of the new intelligentsia whom I had met in New York, Boston and New Orleans, I tried to show that many Americans were beginning to resemble Europeans: 'America is not a world that stands still, it is constantly shifting. Yesterday's puritans become hard-drinking neurotics, Hemingway characters. The sons of Baptists and Methodists read the New Yorker which satirizes Americanism. In fact, no European will ever be able to debunk America as well as the Americans do it themselves; and in this lies the promise of growth. I am certain that those Americans who criticize America are fervently patriotic. They are thc new pioneers; they too are consumed with a fever, but not with "gold fever": they are searching for spiritual values; skyscrapers do not satisfy them, and if they deride these soaring buildings it is not because they prefer shacks but because they prefer soaring thoughts and soaring emotions.'

{The above, I can agree with}

All this is probably true, but 'a story is soon told' while history meanders. The progress of science has become universal. The Americans were dismayed to see the supremacy of Soviet technology in certain fields; but this stemmed more from the calculations of politicians and generals than from any searching or 'soaring thoughts and soaring emotions'.

{Now he takes a swipe at Stalin}

During the years of what is today called the 'personality cult' cybernetics was treated as charlatanism in our country. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia included the subject for the first time in its supplementary volume. Our cybernetics experts recall the past with anger; one of them transferred his resentment to art, as if 'the anachronistic enthusiasm for Bach and Blok' were responsible for instigating the campaign against the new science. Meanwhile those who banned cybernetics threw uneasy glances at art. I continued and still continue my dispute not so much with America as with 'Americanism'. Norbert Wiener's book fascinated me (although I did not understand all of it). ...

{p. 72} I THOUGHT I had lost the faculty for feeling surprise: I had flown across the ocean, I had visited a variety of countries, met many famous and a few great men, lived through three wars, the Revolution, the year nineteen-thirty-seven, fascism, victory, and yet, quite unexpectedy, on 14th May 1946 I was struck dumb, like a child who for the first time witnesses some exraordinary natural phenomenon: I was driven to Princeton and found myself face to face with Einstein. I spent only a few hours with him but my memory retains those hours better than many an important event in my life. One can forget joy and trouble, but one never forgets amazement; it etches itself too deeply into one's memory.

I had of course seen photographs of Einstein - who has not? - but he looked different in the flesh, possibly because the photographs had been taken a long time ago, or possibly because the camera is not a human eye. Einstein, when I met him, was sixty-seven years old; his grey hair, worn very long, gave him something of the look of a nineteenth-century musician or a hermit. He was wearing a sweater and no coat, and a fountain-pen stuck into the turtle neck protruded just under his chin. He pulled a notebook out of his trousers pocket. His features were sharp, clear-cut, and his eyes astonishingly young, by turns sad, alert or concentrated, then suddenly full of mischievous laughter like a boy's. During the first few minutes he seemed a very old man, but he had only to start talking, to run out into the garden, to throw me a glance of mocking gaiety, for this first impression to vanish. He was young with the youth that years cannot subdue; he himself expressed it in this casual phrase: 'I live and I feel puzzled, and all the time I try to understand'.

In Julio Jurenito, written in 1921, I spoke of having read a popular exposition of the Theory of Relativity. I am extremely ignorant in many fields of science (a fact of which I am fortunately aware), the results of an incomplete education. I absorbed the popular exposition, though even that I did not entirely understand, and was rather vague about some things. On the way from New York to Princeton I felt

{p. 73} nervous: what should I, an ignoramus, be able to talk about to a great scientist? I confided my apprehensions to the Jewish writer Brainin who was taking me to Princeton. He replied that Einstein was a simple man and that he had asked to meet me because he was interested in Russia and in the threat of a new war. This did not entirely reassure me. But as soon as Einstein began to talk my fears evaporated. Of course I answered his questions and enlarged on some points, but today it seems to me that it was only he who spoke, while I listened and if I did open my mouth it was to ape.

Everything amazed me: his appearance, his life story, his wisdom, his spirit of challenge, but above all the fact that here was I actually drinking cofee with Einstein while he talked to me.

(On one occasion I was sitting next to Joliot-Curie at a meeting of ihe World Peace Council. One speaker followed another reiterating well-known truths. Meanwhile Joliot-Curie, leaning close to my ear, began talking about the pattern of the physicist's life. Something must have been said to start this train of thought. 'Physicists,' he said, 'are like poets, they make their discoveries in their youth. It's a matter of inspiration. Fermi created his theory of the beta-decomposition of radio-active atoms when he was thirty-three. Rutherford showed his genius at thirty-two. Broglie and Pauli made their important discoveries at thirty-one, Dirac at twenty-six. And do you know how old Einstein was when he formulated his special Theory of Relativity? Twenty-six.' Joliot-Curie eyes sparkled merrily, then he grew grave: 'We must listen to what this chap's saying'. I wrote down Joliot-Curie's words on the agenda paper.)

It was, of course, the sheer stature of the man I was about to meet which made me feel nervous on my way to Princeton. I remembered Langevin saying in 1934: 'Einstein has upset the whole of natural science. Before him physicists thought that everthing was known, but he has proved that there is another way of looking at things. Modern physics begins with him, and not only physics, but all modern science.'

He destroyed the old conception of the academic physicist bounded by the limits of his special discipline. I knew that he was a friend of Romain Rolland, that in 1915 he had spoken out against the war; I knew of his fight against fascism, and the man I now saw helped me to understand a great deal about our epoch, so full of contradictions.

Much later I read his autobiographical notes and studies in Einstein,

{p. 74} Philosopher-Scientist, and the reminiscences of his friends, and realized that my amazement had been a natural thing. His life was like a turbulent mountain river. To begin with there is his nationality: he started life as a German subject, then became a Swiss citizen and finally an American one. At the time he made his great discovery he was officially a third grade examiner at the Berne Patent Office. Three years later, when all the leading scientists of the world were talking about his discovery, he was lecturing at Berne University to an audience of two students. Soon people began to speak of him not only at learned meetings but in trams. He gave courses of lectures in Zurich, Prague, Berlin, Leiden, Pasadena and Princeton; he travelled to many European countries and to India, Palestine and Japan. He met, he had intimate talks with the most diverse personalities. I am not speaking about scientists - it was natural that he should have ties of friendship with many of them - but I should like to mention some of the surprising encounters which he has referred to in his writings or in conversation: Romain Rolland and Earl (Bertrand) Russell, Kafka and Charlie Chaplin, Rabindranath Tagore and Chicherin (the Soviet People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs), Martin Buber the historian of Hasidism and Bernard Shaw, Albert the King of the Belgians and the Negro singer Marian Anderson, President Roosevelt and Nehru. He hated receptions, applause and adulation and rarely spoke in public; he loved to play the fiddle, was a passionate gardener, enjoyed sailing (he even wrote an article on the problems of sailing a yacht), while at the same time there as not a world event to which he did not react selflessly and passionately. During the years of the First World War, hearing that Romain Rolland had come out aginst nationalistic blindness, he joined him in Switzerland and publicly opposed the universal carnage. He courageously welcomed the October Revolution {the Bolshevik Revolution} and branded German militarism. In him fascism found an implacab!e enemy. He was no nationalist, German or Jewish or American. When he was appealing for funds to found a Hebrew University in Palestine, he said: 'I have seen Jews humiliated in Germany, and it made my heart bleed. I have seen the schools, the satirical journals and all possible means of propaganda mobilized for the purpose of crushing in my Jewish brothers their faith in themselves'. He did everything he could for Spain defending her dignity. He lent his support to many organizations campaigning against the threat of a new war. He resigned from the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation of the League

{p. 75} of Nations which, he declared, was abetting the strong and encouraging aggressors. In America he publicly declared that he sympathized with Socialism and was a friend of the Soviet Union. He called discrimination against Negroes 'a dark blot on the conscience of every American'. During the Second World War he helped to raise funds for aid to the Soviet Union. He condemned the use of atomic weapons, anathematized the cold war, advocated general disarmament and, a month before his death, was working on the draft of an appeal that was to be signed by himself, Bertrand Russell and Joliot-Curie.

