Speaker 1: Okay, we are love.
Speaker 2: Hi.
Speaker 1: This is William Ramsey. Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates on
Speaker 1: today's show. I have a very special guest or attorney guest.
Speaker 1: We just talked in April twenty twenty five about his
Speaker 1: excellent book. People check it out. The full title of
Speaker 1: the book is The Wise of Heart, A modern day
Speaker 1: reimagining of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Has really good reviews
Speaker 1: on Amazon right now four point nine twenty five star
Speaker 1: reviews and well deserved. Timely check it out. I will
Speaker 1: put a link to the show we did, but we
Speaker 1: were talking offline after we finished the last show. And
Speaker 1: he has other interests. Thinks I'm not. I can't say
Speaker 1: I'm a science person or physics, but I've done some
Speaker 1: interest People have talked about Einstein, some questionable ideas about
Speaker 1: how valid he is. But anyway, we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about this. And his name is Hans G. Shan's last
Speaker 1: name was spelled Atcha and Tz And if you're watching
Speaker 1: this on Rock Finn, Rumble or Act, you'll see that
Speaker 1: he works for and with the Society for Post Quantum
Speaker 1: Research in His website is the SPQR dot com and
Speaker 1: also ATHERSR dot substack dot com. So I put those
Speaker 1: links in the show notes. But he has a bunch
Speaker 1: of slides, and like I said, I'm not really I
Speaker 1: think this is optimal in a way because I don't
Speaker 1: know that much about kind of modern physics. But he
Speaker 1: can talk more about that. So Hans Schanz, welcome back
Speaker 1: to the show.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you so much for having me on again.
Speaker 1: Excellent. So for people who didn't hear our earlier show,
Speaker 1: maybe you can talk about your recent work. I know
Speaker 1: you're posting a lot on substack, and maybe just talk
Speaker 1: about your background and interest in this particular subject relativity,
Speaker 1: Einstein and modern physics.
Speaker 2: Sure, I started off in school studying industrial engineering because
Speaker 2: I had read Atlas Shrugged and really liked the idea
Speaker 2: of being a creator and an entrepreneur. And I got
Speaker 2: most of the way through my industrial engineering training and
Speaker 2: great training, good general engineering background and how to run
Speaker 2: a business, production control, project management, things like that. But
Speaker 2: as I got near the end of that, I realized
Speaker 2: no one was going to hand me a copper mine
Speaker 2: or a steel mill or a trans continental railroad, and
Speaker 2: if I wanted to run a business, I was going
Speaker 2: to have to invent something or come up with some
Speaker 2: concept that I could wrap a business around. That got
Speaker 2: me into physics. I finished a second undergrad bachelor's degree
Speaker 2: in physics and liked it so much I went all
Speaker 2: the way through grad school getting a PhD in theoretical electromagnetism. Well,
Speaker 2: then I had the unwelcome discovery that what physicists regard
Speaker 2: as electromagnetism is a bit different than the practical, everyday
Speaker 2: electromagnetism that electrical engineers put to practical use. So I
Speaker 2: had to do a bit more of training and get
Speaker 2: myself up to speed before I land ended a job
Speaker 2: doing ultra wide band antenna design. It was a great job.
Speaker 2: I learned a lot. I was able to synthesize a
Speaker 2: lot of my theoretical physics ideas with some practical applications,
Speaker 2: and learn not just about how antennas work, but how
Speaker 2: electromagnetism works, and develop some ideas for how that all
Speaker 2: plays out. I left the ultra wideband business to do
Speaker 2: a startup at last. With some friends, I co founded
Speaker 2: q Track Corporation. I invented a way to do indoor
Speaker 2: location using low frequency near field signals. The conventional way
Speaker 2: uses high frequency signals. They tend to bounce around. It
Speaker 2: makes it really hard to tell where whatever it is
Speaker 2: you're tracking is. We used signals down in the AM
Speaker 2: broadcast band, very long wavelength, very low frequency, and built
Speaker 2: a product that was able to track people to an
Speaker 2: accuracy of about fifty centimeters a couple feet or so.
