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"To label the letter a glowing recommendation would be an understatement ..." "He is ... extremely normal in all respects ..." That doesn't seem so "glowing",
by ThaddeusQuay2 15y ago
"To label the letter a glowing recommendation would be an understatement ..."
"He is ... extremely normal in all respects ..."
That doesn't seem so "glowing", unless it's 1943 government employee code for "not gay, not a communist, and not anything else that could get your university into trouble, mister".
EDIT: To understand the political climate of that era, consider that Turing and Oppenheimer got into lots of trouble because of actual, or perceived, homosexuality and communist sympathy, respectively. So, it is certainly not a stretch of the imagination to think that something as innocuous as "extremely normal in all respects" could be code for "not gay, not a communist" and not anything else that a university might care about in those days.
- jleyank 15y agoGleick makes the point that this might be code for "Jewish, but not really", as he talks about the bias against such people back then.
- ThaddeusQuay2 15y agoInteresting. I wouldn't have guessed such a connection, given Einstein's apparent popularity in that particular circle. I find it amusing to be reading this important recommendation letter to a university on the same weekend that someone asked me to look into the background of an applicant for an important position at another university. This person might be a homosexual, and the contract for the position states that they cannot be involved in an "alternative lifestyle". In that regard, not much has changed regarding the politics of universities since 1943.
- eschutte2 15y agoThe head of Princeton's physics department wrote, "Is Feynman Jewish? We have no definite rule against Jews but have to keep their proportion in our department reasonably small because of the difficulty of placing them."
- schrototo 15y agoWhat the fuck? That is absolutely horrible! What piece-of-shit university do you work for?
- corin_ 15y agoI am assuming a fictitious one, since his website (linked in HN profile) has swasticas in it... http://dl.dropbox.com/u/942437/TQ/index.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/942437/TQ/index.png
- ThaddeusQuay2 15y agoThat's out of context and you know it. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3231615 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3231615
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- schrototo 15y agoWow, that context really doesn't help your case at all.
- ThaddeusQuay2 15y agoWhat case? All I did was to compare something from 1943 to something that's happening now. I did not, at any point, state that I have anything against homosexuals. You are inferring that, simply because of the modified swastika on my website. You didn't take the time to read anything about me, so I put forth an explanation. I am being calm and logical, not emotional and reactionary, like you and a few others here. The picture he posted is out of context, simply because it is disconnected from the text of my website, which contains, in its first link, a set of three links which give more information about who I am. I gave a summary of those, and linked directly to them, here, as well as informing you of that comment.
- mbreese 15y ago
- Create 15y agoEinstein never got a job in the USA ...anywhere, from Caltech to the other coast. This is why his backers actually made an institute for him (IAS). Oddly, his presence was perhaps the only reason why Feynman wanted to be at Princeton (besides his ego, oc). And yes, E. was a jerk to his family, at the very least: http://www.giagia.co.uk/2010/03/23/ada-lovelace-day-2010/ http://www.giagia.co.uk/2010/03/23/ada-lovelace-day-2010/
- ThaddeusQuay2 15y agoActually, he might have been much worse than that. I haven't read this yet, partly because it's 2,825 pages with 3,683 footnotes, but I'm guessing there's some truth buried in that length. It's a free download. http://jewishracism.com/SaintEinstein.htm http://jewishracism.com/SaintEinstein.htm (The Manufacture and Sale of Saint Einstein, by Christopher Jon Bjerknes, 2006)
- logjam 15y agoOh - innuendo, and argument from...length of prose. I looked up the "author" you cite - here are characteristic excerpts from his blog: "Human beings have an enemy that has always sought to control the leadership of humanity to guide it into death. That enemy is the Jew...The Jews want to destroy creation. They will kill and destroy wherever and whenever they can. You are their target, and you lie still waiting for the bullet to reach you." No, I'm not going to read any more of his or your bullshit, no matter how deep he or you pile it up. Please go away.
- ThaddeusQuay2 15y agoSo what? Just because someone says something you don't like, doesn't mean that they are wrong about something else. "An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an attempt to negate the truth of a claim by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of the person supporting it."