He had many enemies. There were scientists who tried to confute his theories which they suspected of undermining their tiny reputations, acquired by fair means or foul. The German fascists hated him: for them he was first and foremost a Jew. An 'Anti-Einstein' organization was set up and joined by several famous physicists, including some Nobel prize-winners. They embarked upon the systematic persecution of Einstein: lectures were sabotaged, pseudo-scientific satires and pamphlets were published. In 1922 the Camelots du Roi, on learning that Einstein was coming to Paris, organized a hostile demonstration. When Hitler came to power Einstein was condemned to death in absentia and a high price was set on his head. In 1933 certain obscurantists clamoured for him to be debarred from entering the United States. In 1945 John Elliott Rankin, speaking in Congress, called on the government to deal with this agitator called Einsein who had dared to speak against Franco's regime. Five years later this Rankin referred to Einstein as an old charlatan, who called himself a scientist but was in fact a member of the Communist camp. The notorious Committee on Un-American Activities put him under observation.

In my notebooks I find some of Einstein's sayings which I recorded immediately on my return to New York. Of the Americans he said: 'They're like children, sometimes charming, sometimes unruly. It's bad when children start plaving with matches. It's better if they play witn bricks ... I don't think the average American reads less than the average European but he reads different things, and, more important, he reads in a different way. I once asked a student whether he had read a certain book and he said: "I think so, but I can't remember. Anyhow, that book came out quite a few years ago, it must be out of date by now". A fellow like that is interested only in the latest thing ... They're very good at forgetting here. During the war the average

{p. 74} American's reaction to the word "Stalingrad" was to tale off his wristwatch and send it to a Red Army man. Mikhoels and Feffer saw it happen. Today you get a very different reaction to that word from many people: show the Russians we've got the atom bomb. Of course it's the result of the press campaign ...

He went back to the bomb: 'You see, the greatest danger lies in trusting logic. You feel certain that 2 and 2 make 4. I don't ... It's a terrible thing that Roosevelt died when he did; he wouldn't have let it happen'.

(It was only later that I learnt about what is regarded as Einstein's tragedy. A month before the outbreak of the Second World War some friends of Einstein who were physicists informed him that they were working in Germany to produce an atom bomb. Since their seizure of Czechoslovakia the Nazis had access to uranium. Einstein was persuaded to write to Roosevelt. This he did. In April 1945, when it became clear that the Nazis had not yet succeeded in producing an atom bomb, but that the Americans had, Einstein wrote to the President a second time beseeching him not to have recourse to this cataclysmic weapon. Roosevelt died without reading this letter and a few months later the new President, Truman, gave the order for the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

I knew that Einstein was interested in the Black Book, the general title of a collection of human documents: diaries, letters and statements by eye-witnesses concerning Nazi crimes against the Jewish people in the occupied territories. I had brought with me certain published material and photographs. Einstein examined them with close atten-

{p. 77} tion and when he raised his eyes I read grief in them, and his lips twitched slightly. He said: 'I have often said that the potentialities of knowledge are unlimited, as is the knowable. Now I think that vileness and cruelty also have no limits.'

He asked me where I intended to go. I told him that in two days I should be leaving for the south as I wanted to see how the Negroes lived. He said: 'They live in terrible conditions. It's shameful. The actions of the legislatures in the Southern States are covered by some of the counts of the Nuremberg indictment'. A few minutes later, when we had, one out into the garden and a photographer was pestering us, he told me bout beautiful young American girl who, defending racial discrimination, had asked him the usual question: 'What would you say if your son announced that he was going to marry a Negress?' He said he had replied: 'I don't know. I should probably ask to meet his fiancee. But if my son anncounced that he wanted to marry you I should certairly lose both sleep and appetite', and his eyes lit up ith a challenging gleam.

He asked me about the Soviet Union and then said: 'I feel sure that you'l! be able to restore the economy very quickly. In fact, I believe in Russia. Tell me, do you see Stalin often?' I said I had never talked to him face to face. 'A pity; I should have liked to know what he's like as a man. A Communist told me that I was behind the times, exaggerating the role of the individual. Of course I'm not a Marxist but I know well enough that the objective world exists outside the individual's subjective appraisals. And yet the individual plays a most important part. I can picture Lenin to myself far better: I've read about him, met people who'd known him. He commands respect not only as a politician but also as a man of high moral integrity'.

There is a note of another thing he said, although I cannot remember at what stage of our conversation: 'I was greatly impressed by The Brothers Karamaov. It's one of those books that shatter the mechanical conception of man's inner world, of the limits of good and evil'.

As we parted he said: 'The main thing now is to prevent an atomic catastrophe. It's a good thing that you've come to America. I hope more Russians will come and talk to us. Mankind must prove itself more intelligent than Epimetheus who opened Pandora's box and could not shut it again. Au revoir, come again'.

Ten days later I lleard a familiar voice on the radio: Einstein was speaking about the deadly danger hanging over humanity ...

{end}

(5) Einstein and Olinto de Pretto (discoverer of E=mc2)

5.1 From: "Marek Glogoczowski" <mglogo@poczta.fm>

Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2003 00:23:30 +0200

In essays about Einstein ... somebody mentions that the equation E =mc2 (which is at the base of atomic bomb functioning) Einstein "borrowed" from an Italian. The information about this plagiary was published by Italian revue "Gente" no 49, Dec. 2, 1999, and reprinted in Poland in weekly (of very small diffusion) "Mysl Polska", March 2, 2000. As a physicist I know several researchers in Poland working on Einstein's discoveries (among them Prof. Ludwik Kostro quoted in my paper on origin of American Superpower), but no one of them knew, prior to my information, that Einstein indeed used the work of Italian agronomer (but also geologist, astronomer and physicist) Olinto de Pretto, who published his work in 1903 and then, thanks to help of astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, again in 1904. (His work is preserved at Torino's bibliotheca.)

Olinto de Pretto was afraid that his theory, put into practice, might give horrible results. Einstein knew Italian, for his family lived in Italy (Milano), where in 1902 died his father. Moreover, one of closest friends of Einstein was Italian engineer Michele Besso, who lived for a certain time at Rome at house of his uncle Beniamino Besso, who in turn was a close friend of Augusto de Pretto, brother of Olino. {end}

5.2 Einstein's E=mc2 'was Italian's idea'

Rory Carroll in Rome Thursday

November 11, 1999 The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,3928978-103681,00.html

The mathematical equation that ushered in the atomic age was discovered by an unknown Italian dilettante two years before Albert Einstein used it in developing the theory of relativity, it was claimed yesterday.

Olinto De Pretto, an industrialist from Vicenza, published the equation E=mc2 in a scientific magazine, Atte, in 1903, said Umberto Bartocci, a mathematical historian.

Einstein allegedly used De Pretto's insight in a major paper published in 1905, but De Pretto was never acclaimed, said Professor Bartocci of the University of Perugia.

De Pretto had stumbled on the equation, but not the theory of relativity, while speculating about ether in the life of the universe, said Prof Bartocci. It was republished in 1904 by Veneto's Royal Science Institute, but the equation's significance was not understood.

A Swiss Italian named Michele Besso alerted Einstein to the research and in 1905 Einstein published his own work, said Prof Bartocci. It took years for his breakthrough to be grasped. When the penny finally dropped, De Pretto's contribution was overlooked while Einstein went on to become the century's most famous scientist. De Pretto died in 1921.

"De Pretto did not discover relativity but there is no doubt that he was the first to use the equation. That is hugely significant. I also believe, though it's impossible to prove, that Einstein used De Pretto's research," said Prof Bartocci, who has written a book on the subject.