Speaker 2: It was used in about a third of US nuclear plants,
Speaker 2: a bunch of industrial customers. It gave me an opportunity
Speaker 2: to master another realm of electromagnetism, the whole area of
Speaker 2: near field electromagnetism and how these short range, long wavelength,
Speaker 2: low frequency links work. Well. That was kind of a
Speaker 2: hand in hand and mouth existence. Never terribly successful. We
Speaker 2: ultimately had to sell out, and I've been working in
Speaker 2: the defense industry since then. But it gave me an
Speaker 2: opportunity to write a book about ultra wide band antennas,
Speaker 2: The Art and Science of Ultra wide Band Antennas. If
Speaker 2: you're interested in time tomain electromagnetism, you might want to
Speaker 2: look that title up. And it helped me appreciate that
Speaker 2: physicists really don't understand very well how electromagnetism really works.
Speaker 2: And I can go into the details later but that
Speaker 2: led me on a quest to try to understand where
Speaker 2: physics went wrong, how we got the premises that we
Speaker 2: have on how things work, why things like pilot wave
Speaker 2: quantum mechanics have been largely ignored in favor of less
Speaker 2: reasonable interpretations not only of relativity but of quantum mechanics.
Speaker 2: And that led me to a historical study to try
Speaker 2: to track that down. And the central figure involved in
Speaker 2: that process is Einstein. And I think I've come up
Speaker 2: with exactly what went wrong and how Einstein led physics
Speaker 2: the wrong way and tried to save it at the end,
Speaker 2: but his dream has not yet been realized. So that
Speaker 2: is what I will be discussing the presentation today.
Speaker 1: Great and I've heard that from other people that the
Speaker 1: theory of relativity isn't there's holes in it. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've heard this before. Would you agree with that? Is
Speaker 1: that kind of your position that there's things that Einstein
Speaker 1: left out or didn't address in physics.
Speaker 2: The fundamental issue, and I'll be getting into it in
Speaker 2: the presentation is it's really a backwards way of looking
Speaker 2: at things. What he did was take a look at
Speaker 2: the emerging discoveries and electromagnetism trying to understand things like
Speaker 2: the Michaelson Morley experiment that seemed to indicate there wasn't
Speaker 2: any ether drift, and he decided to do a top
Speaker 2: down approach of deducing the physics the Lorentz transforms, which
Speaker 2: had already been discovered, deducing them from two simple principles.
Speaker 2: It was a remarkably creative and clever thing to do.
Speaker 2: But in inverting the hierarchy and making it a top
Speaker 2: down theory like that, he believed that no mechanism was
Speaker 2: necessary and that it was a complete waste of time
Speaker 2: to talk about that, that we should focus only on
Speaker 2: the observables. And that's been an idea that has plagued
Speaker 2: physics ever since.
Speaker 1: Gotcha, And that's the whole kind of concept of the ether, right,
Speaker 1: is that there's there's some kind of other unseen force
Speaker 1: affecting physics. Is that? Is that too simplistic?
Speaker 2: The idea of the ether came up as the wave
Speaker 2: theory of light was developed initially by principally by Frenelle
Speaker 2: in France, and then as James Clerk Maxwell discovered the
Speaker 2: laws of electromagnetism, he was able to merge optics and
Speaker 2: electromagnetism and demonstrate that light was an electromagnetic phenomenon. And
Speaker 2: if you have a wave, the natural question to ask
Speaker 2: is in what medium is it waving? And you know,
Speaker 2: the answer to that was this mysterious medium called the
Speaker 2: ether that somehow was able to support all of these
Speaker 2: waves that you know, insanely high frequencies and insanely fast velocities,
Speaker 2: and yet was so immaterial that you planets would go
Speaker 2: through it without being slowed down in the least, and
Speaker 2: that it was very hard to detect. And that's the
Speaker 2: paradox that people were wrestling with when Einstein came around
Speaker 2: and said, you know, let's not worry about how electromagnetism works.
Speaker 2: Let's just deduce how electromagnetism works for moving bodies from
Speaker 2: these two simple principles.
Speaker 1: Gotcha. So those are kind of the themes that kind
Speaker 1: of logical themes that are going to be in this presentation.
Speaker 1: Is the difference between induction and deduction. Is that right?
Speaker 2: That's one of the fundamental themes of my book, and
Speaker 2: it really goes all the way back to Plato and
Speaker 2: Aristotle and their approaches. I'll talk about that more when
Speaker 2: we get into it.
Speaker 1: Okay, just I'm trying to like define terms before you
Speaker 1: get into your presentation. Sometimes that makes it clear what
Speaker 1: we're talking about. Like, I'm not that familiar with this
Speaker 1: stuff either, so but yeah, So this is the way
Speaker 1: that Einstein looked at the theory of relativity, right, as
Speaker 1: these different He just made these assumptions from the top
Speaker 1: down about he induced it, right, not deduced it.