- 15y ago
- jacquesm 15y agoI will just leave this link here and let HN'ers draw their own conclusion as to whether to take you serious or not. http://thaddeusquay.com/ http://thaddeusquay.com/ Your previous profile is at -23 http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ThaddeusQuay http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ThaddeusQuay . PG please ban this asshole.
- ThaddeusQuay2 15y agoThanks for the advertising, but since the inference is negative, and especially since you are calling for me to be banned, I guess I'll have to say a few words that I have not previously had to on HN. I am a Nazi, but I don't see myself as one of today's nazis (#1), most of whom do little more than burn books and pick useless fights. I am a scientist who aligns himself with original Nazi thought, which came from the founders of the political party, as well as from those who influenced those founders, namely German philosophers who wrote big, dense books. From this, you can take the fact that I care (and do so pretty much to the exclusion of all else) about making progress, by which I mean humans directing their evolution in a positive manner. Therefore, the only people I hate are the ones who purposely do not do the best that they can with what they have, and those who intentionally commit acts which impede progress. The latter is why I care deeply about defeating censorship, in every form. If someone truly cares about progress, and there's something that we can do together, then I'll gladly work with them. It wouldn't matter to me if they also just happen to be a jew or a homosexual or anything else which nazis apparently hate. The bottom line is that real Nazis care about progress, and if the original ones had today's scientific knowledge, they likely would have had different attitudes towards race and sex. Think about it: They didn't even know about DNA. If Nazism had started fifty years later, Mein Kampf would have been profoundly different. By attempting to disparage me, through inference, you align yourself, accidentally, with today's nazis, because you both see Nazism only from a historical perspective, one which cannot possibly grow with new knowledge. I have contributed positively to HN, so there is no reason for me to be banned, and you calling for that to happen is very nazi-like. If you want to know more about me, you should look at the three links answering the question of whether I am a Nazi, which are located on the first link on my website, and which I shall repeat here as #2a, #2b and #2c. The research I was asked to do was merely to check on whether an allegation was a fact, as part of a greater effort of due diligence, an effort being conducted by others, those who would make a decision based on all of the facts obtained. I don't directly work for the university, and I dislike most universities because I see their policies as being against progress. I also have no personal opinion about that man, and that will not change, regardless of what I find out about him. #1: Notice the lowercase "n", which I use to identify those nazis who I do not consider to be "real", which is in the sense of when I use uppercase "N". #2a: http://comments.deviantart.com/4/2240268/532905771 http://comments.deviantart.com/4/2240268/532905771 #2b: http://comments.deviantart.com/4/2240268/519933389 http://comments.deviantart.com/4/2240268/519933389 #2c: http://djangodurango.com/?p=46 http://djangodurango.com/?p=46
- Angostura 15y agoEdward Teller seemed to manage OK.
- rudiger 15y agoI interpreted "extremely normal in all respects" as meaning he's someone you wouldn't mind working with. You see, a lot of theoretical physicists are brilliant but have very difficult personalities.
- ThaddeusQuay2 15y agoYes, that could easily have been what he meant, but then again, a university would be more likely to care about the "gay, communist, whatever" thing much more than how easy he was to work with. Therefore, I think that the former was more important for Oppenheimer to communicate. Any university would want an Einstein. Only a few, or maybe even none, would want a gay Einstein or a communist Einstein.
- scarmig 15y agoCommunism is different from socialism, but an interesting aside: Einstein was an ideological socialist. He went so far as to publish an article called (iirc) "Why Socialism" in the Monthly Review. It's not particularly enlightening or anything, just lending his name to the movement.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- hakl 15y agoApparently Einstein had an FBI file: http://www.fbi-most-wanted.com/albert-einstein.php http://www.fbi-most-wanted.com/albert-einstein.php
- mbreese 15y agoSo did everyone particularly interesting at the time.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- phaus 15y ago
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- brain5ide 15y agoI totally agree with you on this one. I dont't think that Feynman was truly regarded as normal. I mean, the guy liked to crack safes of high rank military officers in a wartime nuclear base to just screw with them. Disrespect to authority shouldn't have been normal at that time. Especially at Los Alamos.
- Create 15y agoHis father was a MIL contractor, maybe it was uniforms -- or whatever that was a cover for (ie. not limbs). Feynman's starring was high on the agenda for the then-authorities: he was basically the first (and only?) successful physicist "born and bred" in the USA, not being a self-proclaiming (or immigrant) Jew.