Einstein's theory held that time and motion are relative to the observer if the speed of light is constant and if all natural laws are the same. A footnote established the equivalence of mass and energy, according to which the energy (E) of a quantity of matter (m) is equal to the product of the mass and the square of the velocity of light (c). Now known as: E=mc2 .

The influence of work by other physicists on Einstein's theory is also controversial. A German, David Hilbert, is thought by some to have been decisive.

Edmund Robertson, professor of mathematics at St Andrew's University, said: "An awful lot of mathematics was done by people who have never been credited - Arabs in the middle ages, for example. Einstein may have got the idea from someone else, but ideas come from all sorts of places.

"De Pretto deserves credit if his contribution can be proven. Even so, it should not detract from Einstein."

5.3 Michael Falotico's review of Umberto Bartocci's book

A review by Michael Falotico of the book written by Professor Umberto Bartocci

http://www.italian-american.com/depretreview.htm

Umberto Bartocci, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Perugia, Italy, in his book, "Albert Einstein e Olinto De Pretto: la vera storia della formula piu' famosa del mondo" (Albert Einstein and Olinto De Pretto, the true history of the most famous formula in the world) has shown to us what can happen if one digs long enough through old Italian archives. His book literally re-writes the history of science in the 20th Century. Professor Bartocci proves that an Italian first formulated the famous equation E=mc^2.

An industrialist named Olinto De Pretto, a native of the Veneto region of Italy, published an article in which he gave, in its final form, the equation E=mc^2. This article was published on June 16, 1903, and published again in February 27, 1904, the second time in the Atti of the Reale Instituto Veneto di Scienze. De Pretto thereby preceded Einstein's famous 1905 "E=mc^2" paper by at least a year-and-a-half.

To Professor Bartocci's credit, he attaches the complete text of the De Pretto article as an appendix to his book so that the reader can decide for himself/herself if De Pretto was a true precursor to Einstein.

In the article, Olinto De Pretto actually comments on how amazing his discovery is. De Pretto could hardly believe his mathematical discovery. This formula, of course, would later be the theoretical basis for the atomic bomb. Indeed, decades later, when another Italian, Enrico Fermi, was working on nuclear reactions, Fermi credited the famous equation E=mc^2 (attributed to Einstein) for formulating the theoretical underpinnings that made nuclear reactions possible.

De Pretto himself understood the significance of his discovery. Speaking of E=mc^2 he wrote (my translation), "To what astonishing result has our reasoning brought us? Nobody would easily admit that stored in a latent state, in a kilogram of whatever material, completely hidden from our investigations, there comes into play such a sum of energy. The idea would be adjudged crazy!" De Pretto was 46 years old when he made this discovery.

Unfortunately, he would never be in a position to take credit for it. In 1921, a year before Einstein received the Nobel Prize, De Pretto was shot dead, murdered by a woman over a business dispute. De Pretto was in the process of having a complete book of his scientific ideas published when he was killed.

Could Einstein have copied from De Pretto? Nobody can absolutely prove that Einstein saw De Pretto's article but Professor Bartocci offers some intriguing speculation.

Professor Bartocci has traced a link between De Pretto and Einstein, through Einstein's best friend, Michele Besso. Besso is the only person credited in the famous E=mc^2 paper of 1905. Throughout all of his famous papers on 1905, Einstein gives no sources or citations. The only credit given to anyone is a brief mention of his friend Michele Besso. Why the lack of citation of any source material?

Interestingly, Besso was originally from the Veneto region of Italy; his native tongue was Italian. The city of Vicenza, Italy, again in the Veneto region, was where Olinto De Pretto was from.

Michele Besso was close to his uncle, Beniamo Besso, who lived in Rome. Beniamo Besso worked as an engineer in Rome with Olinto De Pretto's brother, Augusto De Pretto. Perhaps Augusto passed on Olinto's discovery to Beniamo Besso who in turned told Michele Besso who in turn told EinsteinÑor so goes the thread.

While the De Pretto-to-Besso-to-Einstein link is seemingly tenuous, it must be noted that Einstein was well aware of other groundbreaking work by Italian physicists (having read deeply the Italian physics literature). During the very same "anno mirabilis" of 1905, when Einstein published his famous four physics papers in the Annalen der Physik (including the paper that derived the E=mc^2 formula), he also published in the very same Annalen der Physik reviews of articles written by Italian physicists. For example, the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, published by Princeton University Press, contains a review written by Albert Einstein in March 1905 of the an article written by Arturo Giammarco, "A Case of Corresponding States in Thermodynamics" Einstein also wrote a review of Giuseppe Belluzzo, "Principles of Graphic Thermodynamics." This shows that Einstein was reading rather deeply in the Italian physics literature at the time.

Perhaps the Besso connection is probably unnecessary although it could very well have happened. Einstein, too, could have stumbled across De Pretto's formula on his own.

The Veneto region is not that far from where Einstein was then living in Switzerland. Indeed, Albert Einstein was quite fluent in Italian. According to Abram Pais in his biography of Einstein, "Subtle is the Lord", when Einstein graduated from high school in Aarau, Germany, he was required to take exams in both the German language and the Italian language. Out of a maximum score of 6,Einstein received a score of 5 in German (his native tongue) and also a score of 5 in Italian! This in and of itself is proof of Einstein's conversance in Italian; Einstein could write as well in Italian as he could in his native German tongue.

Also, the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, published by Princeton University Press, notes that Einstein spoke Italian. Of course, Einstein had lived in Italy during his youth, and Einstein's father is buried in Milan. Further, in order for Einstein to gain Swiss citizenship (a requirement for him to work in the Berne patent office since that was a government job) it could only help him if he could show proficiency in Italian, which, along with German and French, is one of the three official languages of Switzerland. Finally, there are still extant postcards written by Einstein in Italian as well as living Italians who spoke to Einstein in his later years who can attest to his fluency. There is no doubt that Einstein spoke Italian well. Indeed, the above cited reviews of the Italian physics literature prove the point. It is impossible to say if Einstein ever saw the De Pretto article. All one can say with any assurance is that if Einstein indeed saw the article, Einstein's Italian language skills were strong enough that he could read it.

When Einstein did publish his famous article in 1905 wherein he gave a variation of the famed "E=mc^2" formula, he titled this "discovery" in the form of a question. Published in November, 1905, in Volume 18, pages 639-641, the title of Einstein's paper was phrased as a question, "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon its Energy Content?"

Professor Bartocci finds it curious that Einstein would title his article in the form of a question. Perhaps he was not quite sure of its significance or perhaps he wanted the title in question form in order to later attribute the idea to someone else should the formula prove incorrect. Or perhaps Einstein is making a veiled reference to something he saw in the Italian physics literature.

Professor Bartocci spends much of his book discussing how difficult it was to get anyone to believe him. The Einstein "establishment" is so strong, and the mythology surrounding Einstein so ingrained, that no one in Italy would publish his book. Once he did find a publisher, he could not get the book reviewed. It was only in Great Britain, far from Italy, that word leaked out regarding the book.

On the face of it, the Einstein story is irresistible. How one obscure patent clerk single-handedly published in the same year (1905) four articles that, respectively, explained Brownian motion; explained the photo-electric effect; formulated the equation E=mc^2, and invented the theory of relativity! For one man to have done all that, and all in the same year, is nothing short of miraculous. Any one of these discoveries would have assured Einstein a place in history. To have single-handedly made all four and published them all in the space of a year, well, that is astonishing genius.

Perhaps the British reviewers are a bit more cynical. They publicized Professor Bartocci's findings when no one else would. Perhaps Einstein, undoubtedly a brilliant man, did not do quite all that he is said to have done.

