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In addition Einstein's theories were denounced by a group of physicists because they were considered "Jewish physics" and not "German physics": https://en.wiki

In addition Einstein's theories were denounced by a group of physicists because they were considered "Jewish physics" and not "German physics": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik I think it is remarkable that a racist argument against a description of nature could even gain a foothold in the physics community. Fortunately, people like Planck and Heisenberg could see the insanity of it all.

dukeofdoom 3y ago
[flagged]
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  This sounds like rubbish to me. I've heard Poincare almost discovered special relativity, but insisted on keeping aether in the model or something like that. Apart from that I've never seen anything about Einstein not being fully original in his ideas. Source please.
  - dukeofdoom 3y ago
    I can't find the original article, I read it long ago. Here's a short summary why this article may have been written though. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35090/why-did-einstein-get-credit-for-formulating-the-theory-of-special-relativity https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35090/why-did-ei...
    - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
      Eh, so he built on other people's work like any other scientist. I can't see he would have Zuckerberg'd anything based on reading those discussions.
    - guebjnjnl 3y ago
      Well, you submitted this [1] last April. The piece comes straight from a conspiracy theory website. [1] https://www.techcounsellor.com/2017/04/albert-einstein-plagiarist-century/ https://www.techcounsellor.com/2017/04/albert-einstein-plagi...
  - chasil 3y ago
    As I understand it, the Lorenz transform for relativistic velocities was well-known prior to Einstein's publications (1892 initial appearance for Lorenz). Einstein's work, as I understand it, was to set the transform in a complete and encompassing theory. "The transformations later became a cornerstone for special relativity." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation
    - lovecg 3y ago
      Worth noting he did a ton more than special relativity (his Nobel prize wasn’t for that theory)
      - chasil 3y ago
        Right, the article reminds us that the Nobel was for his work on the photoelectric effect, and implies that relativity was too radical for a substantial number of scientists.
  - nyrikki 3y ago
    Poincaré moved knowlage forward but could never let go of the concept of aether. Einstein’s novel addition were the first and second postulate of SR. This is what allowed him to use the work of Poincaré, Lorentz, Heaviside etc.. and move beyond the falsified concept of aether which absolutely was holding Poincaré back at that point in history.
jj999 3y ago
We live in a world where code in the Linux kernel will rot until removal if it was commited by someone who later become a criminal and where research will simply not get done if the one that would do it don't have the right political opinion. "Remarkable" is not the word I'd use. "Banal" seems more true.
- kragen 3y ago
  while presumably the emotional associations of murdererfs made it harder for it to find new maintainers, i think the bigger issue is that the maintenance had been handled by reiser's employees, and the company sort of organizationally collapsed in the wake of his imprisonment https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/namesys-vanishes-but-reiser-project-lives-on/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/namesys-vanishes-but-rei... it might have helped if he hadn't named it after himself. though that wasn't without precedent; xiafs was also named after its author, and of course there are lots of other examples that aren't failsystems (linux, the boehm–demers–weiser garbage collector, the stl by stepanov and lee, and of course every software project named something like ZEUS or THOR) the default is for free software to die if nobody works on it, and though murdererfs did have some users, it evidently didn't have enough enthusiastic users for them to take up the mantle pretty similar to what's happened with firefox and chromium; the hypothetically less evil forks like palemoon keep dying off from failure to recruit new talent
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    stl get a pass because it also makes a great acronym.
    - kragen 3y ago
      also as far as we know meng lee has never stabbed anyone to death
      - kragen 3y ago
        (or strangled anybody)
chasil 3y ago
There was also a plot to assassinate Heisenberg. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-baseball-player-turned-spy-who-went-undercover-to-assassinate-the-nazis-top-nuclear-scientist-180982813/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-baseball-player-t...
wslh 3y ago
> I think it is remarkable that a racist argument against a description of nature could even gain a foothold in the physics community. And, Germany was a cornerstone in physics in the late XIX and early XX centuries. This shows a bad aspect of humans in the quest for truth. If many scientists are involved in nationalism, antisemitism, etc what can we expect of less rational people? Not saying that we need to be completely rational though but it is interesting when bad emotions beat rationality in smart people as a topic itself.
- Viliam1234 3y ago
  I suspect many scientists are not especially rational outside their field of study. Probably worse, being scientific authorities can make them overconfident.
  - croes 3y ago
    Isn't there a study that shows that new theories don't get accepted because people got convinced by evidence but the supporters of the old theory just die of age?
