Anyone ever read this Einstein book?

Has anyone ever read this book? The Evolution of Physics by Albert
Einstein. I was thinking about trying to get a really nice copy for my
library, like this one on eBay if it is a good read.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...tem=6573594864

On 27 Oct 2005 18:24:50 -0700, "Gene Long"
wrote, in part:

Has anyone ever read this book? The Evolution of Physics by Albert
Einstein. I was thinking about trying to get a really nice copy for my
library, like this one on eBay if it is a good read.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...tem=6573594864

It was written by Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, and probably more
by the latter than the former.

Leopold Infeld was a theoretical physicist, working on Einstein's theory
of General Relativity. He was of Polish descent (although his surname
sounds German to me) and he purposed to pay a visit to Poland after the
war.

A misunderstanding about the nature of his work - which was of an
academic rather than a practical nature - led to a panic where he was
accused of wanting to betray secrets of atomic weaponry to the Soviets.
However, he was not prevented from leaving to go to Poland, but his
Canadian citizenship was revoked.

I could almost feel sorry for him. But in a book of his papers,
published after his death by his wife, he is quoted as writing of being
glad that he was unaware of "the seriousness of the times" during the
early part of his stay in Poland, while Stalin was ruling Russia.

To me, this is like someone saying he was glad that he didn't know about
the concentration camps, so he could safely stay a loyal Nazi. It were
better that he had, before leaving for Poland, thought harder and
realized that his attackers may have had a valid point about the cruel,
evil nature of Communism, even if they misunderstood the nature of his
scientific work.

John Savard
http://home.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/index.html
http://www.quadibloc.com/index.html
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John Savard wrote:

I could almost feel sorry for him. But in a book of his papers,
published after his death by his wife, he is quoted as writing of being
glad that he was unaware of "the seriousness of the times" during the
early part of his stay in Poland, while Stalin was ruling Russia.

To me, this is like someone saying he was glad that he didn't know about
the concentration camps, so he could safely stay a loyal Nazi.


I note he visited Poland, not the USSR. Although Poland was a communist
satellite country, it had a at least marginally separate government from
the USSR.
Did he say he was a communist? You seem to imply that just by visiting
his ancestral homeland, he somehow was tainted by its communist government.
That would be like me being suspected of being a IRA member if I visited
Ireland.

It were
better that he had, before leaving for Poland, thought harder and
realized that his attackers may have had a valid point about the cruel,
evil nature of Communism, even if they misunderstood the nature of his
scientific work.



I also note that apparently neither the Poles or the Soviets dragged him
away to beat Einstein's nuclear secrets out of him.
("What's all this about God not throwing dice? THERE IS NO GOD! Gambling
is a vice of the counterrevolutionary and historically decadent west!
Now...the Grand Unified Field Theory....AND BE QUICK ABOUT IT!")
So did his visit do any harm? In fact, by seeing conditions in communist
Poland firsthand, he could probably be in a far better position to judge
the situation than he would have been by relying on conflicting
propaganda by the US and USSR regarding Poland.
I visited the Soviet Union, and by the time I got back I knew that I had
seen a very impoverished country with a very crooked, incompetent, and
ruthless government and day-to-day life in a society that was corrupt to
a degree that was almost hard to comprehend.
And I could say that to anyone that asked me what it was like over there
based on firsthand experience, not anyone's propaganda.

Pat

To Gene

You can always read the fictional 1898 novel by H.G.Wells which is
free on Bartleby which constitutes the basis for relativity.If you wish
to destroy you rown mind for a homocentric extension and expansion of
Newtonian quasi-geocentricity,then be my guest.At least I can stand
back and have no pretensions to the contrary that relativity begins and
ends as fiction -

"'Scientific people,' proceeded the Time Traveller, after the
pause required for the proper assimilation of this, 'know very well
that Time is only a kind of Space" Time Machine 1898

http://www.bartleby.com/1000/1.html

"THE NON-MATHEMATICIAN is seized by a mysterious shuddering when he
hears of "four-dimensional" things, by a feeling not unlike that
awakened by thoughts of the occult. And yet there is no more
common-place statement than that the world in which we live is a
four-dimensional space-time continuum"

http://www.bartleby.com/173/17.html

The mysterious shuddering should be that of laughter but as the
concept highlights the unethical Newtonian maneuvering which departed
from pure heliocentricity to quasi-geocentricity and disrupted the
progress of what Kepler called 'contemplative astronomy ' *,it has
become a serious affair that affects what human achievement is and how
it is appreciated.

* "To set down in books the apparent paths of the planets [vias
planetarum apparentes] and the record of their motions is especially
the task of the practical and mechanical part of astronomy; to discover

their true and genuine path [vias vero veras et genuinas] is . . .the
task of contemplative astronomy; while to say by what circle and lines
correct images of those true motions may be depicted on paper is the
concern of the inferior tribunal of geometers"


Kepler 'Mysterium Cosmographicum'

In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:


I visited the Soviet Union, and by the time I got back I knew that I had
seen a very impoverished country with a very crooked, incompetent, and
ruthless government and day-to-day life in a society that was corrupt to
a degree that was almost hard to comprehend.


I worked in Moscow for a month in 1989 as part of a group with
experiments on a Biocosmos flight (mentioned so that this post is not
too off topic). Your quote is one of the best and most succinct ways of
describing my impression of life in and around Moscow at that time.

Wallace Berry wrote:


I worked in Moscow for a month in 1989 as part of a group with
experiments on a Biocosmos flight (mentioned so that this post is not
too off topic). Your quote is one of the best and most succinct ways of
describing my impression of life in and around Moscow at that time.