What is absolutely indisputable is that the formula was published, not once but twice, in the Italian physics literature. Its authorship should rightly be credited to the industrialist, Olinto De Pretto. ...

5.4 Anonymous response to my Einstein biography, by Tim McCaskey

Just to clarify, this is a response I received to my Einstein biography. The author chose to remain anonymous. I haven't checked the sources, so you may take it or leave it as you will.

Tim McCaskey

http://www.wam.umd.edu/~mccaskey/eresp.htm

Sir,

You requested comments on your Einstein web site, so here are some (please keep an open mind as you read this; apologies for the length):

Your biography on your Web site of A. Einstein is the same old stuff everyone has been reading about him for years and is quite obsolete by now.

For example, you mention Albert Einstein fathered two sons. True, as far as it goes. But why do you not mention that Albert also fathered a daughter, named Lieserl? Do not daughters rate a mention?

Lieserl is mentioned quite prominently in the Love Letters between Mileva Maric (Einstein's first wife and the mother to all his biological children) and Albert Einstein.

The curious fact about Mr. Einstein is that his early teachers were probably correct: they did not view him as particularly bright. When Einstein (on his second attempt) managed to finally enter the Swiss Polytechnic school in Zurich, the young 17 year old quickly realized he was in way over his head. He was extremely quick to glom on to Mileva Maric, a brilliant Serbian student, who was the only woman studying physics at the Swiss Polytechnic ("ETH") the entire time Einstein was there. Maric was four years Einstein's senior. She was a Serb, an Eastern Orthodox Christian, short of stature, had a limp and was extremely bookish. In addition to taking the exact same course-work in college that Einstein took, and living together with him, sharing textbooks, etc., Maric studied on her own for one semester in Germany under Phillipe Lenard, the Nobel Prize winning physicist who discovered the photo-electric effect (which was explained in one of the 1905 papers attributed to Einstein).

She was also absolutely hated by Einstein's mother, Pauline. Still, despite his mother's fierce objections, Einstein stubbornly went ahead and married her. It was during this marriage that Einstein is credited with producing the 1905 papers which made him famous. All this is detailed in the Love Letters. Further, I suggest you read TIME magazine, April 30, 1990, and the essay by Dennis Overbye "Einstein in Love." This essay refers, without giving attribution, to the work of Dr. Evan Harris Walker and the linguist, Senta Troemmel-Ploetz. If you can find their work anywhere, it is truly an eye-opener.

Prior to their marriage, Mileva Maric gave birth out of wedlock to Lieserl, the only biological daughter of Albert Einstein. Nobody really knows what happened to this child; there is a mention in one of the letters to her having scarlet fever and it is believed that the child was put up for adoption in Serbia. Albert never breathed a word about her publicly during his life-time (which, personally, I find rather strange).

Mileva faced the obvious invidious prejudice of being a woman. Remember, in 1900 women couldn't even vote! Although her grades were comparable to Einstein, Mileva ultimately did not pass her final examinations. It must be noted, however, that at the time she was taking these exams she was late in her pregnancy with Albert's second child (his son, Hans Albert) and also faced the prejudice of her teachers for being both a Slav and a woman. She was, indeed, the only student in Albert's class not to graduate, although she did receive a research position with Professor Weber, which later fell through. Of the students who did actually graduate, Einstein had the lowest grade point average.

But did Albert Einstein---the same man his teachers thought lazy, the same man who after graduating from the ETH could not find a job in physics and was ultimately forced to work for ten years as a lowly patent clerk --- really formulate all by himself the great works in 1905 for which he is credited? Or did his wife, who struggled against the obvious prejudice of being a woman studying science during a highly "male chauvanistic" era, and the added prejudice of being a Slav in Switzerland, collaborate with Einstein?

The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein prove to any open-minded person, that Maric did indeed collaborate on the authorship of Einstein's famous papers in 1905. Einstein even uses the word "collaboration". Just a random sample quote from Albert to Mileva (published also in the Love Letters):

"How happy and proud I will be when the two of us together will have brought our work on the relative motion to a victorious conclusion!" Our work??? This is just one isolated quotation. Should you read the entire Love Letters you will find that Albert shares all his physics ideas with her and is extremely interested in her opinion. There are literally dozens of examples. See the copyrighted manuscript by Evan Harris Walker "Ms. Einstein". There is also a book by Ann Gabor called, "Mrs. Einstein" which essentially parrots Dr. Walker's work but fails to give him any attribution.

Senta Troemmel Ploetz, in her excellent paper, "Mileva Maric-Einstein: The Woman who did Einstein's Mathematics" quotes from a Serbian biography of Maric, that Einstein himself once told his friends that his wife did his math for him. When one realizes the highly mathematical aspect of the 1905 Special Relativity paper, which relies heavily on derivations of the Lorentz transformations, then one can see the importance of having a first-rate mathematician's help. The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein even have a photo-static copy of one of Albert's college notebooks, in which Mileva has gone through and corrected Albert's math! Yet the myth of the isolated Einstein working alone, who all by himself, without help from anyone, wrote four brilliant papers on physics in 1905, endures. No two physicists ever had a closer relationship: Mileva and Albert ate together, went to school together, shared ideas together, shared textbooks together, slept together, raised children together, and yet the "Einstein Establishment" refuses to acknowledge her as a collaborator in any way whatsoever.

There's more: Naturally, the original manuscript for the Special Relativity paper is missing. It was lost during Einstein's lifetime. Yet, Abram Joffe, a summa cum laude Russian physicist is quoted as having seen the original 1905 manuscript and said it was signed, "Einstein-Marity" (Marity being the Hungarianized version of Maric'; at that time Serbia was under the dominion of Austro-Hungarian empire). Joffe died in 1961. See op cited TIME (April 30, 1990).

Moreover, when Albert admitted adultery and divorced Mileva in 1919, he promised that in the event he should win the Nobel Prize all the money - not part of the money but all the money - would go to Mileva. According to the Einstein biography, "Subtle is the Lord" by Abram Pais, Einstein kept his promise. When he received the Nobel Prize money in 1922 (he was awarded the prize for the year 1921; the award was announced and he received the money in 1922) Albert did indeed give Mileva all the money from the Nobel Prize. Why all the money?

Then I must also mention Olinto De Pretto. Albert Einstein was quite fluent in Italian. According to the already cited Pais biography, when Einstein graduated from high school in Aarau he was required to take exams in both the German language and the Italian language. Out of a maximum score of 6, Einstein received a score of 5 in German (his native tongue) and also a score of 5 in Italian! Of course, Einstein had lived in Italy during his youth, and Einstein's father is buried in Milan. Further, during the very same "anno mirabilis" of 1905, when Einstein published his famous four physics papers in the Annalen der Physik, he also published in the very same Annalen der Physik two reviews of articles written in Italian by Italian physicists. Again, these were reviews of articles written in Italian and were published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905, which shows that Einstein was reading rather deeply the Italian literature in physics at the time. Moreover, Michele Besso, the only person credited in the famous E=mc^2 paper of 1905, was originally from the Veneto region of Italy; his native tongue was Italian. Also, in order for Einstein to gain Swiss citizenship (a requirement for him to work in the Berne patent office since that was a government job) it could only help him if he could show proficiency in Italian, which, along with German and French, is one of the three official languages of Switzerland. Finally, there are still extant postcards written by Einstein in Italian as well as living Italians who spoke to Einstein in his later years who attest to his fluency. There is no doubt that Einstein spoke Italian well.