    - jabl 3y ago
      It's a common quip attributed to Max Planck, not really a study. Developed more thoroughly into a theory e.g. by Thomas Kuhn, see his book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re... Some broadly similar ideas in the philosophy or science were also explored by Feyerabend in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method
- strogonoff 3y ago
  It’s good to remember that scientists are just as capable of violence (if anything, they can be better at it). It might also be a mistake to think that rational people are inherently less violent towards other people. Finally, I reckon it’s especially dangerous to think the Nazi did what they did just because of “bad emotions”. The trolley problem adjacent research has shown (if inconclusively) that more rational people are more likely to be OK being a cause of harm to other people to achieve some goal. In those experiments such goal is usually “save more people”, but all you need is to define some terms and “kill some now” might seem imperative to “save more later” to a sufficiently rational, long-term-thinking, “smart” person. So the Nazi did, and there is much less conjecture here since it’s mostly well-documented. They were specifically inspired by natural sciences, including the then-new Darwin’s theory of natural selection. If anything, their shtick might’ve been to overcome the “bad” (for the Nazi) emotions that one may experience when sending some disabled person or a Jew to death. Which, according to them, had to be done since they were detrimental to survival of humanity (as Nazis defined it, of course) by polluting its genetic pool—so they were taught to train themselves to treat Jews as non-human bedbugs, stripped Jews of citizenship, disciplined fellow Germans who dared to shake hands with a Jew, etc. To Nazis emotions were a hindrance, they included the “irrational” compassion, and we might be better off remembering that when we discuss rationality, which consequentialism tends to go hand in hand with. Addendum: An obvious argument can be made that Nazis were “not rational enough”, i.e. the problem is not with rationality per se but only with rationality based on premises that we now know are wrong. That, however, shows nothing because if we’ve learned anything it should be not to assume that now we have finally got all of our premises in order and possess absolute truth and complete understanding of reality.
bee_rider 3y ago
Of course nobody needs convincing of the idea that Hitler was a fucking idiot, but also, designing a philosophy of racial purity so aggressive that it scares away like half of your physicists, including probably the best physicist in generations, was a pretty boneheaded move. I guess he didn’t know that they were on the verge of a wild and completely war-changing discovery, but physicists are always up to something.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  The Germans were also disastrously behind with radar, but were way ahead with rocket engines and turbojets. Their faith in Enigma also arguably cost them the war.
  - defrost 3y ago
    Their faith in the Lorenz cipher aka Fish cipher codenamed Tunny also arguably cost them the war. The Germnans were suspicious of Enigma security given Polish cryptanalysts had an attack in the late(?) 1920s and further attacks in the 1930s. The German High Command used Lorenz for significant traffic .. this was cracked by the Britsh, by Bill Tutte and others, in house at Bletchley during WWII.
  - dmichulke 3y ago
    From what I'm reading, it wasn't as decisive as "costing Germany the war". Instead if would have delayed D-day and other operations by a year or more but the benefit is arguably on the side of Germany because both the Soviet Union (making Germany "pay") and the US (first use of the atomic bomb there?) had more sinister intentions. https://www.historynet.com/what-if-the-allies-had-not-broken-the-german-naval-code/ https://www.historynet.com/what-if-the-allies-had-not-broken...
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      Enigma caused the U-boot campaign to fail. Many U-boot commanders were convinced that Enigma was compromised, as the circumstances of the losses were too coincidental. But Admiral Doenitz doggedly refused to believe that. All the Kriegsmarine needed to do was layer on a one-time pad - a simple and effective technique. But nope. The failure of Enigma also caused Rommel to lose the Afrika campaign. The Allies knew when and where his supply ships were coming, and sank them one after the other. Rommel knew that these losses were only explainable by espionage, but believed the Allied disinformation and misdirection as to the cause.
bhewes 3y ago
I am guessing this is why Planck coined the phrase "science advances one funeral at a time".
punkybr3wster 3y ago
It’s likely a big part of what helped win the war. A whole swath of science was discounted or thrown out by the Germans because of the race component.
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
It's very postmodern. Note how science is sometimes called patriarchal or "white" today in some circles. It's not unique to the Nazis. Of course, it is true that science is a part of culture and society, and that the world is interpreted though the lens of both. Yes, culture can distort, but it is also a medium of truth. And reason is able to make these determinations in principle.
odyssey7 3y ago
Researchers falling behind on mathematical results? Government can lend a hand: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
LAC-Tech 3y ago
Is it so hard to imagine? I can easily see certain theories being denounced today because they are "too white". Maybe not in physics - not yet - but I imagine this is already a debate in the social sciences.