- lurker14 15y agoOf course, cracking a safe just to screw with someone (and, you know, to remind someone that their safes aren't in fact secure) is perhaps the single most honorable thing to do with a safe. Better that the safe be left around for spies to infiltrate?
- gwern 15y agoI'd do with the interpretation that 'he's not a cranky Aspie, who you can actually work with', especially given the description of him 'a second Dirac, only this time human'.
- angstrom 15y agoQuantum Man goes into a bit of detail about this matter http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/quantum-man-lawrence-m-krauss/1100043400?ean=9780393080544&itm=1&usri=quantum%252bman http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/quantum-man-lawrence-m-kraus... Dirac was a very bright, but logically bound person. His decisions, right down to his marriage, were based on logic. If you've ever seen "The Big Bang Theory" think of Sheldon. Feynmann, on the other hand, had both the logical abilities of Dirac and the sociable abilities that made him capable of interaction outside his narrow discipline. That is what he meant by "extremely normal in all aspects". When you get into people who are extremely skiled in something it's often the case they do so at the expense of everything else. This tends to create an eccentric attitude that doesn't transcend social circles.
- gcb 15y agoAgree. And more relevant to the teaching career, "not too autist", as was the case with Dirac.
- thisrod 15y agoNote that Feynman was Jewish. I don't know if that mattered in America in 1945, but it certainly did in Australia. See http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s632081.htm http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s632081.htm : "What too are we to make of the cavalier disregard of an applicant whose list of referees included Rudolf Carnap, G.E. Moore, Niels Bohr, and Bertrand Russell?"
- nl 15y agoAttitudes to Jews in the 1930's (which is what your link refers to) and attitudes in the 1940's (especially postwar) were very different (in Australia and elsewhere).
- thisrod 15y agoDo you have any evidence for that? Later, the Occam's Razor talk mentions that Popper applied again in 1945, with the same result. I assume the allied public changed its mind very rapidly when the war ended, and it learnt about the extermination camps.
- nl 15y agoSure. (Although most articles discuss it on a country-by-country basis) ..nearly every survey of antisemitism taken after 1946 showed a rapid reduction.[39] It is impossible to determine precisely to what extent knowledge of the murder of six million Jews contributed to this change. In the aftermath of the war, non-Jews tried to avoid expressing prejudicial remarks. To the question “Have you heard any criticism or talk against the Jews in the last six months,” the answers showed a decline, with the most significant changes occurring from 1946 to 1951. In 1946, 64 percent responded positively whereas in 1950 only 24 percent did so. http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2003-4/ouzan.htm http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2003-4/ouzan.htm ..the new president Harry Truman viewed the question of the million European refugees who had survived the war and who opposed repatriation to their country of origin as a "world tragedy".[42] Thus, he slowly encouraged the United States to take the lead in seeking a solution. Among the Displaced Persons, about 20 percent were Jews who languished in displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria or Italy, waiting for emigration visas.[43] However, no country was willing to admit them in large numbers.[44] Antisemitism in the United States began to decline in the late 1940s. As they became aware of the Holocaust, many Americans found themselves ardently opposed to views which had been used to justify such genocide. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism_in_the_United_States#Postwar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism_in_the_... Specific to Australia: Possibly as a belated compensation for the thoughtless mild anti-semitism in Catholic and labour movement circles in the pre-war period, Calwell (Labour party minister) became quite a determined and resourceful sponsor of Jewish immigration in the immediate postwar period. A very widely publicised incident was that Calwell and the government actually connived at the chartering of several ships specially to transport Jewish migrants, although some other migrants were brought on these ships as a kind of camouflage, in the face of the anti-Semitic hysteria being whipped up by reactionary Liberal politicians http://members.optusnet.com.au/spainter/Racism.html http://members.optusnet.com.au/spainter/Racism.html
- Angostura 15y agoI think you need to read that line in the content of a few others within the letter, in particular the "he's a second durac, but this time human" quote. Oppenheimer also points out that he is a good communicator and in particular can bridge the divide between theoretical and experimental physicists. Being that brilliant and that nice can be an unusual combination.