Why do I emphasize Einstein's fluency in Italian? Because another native of the Veneto region, an industrialist named Olinto De Pretto, had published an article in which De Pretto gave, in its final form, the equation E=mc^2. This article was published in 1903 and published again in 1904; preceding Einstein's 1905 "E=mc^2" paper by at least a year-and-a-half. Dr. Umberto Bartocci, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Perugia, in his book, "Albert Einstein e Olinto De Pretto: la vera storia della formula piu' famosa del mondo" (Albert Einstein and Olinto De Pretto, the true history of the most famous formula in the world) has published De Pretto's article in full. In the article, De Pretto actually comments on how amazing his discovery is. That is a kilogram of any material there is within an extraordinary explosion of energy. De Pretto articulated the formula quite well and realized its significance. This formula, of course, would later be the theoretical basis for the atomic bomb. Throughout all of the famous papers on 1905, Einstein gives no sources or citations. The only credit given to anyone is a brief mention of his friend Michele Besso. Why the lack of citation of any source material?

Dr. Bartocci has made a link between Michele Besso and Olinto De Pretto; however, nobody can absolutely prove that Einstein saw De Pretto's article. Yet based on the Besso link with the De Pretto article, and also that Einstein was well aware of other groundbreaking work by Italian physicists (having read deeply the Italian physics literature), it would seem difficult to deny that Einstein was aware of the De Pretto article. Indeed, when Einstein did publish his famous article in 1905 wherein he gave a variation of the famed "E=mc^2" formula, he titled this "discovery" in the form of a question. Perhaps he was not quite sure of its significance or perhaps he wanted the title in the form of a question in order to later attribute it to someone else should the formula prove incorrect.

What is absolutely indisputable is that the formula was published, not once but twice, in the Italian physics literature. Its authorship should rightly be credited to the industrialist, Olinto De Pretto.

Recently published letters written by Einstein (see The Collected Papers of A. Einstein) reveal him to be far less than a saintly figure in his personal life. His first wife, Mileva Maric, for whom he had originally professed such great love, he treated cruelly toward the end of the marriage, even calling her "uncommonly ugly". He admitted in a deposition during divorce proceedings (28 December 1918) that he had carried on an adulterous relationship with one of his cousins, whom he later married. During this second marriage, Einstein had numerous affairs, even - apparently -- including an affair with a Russian spy! And again, Einstein never breathed a word about having fathered a daughter with Maric.

The "Einstein myth" has become so ingrained in popular thought that many of the current generations will be loath to part with it. It does make a terrific story: a student whom his teachers thought would not amount to anything, a sloppy dresser who abhored wearing socks or even neatly combing his hair, should later be revealed to be the greatest scientist of all time. A solitary genius who without any significant help from anybody, re-arranged the universe. Like most fine stories that sound too good to be true, the "Einstein myth" is really too good to be true. The Nobel Prize winning chemist Linus Pauling once said (on a completely unrelated topic) that it takes a generation before people will accept a truly new idea. Current generations, weaned on the "Einstein myth" will not bear to part with it. Women and men of newer generations, not weaned on the myth, willing to investigate the evidence for themselves, and not wedded to any ideology or point of view, will approach the issue of Einstein's authorship of the Special Theory of Relativity and the formula "E=mc^2" with fresh eyes. I ask only that the reader keep an open mind.

Thank you for patience.

5.5 Umberto Bartocci to Julio Gonzalez Cabillo, on Einstein & De Pretto

Re: [HM] Einstein's E=mc^2 was Italian's idea ...

Julio Gonzalez Cabillon (jgc@adinet.com.uy) Thu, 18 Nov 1999 16:02:17 -0200

http://sunsite.utk.edu/math_archives/.http/hypermail/historia/nov99/0134.html

~~ forwarded message ~~~

Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 19:17:38 +0100 From: Umberto Bartocci To: Julio Gonzalez Cabillon Subject: Re: [HM] Einstein's E=mc^2 was Italian's idea ...

Dear Professor Cabillon,

I exposed my researches on the affair Einstein-De Pretto in a book ("Albert Einstein e Olinto De Pretto - La vera storia della formula piu' famosa del mondo"), which was published some months ago by the following editor: andromeda@posta.alinet.it (this editor is in Bologna, Italy). In this book I included all the original paper by De Pretto, which was published in in the Proceedings of the Reale Istituto... Since I presume that you can understand Italian, I send to you an excerpt from this book:

Il 23 novembre del 1903 veniva presentata al Reale Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, da parte del Conte Almerico Da Schio, una memoria del Dott. Olinto De Pretto dal titolo "Ipotesi dell'etere nella vita dell'universo" (apparsa poi nel febbraio del 1904 negli Atti dello stesso Istituto, Tomo LXIII, Parte II, pp. 439-500).

About De Pretto's own comments of his "intuition", I wrote:

Nel terzo paragrafo di questo scritto, intitolato "Energia dell'etere ed energia latente nella materia" (vedi il successivo Capitolo IX), troviamo formulata non soltanto la stessa relazione ipotizzata da Einstein tra massa ed energia, ma anche la sua 'corretta' interpretazione fisica, che viene espressa attraverso le seguenti parole:

"La materia di un corpo qualunque, contiene in se stessa una somma di energia rappresentata dall'intera massa del corpo, che si muovesse tutta unita ed in blocco nello spazio, colla medesima velocit\a delle singole particelle. [...] La formula mv2 ci d\a la forza viva e la formula mv2/8338 ci d\a, espressa in calorie, tale energia. Dato adunque m=1 e v uguale a 300 milioni di metri [al secondo], che sarebbe la velocit\a della luce, ammessa anche per l'etere, ciascuno potr\a vedere che si ottiene una quantit\a di calorie rappresentata da 10794 seguito da 9 zeri e cio\e oltre dieci milioni di milioni" (pp. 458-459).

[...]

Che questa conclusione dovesse sembrare all'epoca incredibile, e completamente al di fuori delle conoscenze fisiche del tempo, appare all'autore subito chiaro, visto che questi aggiunge subito al calcolo precedente il seguente commento:

"A quale risultato spaventoso ci ha mai condotto il nostro ragionamento? Nessuno vorr\a facilmente ammettere che immagazzinata ed allo stato latente, in un chilogrammo di materia qualunque, completamente nascosta a tutte le nostre investigazioni, si celi una tale somma di energia, equivalente alla quantit\a che si pu\o svolgere da milioni e milioni di chilogrammi di carbone; l'idea sar\a senz'altro giudicata da pazzi" (p. 459).

Unfortunately, I did never translate in English my work, thus I hope that this will be enough for you, and I am sorry I cannot send to you much more information. In any case, if you wish to submit to me any single question, I shall be happy to help you...