Speaker 2: Well, he de do saste into the fundamental principles, gotcha? So?
Speaker 2: I mean deduction is the idea where you start with
Speaker 2: some fundamental truths, some axioms, some basic principles and work
Speaker 2: out logically what their consequences are. Induction is when you
Speaker 2: take a look at a bunch of specific instances or
Speaker 2: examples and try to infer from them what general law
Speaker 2: or principle connects or govern stuff.
Speaker 1: Gotcha. Okay, okay, So induction, deduction and Einstein and Einstein's
Speaker 1: ideas did not come about in a vacuum, right like
Speaker 1: there were other people doing similar physics around that time.
Speaker 1: Is that correct?
Speaker 2: That's a very interesting question. Maybe I should get into that.
Speaker 1: You can do the slot. Yeah, if would like to
Speaker 1: start with the slides, that's fine too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let me go ahead, We're covering a bunch of
Speaker 2: topics that I'm going to be kidding. Okay, sorry, anyway,
Speaker 2: if you have any questions or if anything's unclear, it'll
Speaker 2: probably you know, those may be questions the audience is
Speaker 2: having to so please feel free to stop me.
Speaker 1: And yeah, we already have one question, so we can
Speaker 1: we can address that whenever you're ready.
Speaker 2: But let's get into why we go ahead and take
Speaker 2: you to see it.
Speaker 1: Sure as Johnny, he writes, can the speaker opine on
Speaker 1: whether Alexanderson alternator transmitters antennae maybe and under exam phenomena
Speaker 1: we quantum spooky at a distance of longitudinal scaler waves.
Speaker 2: Oh, those are all some very interesting questions. The Alexanderson
Speaker 2: alternator was one of the first high frequency radio transmitters.
Speaker 2: It was basically a mechanical oscillator that would whip around
Speaker 2: fast enough to generate radio waves. Now relatively low frequency
Speaker 2: radio waves of tends to maybe one hundred killer hurtz
Speaker 2: or a little more than that, And because the wavelengths
Speaker 2: were so long, the a lot of the RF involved,
Speaker 2: particularly in and near the antenna, would involve near field
Speaker 2: phenomenon that are not at least at the time, we're
Speaker 2: not very well understood. Now I know there is. I'm
Speaker 2: trying to remember the gentleman's name. I think maybe Eric Dollard,
Speaker 2: who has done some investigation, has some interesting results and
Speaker 2: claims there that I haven't really dug into. I do
Speaker 2: think the process of radiation is an under examined phenomenon,
Speaker 2: and I should probably come back maybe in a few
Speaker 2: months when I have a presentation ready to talk about
Speaker 2: my understanding of electromagnetism and how it works, or we
Speaker 2: can get into this a little more deeply. But yes,
Speaker 2: these are definitely under examined phenomenon. We'll see a little
Speaker 2: bit about Einstein and the spooky action in a distance
Speaker 2: in the talk, and longitudinal in scaler waves an interesting topic.
Speaker 2: I'm looking on trying to do a paper on that
Speaker 2: in the next few months. I think a lot of
Speaker 2: it is overhyped. There are longitudinal waves in electromagnetism, but
Speaker 2: those waves will aren't really important by the time you
Speaker 2: get more than a wavelength or two from a small transmitter.
Speaker 2: Now there's this scalar wave theory that supposes there are
Speaker 2: undiscovered terms are ignored terms, and the laws of electromagnetism
Speaker 2: that allow your supposed scalar waves to generate from zero
Speaker 2: point energy create effects at a distance. But I have
Speaker 2: yet to see a coherent account of how they're made
Speaker 2: and how they're detected and what their link law is.
Speaker 2: That has convinced me there's much behind that notion. But
Speaker 2: I'll be looking into that, hopefully soon. It's on my
Speaker 2: to do list to look into that further. Excellent, Okay,
Speaker 2: let's do it. Let's let's go into the Stein's great Well.
Speaker 2: What I'll do is I'll begin with kind of the
Speaker 2: conventional perspective that you'd probably get in the physics class
Speaker 2: about relativity and about Einstein. Then I'll talk about some
Speaker 2: of the less appreciated aspects of Einstein's career and the
Speaker 2: relativity of history and development. I'll talk about his person life.