dukeofdoom 3y ago

[flagged]

karmakurtisaani 3y ago
This sounds like rubbish to me. I've heard Poincare almost discovered special relativity, but insisted on keeping aether in the model or something like that. Apart from that I've never seen anything about Einstein not being fully original in his ideas. Source please.
- dukeofdoom 3y ago
  I can't find the original article, I read it long ago. Here's a short summary why this article may have been written though. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35090/why-did-einstein-get-credit-for-formulating-the-theory-of-special-relativity https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35090/why-did-ei...
  - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
    Eh, so he built on other people's work like any other scientist. I can't see he would have Zuckerberg'd anything based on reading those discussions.
  - guebjnjnl 3y ago
    Well, you submitted this [1] last April. The piece comes straight from a conspiracy theory website. [1] https://www.techcounsellor.com/2017/04/albert-einstein-plagiarist-century/ https://www.techcounsellor.com/2017/04/albert-einstein-plagi...
- chasil 3y ago
  As I understand it, the Lorenz transform for relativistic velocities was well-known prior to Einstein's publications (1892 initial appearance for Lorenz). Einstein's work, as I understand it, was to set the transform in a complete and encompassing theory. "The transformations later became a cornerstone for special relativity." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation
  - lovecg 3y ago
    Worth noting he did a ton more than special relativity (his Nobel prize wasn’t for that theory)
    - chasil 3y ago
      Right, the article reminds us that the Nobel was for his work on the photoelectric effect, and implies that relativity was too radical for a substantial number of scientists.
- nyrikki 3y ago
  Poincaré moved knowlage forward but could never let go of the concept of aether. Einstein’s novel addition were the first and second postulate of SR. This is what allowed him to use the work of Poincaré, Lorentz, Heaviside etc.. and move beyond the falsified concept of aether which absolutely was holding Poincaré back at that point in history.

jj999 3y ago

We live in a world where code in the Linux kernel will rot until removal if it was commited by someone who later become a criminal and where research will simply not get done if the one that would do it don't have the right political opinion. "Remarkable" is not the word I'd use. "Banal" seems more true.

kragen 3y ago
while presumably the emotional associations of murdererfs made it harder for it to find new maintainers, i think the bigger issue is that the maintenance had been handled by reiser's employees, and the company sort of organizationally collapsed in the wake of his imprisonment https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/namesys-vanishes-but-reiser-project-lives-on/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/namesys-vanishes-but-rei... it might have helped if he hadn't named it after himself. though that wasn't without precedent; xiafs was also named after its author, and of course there are lots of other examples that aren't failsystems (linux, the boehm–demers–weiser garbage collector, the stl by stepanov and lee, and of course every software project named something like ZEUS or THOR) the default is for free software to die if nobody works on it, and though murdererfs did have some users, it evidently didn't have enough enthusiastic users for them to take up the mantle pretty similar to what's happened with firefox and chromium; the hypothetically less evil forks like palemoon keep dying off from failure to recruit new talent
- bee_rider 3y ago
  stl get a pass because it also makes a great acronym.
  - kragen 3y ago
    also as far as we know meng lee has never stabbed anyone to death
    - kragen 3y ago
      (or strangled anybody)

chasil 3y ago

There was also a plot to assassinate Heisenberg. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-baseball-player-turned-spy-who-went-undercover-to-assassinate-the-nazis-top-nuclear-scientist-180982813/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-baseball-player-t...

wslh 3y ago

> I think it is remarkable that a racist argument against a description of nature could even gain a foothold in the physics community. And, Germany was a cornerstone in physics in the late XIX and early XX centuries. This shows a bad aspect of humans in the quest for truth. If many scientists are involved in nationalism, antisemitism, etc what can we expect of less rational people? Not saying that we need to be completely rational though but it is interesting when bad emotions beat rationality in smart people as a topic itself.