Best wishes, and thanks for your attention

Umberto Bartocci

~~~ end of message ~~~

(6) Bringing Einstein down to earth

6.1 Caroline Thompson's Physics http://www.aber.ac.uk/~cat

Started August 27, 2000

Forgotten History

http://users.aber.ac.uk/cat/History/forgotten.htm

{start} Whether or not there is conscious effort by "the establishment" to support the reigning paradigms by presenting distorted versions of history, the fact is that the text books and popular literature abound with misleading statements and occasional outright falsehoods. If established scientists believe in something, why should they tell historians and science writers the whole truth? After all, it will only confuse them!

In my opinion, the false reporting of the Michelson-Morley result was the worst error in scientific history! ...

Did the Michelson-Morley experiments prove there was no "aether wind"?

Probably not! They have been accepted by almost everyone as giving a "null" result, but in point of fact they showed a very interesting periodic variation indicating something. If it was the presence of an aether wind, then it was not behaving in the way they expected, but it was definitely something that needed further investigation, and Dayton Miller, working at first with Morley, undertook the task. The variations proved to be reproducible and to show systematic changes with time of year and some other factors. He also showed, incidentally, that the effect disappeared if you put the apparatus in a thick-walled enclosure, which nullifies several of the more recent tests. He summarised his work in great detail in a review paper in 1933 (Miller, Dayton C, "The Ether-Drift Experiments and the Determination of the Absolute Motion of the Earth", Reviews of Modern Physics 5, 203-242 (1933)). For a much shorter version written in 1940 (the year before he died) see his article for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

He interpreted his results as showing relative motion of the aether. It could either be that the solar system was moving pretty fast (about 200 km/sec, faster than the earth moves around the sun) in a direction roughly perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic, or the aether was moving in the opposite direction at that speed. The aether seemed to be moving like a fluid, going with much slower relative velocity near solid bodies, thus accounting for the apparently modest speed (about 10 km/sec) indicated by Miller's experiments.

These facts about Miller were drawn to my attention by James DeMeo, who continues to research the subject. It appears that there was a major difference of opinion between Miller and Einstein. Einstein's Special Relativity theory demanded that the Michelson-Morley experiments must have been null! The aether was not acceptable. DeMeo reports (January 2001) that he has now found evidence that Einstein was more directly involved than he had thought. Much new material has been added to his original paper, which concentrated on Shankland's 1955 report, written in consultation with Einstein. (Shankland had been an assistant to Miller in 1932-3. )

As Miller said, in an article in a local paper:

The trouble with Professor Einstein is that he knows nothing about my results. . . . He ought to give me credit for knowing that temperature differences would affect the results. He wrote to me in November suggesting this. I am not so simple as to make no allowance for temperature. (Cleveland Plain Dealer January 27, 1926. )

It was evidently a power struggle between the two, the odds tipped in favour of Einstein by the media-enhanced "victory" of his General Relativity theory after the 1919 eclipse. By 1955 the aether had become a dirty word. Even in 1940 or so, I can find no reference to Miller's existence in Herbert Ives' papers (see The Einstein Myth in my book list). The 1979 Brillet and Hall experiment*, currently accepted as an accurate confirmation of Michelson and Morley's "null" result, appears to have been conducted in ignorance of Miller's work. They seem to have been unaware of Miller's conclusion that the aether wind can only be detected in the open. Their temperature-controlled Fabry-Perot interferometer would have had little chance!

DeMeo is not the only person to have spotted Shankland and Einstein's error! See notes by Prof Allais to the French Academy of Sciences, 1997, 1999 and 2000 at http://allais.maurice.free.fr/English/Science.htm.

However, let us not jump to conclusions! Could Miller in fact have been seeing the same thing as Gershteyn et al. , who reported in February 2002** that there was an apparent periodic variation in the value of G? The data was not quite conclusive but appeared to show that its main variations followed a sidereal cycle, not a solar one. Could it be that a gravitational effect caused the arms of Miller's apparatus to bend and vary slightly in effective length? Or could it be that what he saw was merely an ordinary wind effect? Whatever it was, it should not have been ignored. Even if there was no sign of drift, this should not have been used to dismiss the idea of an aether, since all it means is that some wrong assumptions have been made about its properties.

*A. Brillet and J. L. Hall, Physical Review Letters 42, 549 (1979)

**Mikhail Gershteyn et al, "Experimental Evidence That the Gravitational Constant Varies with Orientation", http://www.arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0202058

Have Einstein's relativity theories ever been "generally accepted"?

Many prominent scientist have expressed their doubts, but one in particular should have been listened to. Louis Essen, professional metrologist,inventor of the atomic clock and co-author of a book on the experimental estimation of the speed of light thought Einstein's ideas ridiculous. He may well have forfeited a Nobel Prize for saying this rather too publicly. As he said, Einstein's theories arbitrarily made "space and time intermixed by definition and not as the result of some peculiar property of nature ... If the theory of relativity is regarded simply as a new system of units it can be made consistent but it serves no useful purpose".

See his essay, http://www.btinternet.com/~time.lord/Relativity.html

Whilst on the subject, see also:

New Scientist book review, May 13, 2002, page 48: Margaret Wertheim reviews Robert Marc Friedman's "The Politics of Excellence" (Time Books):

"Seen as a purveyor of metaphysical nonsense that would corrupt the vigorous strain of experimental physics admired by conservative Nobel committee members, Einstein's nomination provoked an extraordinary depth of hostility. "

[Though his nomination for the Nobel prize was not for his relativity ideas, these would have contributed to the impression of "metaphysical nonsense". ]

Dingle, H, "The Case Against Special Relativity", Nature 216, 119-22 (1967)

McCrea, W H, "Why the Special Theory of Relativity is Correct", Nature 216, 122-4 (1967)

and later correspondence: Nature, vol 217, Jan 6 1968, p19

Did Einstein discover E=mc2?

Well, no! I received the following from Theo Theocharis, August 23, 2000, and relayed it to APS News on his request:

In the APS News, Vol. 9, No. 8, August/September 2000, p. 2, the "This Month in Physics History" column was entitled "September 1905: Einstein's Most Famous Formula", and it stated:

"But it was later that year [1905], in a paper received by the Annalen der Physik on September 27, applying his equations to study the motion of a body, that Einstein showed that mass and energy were equivalent, a startling new insight he expressed in a simple formula that became synonymous with his name: E=mc2. However, full confirmation of his theory was slow in coming. It was not until 1933, in Paris, when Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie took a photograph showing the conversion of energy into mass. "

The "100 YEARS AGO" item in the 6 April 2000 issue of Nature (Vol. 404, p. 553) is taken from the 5 April 1900 issue of Nature (note the dates), and it states:

"The calculations of M. Henri Becquerel show that this energy is of the order of one ten-millionth of a watt per second. Hence a loss of weight of about a milligram in a thousand million years would suffice to account for the observed effects, assuming the energy of the radiation to be derived from the actual loss of material. "

The assumption that accounts for the stated (in the 5 April 1900 issue of Nature) figures is E=mc2. But according to APS News, this is "Einstein's most famous formula" which in September 1905 was "a startling new insight".

I think that there is a problem that ought to be resolved.

Did quantum theory "predict" that "back body radiation curve"?

Well, not exactly! This is what Planck -- the reluctant co-inventor of the "photon" -- had to say:

From his 1919 Nobel Prize address, "The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory":

But even if the radiation formula should prove to be absolutely accurate it would after all be only an interpolation formula found by happy guesswork, and would thus leave one rather unsatisfied. I was, therefore, from the day of its origination, occupied with the task of giving it a real physical meaning ...

It is down to you to judge whether or not he succeeded.

Does the photoelectric effect prove the existence of photons?

No! Listen to Millikan on the subject -- and he should know! He is probably best known for his "oil drop" experiment, but he also made a vital contribution to photoelectric theory. His experiments confirming that Nature really does seem to obey the law that Einstein had predicted in 1905 are still taken as definitive. In his main paper on the subject, (Millikan, R A, "A Direct Photoelectric Determination of Planck's Ôh'", Physical Review 7, 355-388, 1916) he says in the introduction:

It was in 1905 that Einstein made the first coupling of photo effects and with any form of quantum theory by bringing forward the bold, not to say reckless, hypothesis of an electro-magnetic light corpuscle of energy h?, which energy was transferred upon absorption to an electron. This hypothesis may well be called reckless, first because an electromagnetic disturbance which remains localised in space seems a violation of the very conception of an electromagnetic disturbance, and second because it flies in the face of the thoroughly established facts of interference. [My emphasis]

Millikan's concluding discussion includes fascinating ideas about what really happens, some sounding remarkably similar to my own [see my faq file]! He repeats several times his vehement objection to the idea of localised packets of light. For example:

... if the equation be of general validity, then it must certainly be regarded as one of the most fundamental and far reaching of the equations of physics; for it must govern the transformation of all short-wave-length electromagnetic energy into heat energy. Yet the semi-corpuscular theory by which Einstein arrived at his equation seems at present to be wholly untenable ...