Speaker 2: I'll talk about how the Eclipse of nineteen nineteen was
Speaker 2: a major event in promoting Einstein and bringing his theory
Speaker 2: to prominence. About the esthetics of relativity and the critics
Speaker 2: of relativity. It's fascinating looking at how the publicity behind
Speaker 2: Einstein and relativity rolled out. And I'll take a closer
Speaker 2: look at Einstein's trip to America in nineteen twenty one.
Speaker 2: I'll talk about some of the very contentious arguments between
Speaker 2: advocates of what was called Deutsche physic German physics versus
Speaker 2: Jewish physics. And finally, i'll talk about some of the
Speaker 2: lessons here for the foundational narratives that govern physics. And
Speaker 2: I'm really happy to be able to present this to
Speaker 2: you and to your audience, because there are a number
Speaker 2: of really intriguing suggestions about how Einstein and the campaign
Speaker 2: to promote him may have had taught to more occult
Speaker 2: or esoteric groups. And I want to lay out some
Speaker 2: of the clues I haven't been able to track down
Speaker 2: and hope that maybe someone in the audience will have
Speaker 2: some insights and we'll get back to me and clear
Speaker 2: this up. So let me begin by talking about relativity.
Speaker 2: In eighteen eighty seven, to researchers Michaelson Morley set up
Speaker 2: an interferometer to basically bounce light back and forth on
Speaker 2: a path on paths at right angles to each other,
Speaker 2: and they assumed that they would see light moving slowing
Speaker 2: down depending on which way the interferometer was changed or
Speaker 2: was oriented, and what they discovered was a null result
Speaker 2: that the change in the speed of light on the
Speaker 2: two different directions was much less than they were expecting. Now.
Speaker 2: It wasn't a zero result, but it was a lot
Speaker 2: smaller now. Heaviside a couple of years later predicted that
Speaker 2: a moving electrified sphere would contract along its axis of motion,
Speaker 2: inferring that from the laws of electromagnetism. A researcher named
Speaker 2: Fitzgerald came up with the idea that the interferometer itself
Speaker 2: might be contracting as it moves through the ether. Larmore,
Speaker 2: British physicist, did a lot of work on radiation and
Speaker 2: other subjects. He predicted the concept of time dilation and
Speaker 2: started developing transforms to discuss how electromagnetism changes with moving bodies.
Speaker 2: Lorentz described them in coordinate transformations, and in nineteen oh
Speaker 2: four a French scientist, Henri puan Care developed the term
Speaker 2: the principle of relativity, and he predicted that we would
Speaker 2: have to have a new mechanics where light is where
Speaker 2: velocity is strictly limited to the speed of light. So
Speaker 2: that is the context in which an obscure no one
Speaker 2: had ever heard of impatent clerk in Burned, Switzerland named
Speaker 2: Albert Einstein wrote a paper in nineteen oh five suggesting
Speaker 2: that we could explain all of these phenomenon the Lorentz
Speaker 2: transformations from just two principles, first that the laws of
Speaker 2: physics are identical to all observers in non accelerating inertial frames,
Speaker 2: and second that the speed of light is the same
Speaker 2: for all observers, independent of the relative motion of the
Speaker 2: various light sources. And from those principles he showed that
Speaker 2: you could derive the Lorentz transforms and the relativistic mechanics
Speaker 2: that Puan Care had begun exploring. Well, this gets us
Speaker 2: to the discussion we were having before we got started
Speaker 2: on induction versus deduction, and I like to think of
Speaker 2: it in terms of a Platonic versus an Aristotelian approach
Speaker 2: to science. And that's a little controversial because people will
Speaker 2: use Plato and Ara Stytle as archetypes with different shades
Speaker 2: of meanings. So I want to be clear what I
Speaker 2: mean when I talk about Aristotelian physics. A lot of
Speaker 2: people will look at it in terms of the medieval
Speaker 2: schoolmen with their logical syllogisms, and that's not the sense
Speaker 2: in which I'm talking about something that's Aristotelian. By Aristotelian,
Speaker 2: I mean using induction in order to come up with
Speaker 2: basic principles, whereas a Platonic approach, you're using fundamental axioms
Speaker 2: or principles in order to work out predictions that you
Speaker 2: can then say, validate in an experiment. A good way
Speaker 2: to look at that is to see how Aristotle and
Speaker 2: Plato used their approaches in practice. Like if you take
Speaker 2: a look at their analysis of politics, Plato started from
Speaker 2: ideals of human justice and behavior and human character and
Speaker 2: deduced how the philosoph of her king should rule the society. Aristotle,
Speaker 2: on the other hand, gathered the constitutions of over one
Speaker 2: hundred different governments and broke down and start analyzing what
Speaker 2: worked and what didn't. And that's a good example of
Speaker 2: Plato's deductive approach versus Aristotle's inductive approach. But it really
Speaker 2: is a cycle, and you need a balance of induction,
Speaker 2: looking at new phenomenon, coming up with new principles, and
Speaker 2: to complement that that taking those principles, working out consequences
Speaker 2: of them, and then testing them. And I would argue
Speaker 2: that today physics has gone way on the Platonic side
Speaker 2: where we've taken a lot of these principles, including the
Speaker 2: principles that Einstein identified, and are taking them as axiomatic
Speaker 2: and not doing the inductive investigation necessary to try to
Speaker 2: develop new principles or possibly question the principles that we have.