What hit me most was the degree of corruption; the black market was
everywhere, and getting anything at all done relied on bribery of some
sort.*
I kept thinking to myself that if it weren't for the fact that this
place imprisons and kills people at the drop of a hat, this would all be
some sort of a hilarious surrealistic comedy.
The average Russian seemed like a very nice person though; you got the
impression that they were cursed to live in a perpetually dysfunctional
and corrupt political system, and that anything they did that was wrong
was in most cases a result of desperation in an attempt to survive
rather than a desire to profit by doing wrong.

* Although when you think about it, that's what made the fall of the
Soviet Union survivable for the populace. They weren't relying on the
government for their survival, but rather on the black market. So when
the government fell, all they needed to do was to fall back on the black
market to a greater degree to get the necessities of life.

Pat

On Fri, 28 Oct 2005 00:07:22 -0500, Pat Flannery
wrote, in part:

Did he say he was a communist? You seem to imply that just by visiting
his ancestral homeland, he somehow was tainted by its communist government.

The problem was that he didn't just visit.

There was such a public outcry at this time at his intention to visit
Poland that what he *instead* ended up doing was spending the rest of
his life there. And he was aware that would happen on his way there.

What has me thinking poorly of him is not the fact that he visited the
country, but his bizarre statement that he was glad to have been
ignorant of the true nature of Communist rule in Poland.

If he had known ahead of time, he could have avoided all this fuss - and
continued to live his life in a free country.

John Savard
http://home.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/index.html
http://www.quadibloc.com/index.html
_________________________________________
Usenet Zone Free Binaries Usenet Server
More than 140,000 groups
Unlimited download
http://www.usenetzone.com to open account

John Savard wrote:

The problem was that he didn't just visit.

There was such a public outcry at this time at his intention to visit
Poland that what he *instead* ended up doing was spending the rest of
his life there. And he was aware that would happen on his way there.


What has me thinking poorly of him is not the fact that he visited the
country, but his bizarre statement that he was glad to have been
ignorant of the true nature of Communist rule in Poland.

If he had known ahead of time, he could have avoided all this fuss - and
continued to live his life in a free country.



....that hounds you out of it and takes away your citizenship for
planning to visit the wrong place apparently.
I would have expected crap like that out of the the U.S. in the postwar
years, but thought that Canada might have been a bit more tolerant. It
would seem to me that your politics is related a lot more to what's in
your mind than in what nation your feet happen to be standing at any
particular moment.
There was an interesting article about all this published in Canada in 1999:
http://www.aetherometry.com/unified_...a_citizen.html
He and Tsien Hsue-shen would have had a lot to talk about if they ever met.
Both were chased out of free countries and into communist ones based
upon suspicions that they were communists.
A really nice case of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"America- love it, or we'll make you leave it." ;-)

Pat

Wallace Berry wrote:
In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:


I visited the Soviet Union, and by the time I got back I knew that I had
seen a very impoverished country with a very crooked, incompetent, and
ruthless government and day-to-day life in a society that was corrupt to
a degree that was almost hard to comprehend.


I worked in Moscow for a month in 1989 as part of a group with
experiments on a Biocosmos flight (mentioned so that this post is not
too off topic). Your quote is one of the best and most succinct ways of
describing my impression of life in and around Moscow at that time.

Anecdotes (not, of course, to be confued with data): while in the USSR
in 1990 to us ethe 6-meter telescope, I was advised that the Arbat
was the place to experience Moscow. Stalinists mural painters
were holding forth... Anyway, I decided to buy a set of matrioshkas
with Yeltsin outside Gorabachev outside Brezhnev... back to Lenin
who was tiny enough to be easily lost. So we negotiated the deal,
and I was instructed to walk around the block and come back. So
I did, an arm pulled me into a doorway and we made the cash-for-dolls
switch inside my coat pocket. I was confused, being that the transaction
was perfectly legal under then-current rules. A colleague later
explained that organized criminals were exacting protection money,
and some genius had negotiated the amount as a percentage of sales,
giving every reason not to be seen doing much business on the street.

By a year later, a visiting colleague from Moscow State U. described
the government there as like it had been taken over by the Mafia.
When capitalism is outlawed, only outlaws will be captilists.

And even in 1986, I was describing a visit to Moscow on the way to an
Armenian meeting to a colleague back in the states (I being in the
Netherlands at the time). I mentioned having trouble distinguishing
the truly evil from the merely bureaucratic. He (at the time a
more accomplished reader of Screwtape) wanted to know why I thought
there was a difference...

Bill Keel

William C. Keel wrote:


By a year later, a visiting colleague from Moscow State U. described
the government there as like it had been taken over by the Mafia.
When capitalism is outlawed, only outlaws will be captilists.



What hit me most was the degree of corruption; the black market was
everywhere, and getting anything at all done relied on bribery of some
sort. Although when you think about it, that's what made the fall of the
Soviet Union survivable for the populace. They weren't relying on the
government for their survival, but rather on the black market. So when
the government fell, all they needed to do was to fall back on the black
market to a greater degree to get the necessities of life.
I kept thinking to myself that if it weren't for the fact that this
place imprisons and kills people at the drop of a hat, this would all be
some sort of a hilarious surrealistic comedy.
The average Russian seemed like a very nice person though; you got the
impression that they were cursed to live in a perpetually dysfunctional
and corrupt political system, and that anything they did that was wrong
was in most cases a result of desperation in an attempt to survive
rather than a desire to profit by doing wrong.
When I was their (back in the good 'ol communist days of christmas 1978)
I did see one really odd thing happen that I had no explanation for.
I was inside the Kremlin proper, and two guys in official-looking winter
coats approached a outside park bench. One quickly opened a briefcase
and laid a sheaf of papers down on the bench; the other immediately
produced a camera and started photographing the papers one after the other.
It looked like espionage of some sort...but inside the Kremlin in broad
daylight?!

Pat