Finally, he says that a modification of Planck's latest idea [in which light is not in packets of h? but of nh?, where n is any integer]

"... seems to me able to account for all the relations thus far known between corpuscular and ethereal radiations É If any particular frequency is incident upon [a substance containing oscillators of every conceivable frequency] the oscillators in it which are in tune with the impressed waves may be assumed to absorb the incident waves until the energy content as reached a critical value when an explosion occurs and a corpuscle is shot out with an energy h? ...

It is to be hoped that such a theory will soon be shown to be also reconcilable with the facts of black body radiation. " ...

Has it ever been proved that gravity is proportional to mass?

No! This was an assumption that Newton made and others followed, but since nobody pretends to have actually weighed the Sun or the planets it has never been checked. ...

Did Hubble think the cosmological red shift was a Doppler shift?

No! In fact he thought some of his data proved it could not be. He had little use for Einstein's cosmological ideas. Hubble right from the start kept an open mind about the cause of the red shift. ...

Did Quantum Theory help in the discovery of the laser?

Well, certainly the discovery owed nothing to Niels Bohr!

See http://www.spectator.org/AmericanSpectatorArticles/carver.htm, where Carver Mead makes some outspoken criticisms of the status quo. ...
{end}

Caroline H Thompson also wrote:

Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 11:16:05 +0100 From: "Caroline H Thompson" <chelen.thompson@virgin.net>

Einstein the scientist was a very different person from Einstein the man. As far as I can tell, he was ruthless, for example, in suppressing Dayton Miller's work on aether drift, and in asserting his own precedence over Paul Gerber re his prediction for the precession of Mercury's orbit. (Gerber had published the same formula in 1898. The subject has been a matter for debate ever since.) He may well have acted in good faith, believing completely in his own model, but the net result was that false theories have dominated physics for nearly 100 years. {end}

6.2 special theory flawed; thought experiments

by Louis Essen D.Sc., F.R.S.

http://www.btinternet.com/~time.lord/Relativity.html

Relativity

Einstein's theory of relativity was dealt with very briefly in my university course but we were told that we must not expect to understand it. I accepted this situation and I have since discovered that most physicists are content to remain in the same position assuming that it must be right because it is generally accepted. My doubts about it arose when I found that the experts did not understand either. An exchange of letters in Nature between Dingle and McCrea showed that they had opposite views about some of the predictions of the theory and the arguments advanced on both sides were in my view illogical and unconvincing. Much of the discussion about the theory was concerned with the readings of clocks when they are moving relatively to each other, and since I had a wide experience of comparing clocks and measuring time it seemed to be almost a duty to take a closer interest in the controversy especially as some of the so-called relativity effects although very small were not becoming significant in the definition of the atomic second and the use of atomic clocks. It is always better to refer to the original papers rather than to second hand accounts and I, therefore, studied Einstein's famous paper, often regarded as one of he most important contributions in the history of science. Imagine my surprise when I found that it was in some respects one of the worse papers I had ever read. The terminology and style were unscientific and ambiguous; one of his assumptions is given on different pages in two contradictory forms, some of his statements were open to different interpretations and the worst fault in my view, was the use of thought-experiments. This practice is contrary to the scientific method which is based on conclusions drawn from the results of actual experiments. My first thoughts were, that in spite of its obvious faults of presentation, the theory must be basically sound, and before committing my criticisms to print I read widely round the subject. The additional reading only confirmed my belief that the theory was marred by its own internal contradictions. Relativitists often state that the theory is accepted by all scientists of repute but this is quite untrue. It has been strongly criticised by many scientists, including at least one Nobel prize winner. Most of the criticisms are of a general nature drawing attention to its many contradictions, so I decided to pin-point the errors which give rise to the contradictions, giving the page and line in Einstein's paper, thus making it difficult for relativitists to dodge them and obscure them in a morass of irrational discussion.

Special Theory flawed

There were definite errors about which there can be no argument. One was the assumption that the velocity of light is constant. This is contrary to the foundations of science and the fact that it is repeated in all the textbooks I have seen, shows how little these foundations are understood by theoretical physicists. Science is based on the results of experiment and these results must be expressed in a single coherent set of units. The unit of length was the metre and the unit of time was the second. Velocity was a measured quantity as so many metres per second. Even though it was found to be constant under certain conditions, it was quite wrong to make it a constant by definition under all conditions. Only the unit of measurement can be made constant by definition and Einstein's assumption constituted a duplication of units. It was this duplication that led to puzzling and contradictory results and not the profundity of the theory as relativitists like us to believe. The question of units is a rather complicated one; and in this instance some writers are confused by the fact that the velocity of light is now often used as a standard, distances being calculated from the time of travel of a pulse of light or radio waves; but the value used is the measured value and the conditions of measurement are carefully defined. Quite recently a further complication has arisen. At the end of our work at the NPL we made the suggestion that as the techniques improved it might be advantageous to redefine the units of measurement, keeping the atomic second, giving a defined value to the velocity of light and discarding the unit of length. This has now been done, but these developments do not affect the criticisms of the theory. Even with these units it would still be absurd to assume that the velocity would be the same for two observers in relative motion. Units must be used with common sense. top

Thought experiments

The other glaring mistake occurred in the course of one of his thought experiments. Einstein had never made any actual experiments, as far as I can find, and he certainly had no idea of how to compare clocks. He imagined two identical clocks side by side and supposed one of them to move away at a uniform velocity and then return. According to one of the results deduced from the theory a moving clock appears to go slower than the stationary one when viewed from the stationary position. Calling the clocks A and B the predictions are: B is slower than A as seen from A and since velocity is only relative and either of the clocks can be regarded as the moving one: A is slower than B as seen from B This is certainly strange although not logically impossible. It implies that something happens to the signals during their transmission. He then outlines his experiment without giving any details of how the measurements are made and concludes that: B is slower than A and although he does not specifically say so: A is slower than B in accordance with the relativity principle. This result is of course impossible, and is usually called the clock paradox. Many thousands of words have been written about it, but the explanation is simply that he did not go through the correct procedures in making his experiment. It is a very simple experiment, being carried out every day in clock comparisons, and the correct result agrees with his predictions as indeed it must do since a thought experiment cannot give a new result. The predictions themselves are also inexplicable but this is one of the consequences of the duplication of units. I had rather naively thought that scientists would be glad to have an explanation of the confusion which had existed for so long and would at least pay some attention to my explanation, since I had more practical experience in these matters than all the relativitists put together. But I was wrong. No one attempted to refute my arguments although they justified Einstein by repeating his thought experiment and his mistakes in different forms. I was, however, dropped some pretty broad hints that if I continued to criticise the theory my reputation and career prospects were likely to suffer. It was only a sideline to my experimental work but I found it so interesting that I did not feel like dropping it, and felt that it was very important that the theory should be exposed. My Director was good about it and said he had no objection himself as long as I did not involve the NPL. I was beginning to realise that scientists could be just as irrational as anyone else and having accepted the theory as a faith without understanding it they closed their minds to argument. They also tried to suppress opposition and two of my papers after being accepted by the referees were mysteriously never published. I was not entirely without support and was invited to write an article by the Oxford University Press. It was not so comprehensive as they hoped, since I was not able to devote as much time to it as I would have liked, and lacked the secretarial assistance of my department, but it was accepted and published as one of their Research Papers (No. 5). The Director of the Royal Institution also invited me to give one of their Friday Evening Discourses. This was quite enthusiastically received and I had many letters of congratulation, although, as I noticed with some amusement, most of them were written on private notepaper and not on the paper of their organisations as one would normally expect. The history of relativity would make a fascinating study and I regret that I do not feel competent to do it myself. I have kept to those aspects dealing with units of measurement and the comparison of clocks which I know something about. It was inspired by the puzzling results of an experiment made by Michelson and Morley. They argued that if light travelled at a steady velocity through the medium, or aether, and the surface of the earth was moving through this medium there should be a detectable effect on the movement, but they failed to detect any. Fitzgerald and Lorentz gave an empirical explanation that moving rods were shortened and moving clocks were slowed down. Scientists badly wanted a more detailed satisfactory explanation and this is what Einstein thought he had done. All he did was to introduce irrational ideas into physics and incorporate the Lorentz explanation into electromagnetic theory as an assumption. The original puzzling results, therefore, remain and it is important to science that a true explanation should be found. top