Viliam1234 3y ago
I suspect many scientists are not especially rational outside their field of study. Probably worse, being scientific authorities can make them overconfident.
- croes 3y ago
  Isn't there a study that shows that new theories don't get accepted because people got convinced by evidence but the supporters of the old theory just die of age?
  - jabl 3y ago
    It's a common quip attributed to Max Planck, not really a study. Developed more thoroughly into a theory e.g. by Thomas Kuhn, see his book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re... Some broadly similar ideas in the philosophy or science were also explored by Feyerabend in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method
strogonoff 3y ago
It’s good to remember that scientists are just as capable of violence (if anything, they can be better at it). It might also be a mistake to think that rational people are inherently less violent towards other people. Finally, I reckon it’s especially dangerous to think the Nazi did what they did just because of “bad emotions”. The trolley problem adjacent research has shown (if inconclusively) that more rational people are more likely to be OK being a cause of harm to other people to achieve some goal. In those experiments such goal is usually “save more people”, but all you need is to define some terms and “kill some now” might seem imperative to “save more later” to a sufficiently rational, long-term-thinking, “smart” person. So the Nazi did, and there is much less conjecture here since it’s mostly well-documented. They were specifically inspired by natural sciences, including the then-new Darwin’s theory of natural selection. If anything, their shtick might’ve been to overcome the “bad” (for the Nazi) emotions that one may experience when sending some disabled person or a Jew to death. Which, according to them, had to be done since they were detrimental to survival of humanity (as Nazis defined it, of course) by polluting its genetic pool—so they were taught to train themselves to treat Jews as non-human bedbugs, stripped Jews of citizenship, disciplined fellow Germans who dared to shake hands with a Jew, etc. To Nazis emotions were a hindrance, they included the “irrational” compassion, and we might be better off remembering that when we discuss rationality, which consequentialism tends to go hand in hand with. Addendum: An obvious argument can be made that Nazis were “not rational enough”, i.e. the problem is not with rationality per se but only with rationality based on premises that we now know are wrong. That, however, shows nothing because if we’ve learned anything it should be not to assume that now we have finally got all of our premises in order and possess absolute truth and complete understanding of reality.

bee_rider 3y ago

Of course nobody needs convincing of the idea that Hitler was a fucking idiot, but also, designing a philosophy of racial purity so aggressive that it scares away like half of your physicists, including probably the best physicist in generations, was a pretty boneheaded move. I guess he didn’t know that they were on the verge of a wild and completely war-changing discovery, but physicists are always up to something.

WalterBright 3y ago
The Germans were also disastrously behind with radar, but were way ahead with rocket engines and turbojets. Their faith in Enigma also arguably cost them the war.
- defrost 3y ago
  Their faith in the Lorenz cipher aka Fish cipher codenamed Tunny also arguably cost them the war. The Germnans were suspicious of Enigma security given Polish cryptanalysts had an attack in the late(?) 1920s and further attacks in the 1930s. The German High Command used Lorenz for significant traffic .. this was cracked by the Britsh, by Bill Tutte and others, in house at Bletchley during WWII.
- dmichulke 3y ago
  From what I'm reading, it wasn't as decisive as "costing Germany the war". Instead if would have delayed D-day and other operations by a year or more but the benefit is arguably on the side of Germany because both the Soviet Union (making Germany "pay") and the US (first use of the atomic bomb there?) had more sinister intentions. https://www.historynet.com/what-if-the-allies-had-not-broken-the-german-naval-code/ https://www.historynet.com/what-if-the-allies-had-not-broken...
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Enigma caused the U-boot campaign to fail. Many U-boot commanders were convinced that Enigma was compromised, as the circumstances of the losses were too coincidental. But Admiral Doenitz doggedly refused to believe that. All the Kriegsmarine needed to do was layer on a one-time pad - a simple and effective technique. But nope. The failure of Enigma also caused Rommel to lose the Afrika campaign. The Allies knew when and where his supply ships were coming, and sank them one after the other. Rommel knew that these losses were only explainable by espionage, but believed the Allied disinformation and misdirection as to the cause.

bhewes 3y ago

I am guessing this is why Planck coined the phrase "science advances one funeral at a time".

punkybr3wster 3y ago

It’s likely a big part of what helped win the war. A whole swath of science was discounted or thrown out by the Germans because of the race component.

lo_zamoyski 3y ago

It's very postmodern. Note how science is sometimes called patriarchal or "white" today in some circles. It's not unique to the Nazis. Of course, it is true that science is a part of culture and society, and that the world is interpreted though the lens of both. Yes, culture can distort, but it is also a medium of truth. And reason is able to make these determinations in principle.

odyssey7 3y ago

Researchers falling behind on mathematical results? Government can lend a hand: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill

LAC-Tech 3y ago

Is it so hard to imagine? I can easily see certain theories being denounced today because they are "too white". Maybe not in physics - not yet - but I imagine this is already a debate in the social sciences.