Joke or swindle !

The famous paper published in 1905 does not appear to have attracted any attention until Eddington returned from an expedition to study the eclipse in 1919, and with great publicity announced to a meeting of the Astronomical Society in London that the results had proved Einstein's theory. What he thought he had confirmed was Einstein's value for the bending of light round the sun. Scientists were prepared to go to a lot of trouble to obtain experimental evidence for the theory as they realised that this was necessary and yet Eddington is supposed to have said that the theory was so satisfactory that if the experimental results did not confirm it then they must be wrong. A criticism of the results made later pointed out that in order to obtain the result he wanted, some of the observations which did not fit were ignored. Also someone has pointed out, with some evidence, that Einstein himself had predicted two results differing by 2 to 1 for the deflection. Finally the deflection of the sun's rays has nothing to do with the special theory and the clock paradox and yet in some mysterious way it was claimed to confirm it. Still searching for experimental support an experiment was made in the US some years ago. Four atomic clocks were carried by plane in opposite directions round the world. The discrepancies between the results for different clocks were many times greater than the effect being sought, and yet by ignoring the results they did not like and performing some undescribed statistical analysis the authors claimed to have confirmed Einstein's theory and specifically the clock paradox. There was a spectacular television programme about it in which a well-known actor was installed in a simulated space shuttle and told that he would come back younger than if he had stayed on earth. Being an intelligent man he appeared to regard it as a lot of nonsense as I hope the viewers did. top Unified field theory My intrusion into theoretical physics must be regarded as a failure in that I did not convince the relativitists of their mistakes. It may have had some benefit in encouraging scientists to look for a rational extension of electromagnetic theory to explain the many mysteries not yet explained. There have been several attempts, that of Rene L Vallée being in my view particularly encouraging. It is a unified field theory giving an electromagnetic explanation of gravitation, and including a most important suggestion that it might be possible to harness the gravitational energy of space safely and economically. He argued that the nuclear energy programme in France was wasteful and misdirected and was in consequence obliged to leave the authority for which he worked. It is sad if his ideas were not fully studied because the nuclear fusion programmes throughout the world seem to make little progress in spite of the billions spent on them. {end}

6.3 Flaws in the logic of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, by Ilya Stavinsky

http://uweb.superlink.net/dialect/theory.html

Flaws in the logic of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity.

By Ilya Stavinsky

Published in magazine PHILOSOPHICAL RESEARCHES, #4, Moscow 12/2000

Special theory according to A. Einstein, came into existence as the result of the fact that the propagation of light, which is independent from the speed of its source, could not be explained from the principle of relativity in classical mechanics. From here follows that if one can logically disprove this fact then special theory of relativity will lose its credibility and scientific meaning. In the following article the reader will find not only such an explanation but specific flaws in Einstein's examples as well.

The apparent incompatibility of the law of propagation of light with the principle of relativity.

The essence of this theory lies in the fact that it resolved contradiction in physics between the propagation of light which is independent from the speed of its source, and principle of relativity in classical mechanics. The latter states: if, relative to K, K" is a uniformly moving co-ordinate system devoid of rotation, then natural phenomena run their course with respect to K" according to exactly the same general laws as with respect to K.

The above mentioned contradiction Einstein describes in the following way. 'Now let us suppose that our railway carriage is again traveling along the railway lines with the velocity v, and that its direction is the same as that of the ray of light, but its velocity of course much less. Let us inquire about the velocity of propagation of the ray of light relative to the carriage. It is obvious that we can apply here the consideration of the previous section , since the ray of light plays the part of the man walking along relative to the carriage. The velocity W of the man relative to the embankment is replaced here by the velocity of light relative to the embankment; w is the required velocity of light with respect to the carriage, and we have w = c - v

The velocity of propagation of a ray of light relative to the carriage thus comes out smaller than c. But this result comes into conflict with the principle of relativityÉ For, like every other general law of nature, the law of the transmission of light in vacuo must, according to the principle of relativity, be the same for the railway carriage as reference-body as when the rails are the body of reference. But, from our above consideration, this would appear to be impossible. If every ray of light is propagated relative to the embankment with the velocity c, then for this reason it would appear that another law of propagation of light must necessarily hold with respect to the carriage - a result contradictory to the principle of relativity. In view of this dilemma there appears to be nothing else for it than to abandon either the principle of relativity or the simple law of the propagation of light in vacuoÉ' . ' (Relativity -the special and general theory - by A. Einstein, p 22-23, Three Rivers Press)

Since both laws are real facts of real life, then the only solution to this dilemma will be the one which, while maintaining the law of propagation of light constant in vacuo, could be embedded it in the frame of theory of relativity.

The Relativity of simultaneity according to Einstein

And such solution he has found. Simple logic told him that if the velocity of light must be constant in relation to any above mentioned body of reference, then in the latter time and distance cannot be absolute. Really, if the distance S covered by light with velocity C during time T in relation to body-reference M, equals S = C T, then in relation to system M' the light with the same velocity will cover the distance S' during the time T'. i.e. S' = C T'. In reality it must mean that the time during which the body moves in the system M must be different from the time during which the body moves in relation to the system M'. The same logic applies to the distance. The distance which moving body covers in relation to the system M, will be different from the distance which moving body covers in relation to the system M'. In both cases we consider the same event ( the movement of body) in relation to a different system of reference. In other words, time and distance are not absolute values for all coordinate of references.

But one thing is to suppose and express this supposition mathematically, completely another thing is to show logically that this supposition is true and reflects reality. Einstein understood this very well and for this reason he gave an example of two lightnings which strike at points A and B, simultaneously with the respect to the embankment along which a train moves. "When we say that the lightning strokes A and B are simultaneous with respect to the embankment, we mean: the rays of light emitted at points A and B, where the lightning occurs, meet each other at the mid-point M of the length A à B of the embankment. But the events A and B also correspond to positions A and B on the train. Let M' be the mid-point of the distance A --> B on the traveling train. Just when the flashes of lightning occur, this point M' naturally coincides with the point M, but it moves towards the right in the diagram with the velocity v of the train. If an observer placed in the position M' on the train did not move at this velocity, then he would remain permanently at M, and the light rays emitted by the flashes of lightning A and B would reach him simultaneously, i.e. they would meet just where he is situated.

In reality (considered with reference to the railway embankment) he is rushing towards the beam of light coming from B, while he is riding on ahead of the beam of light coming from A. Hence the observer will see the beam of light emitted from B earlier than he will see that emitted from A. Observers who took the railway train as their reference-body must therefore come to the conclusion that the lightning flash B took place earlier than the lightning flash A. We thus arrive at an important result. Events which are simultaneous with reference to the embankment are not simultaneous with respect to the train, and vice versa (relativity of simultaneity). Every reference-body (co-ordinate system) has its own particular time; unless we are told the reference-body to which the statement of time refers there is no meaning in a statement of the time of an event. Before the advent of the theory of relativity it had been tacitly assumed in physics that the statement of time had an absolute significance, i.e. that it is independent of the state of motion of the body of reference. But we have just seen that this assumption is incompatible with the most natural definition of simultaneity; if we discard this assumption then the conflict between the law of the propagation of light in vacuo and the principle of relativity disappears." (page 25)

The logic of the above example using relativity of simultaneity holds only at first glance. The first question to arise, will the relativity of simultaneity exist if instead of flash of light we use sound ? thunder - which the lightning generates simultaneously with the flash. In this case the observer standing in the mid-point of the embankment, M, will hear the sounds of thunder from lightning strokes A and B simultaneously,