Speaker 2: That's a theme of my work on my fields and
Speaker 2: energy substack.
Speaker 1: Gotcha.
Speaker 2: Now. About a decade later, Einstein extended his special theory
Speaker 2: of relativity to come up with a general theory of relativity.
Speaker 2: That's the idea that mass and energy cause spaced curve
Speaker 2: and that gravity is just a reflection of bodies moving
Speaker 2: on this new curve. Space time geometry. I won't bother
Speaker 2: going into the Tensor math because it gets kind of complicated,
Speaker 2: but I think the best shorthand explanation of it was
Speaker 2: coined by John Wheeler, who said space time tells matter
Speaker 2: how to move, and matter tells space time how to curb,
Speaker 2: and that basically explains the fundamental concept behind general relativity.
Speaker 2: There are a bunch of interesting details about that gamma
Speaker 2: or the lamba you see, the cosmological constant and universe
Speaker 2: and cosmology that I'm going to have to skip for now.
Speaker 2: But when Einstein came up with that theory, the question
Speaker 2: arose how to test it. He was able to show
Speaker 2: that his theory would match the observed Perihelian advance that
Speaker 2: had been observed in the planet Mercury, and it predicted
Speaker 2: that the Sun would bend light. So people were going
Speaker 2: out to eclipses and trying to take pictures of the
Speaker 2: Sun during an eclipse and see if the starfield behind
Speaker 2: the Sun was distorted. It's a very tricky thing to
Speaker 2: do because you don't have a lot of time to
Speaker 2: take the picture, and you got to get it right
Speaker 2: the first time, and you're packing up all your equipment
Speaker 2: and going to the jungles of Brazil, or one group
Speaker 2: went to a German expedition went to Crimea in nineteen fourteen,
Speaker 2: and World War One broke out before they were able
Speaker 2: to take their data. All kinds of hazards that experimenters
Speaker 2: ran into trying to test this and take some measurements
Speaker 2: and see if they could validate it. So ultimately, in
Speaker 2: nineteen nineteen it was confirmed. So if you look at
Speaker 2: Einstein's career, he started off as a patent clerk in
Speaker 2: nineteen oh five with four great papers, the Special Relativity paper.
Speaker 2: He did a paper on the photoelectric effect, on the
Speaker 2: energy mass equivalents equals mc squared and on the atomic
Speaker 2: theory in nineteen fifteen. He came up with general relativity
Speaker 2: in nineteen nineteen that was confirmed by Dyson and by Eddington.
Speaker 2: Looks like some of my newspaper clippings got over the text.
Speaker 2: But in nineteen twenty one he had a triumphant US
Speaker 2: tour and ended up winning the Nobel Prize. In nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty two, he came up with Einstein Bow's statistics to
Speaker 2: govern the statistics of bodies under quantum mechanics. In nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty seven was really one of the pivotal moments in
Speaker 2: physics history at the fifth Solve conference, where Einstein maintained
Speaker 2: that God does not play dice with the universe, and
Speaker 2: Boor's answer allegedly was that Einstein should stop telling God
Speaker 2: what to do. Boror ultimately triumphed in the physics community
Speaker 2: with his Copenhagen interpretation in nineteen thirty three. When Hitler
Speaker 2: came to power, Einstein fled Germany. In nineteen thirty five,
Speaker 2: from Princeton, where Einstein had ended up, he wrote a
Speaker 2: fascinating paper that ended up being I think it's his
Speaker 2: most cited paper today and it's one of the ones
Speaker 2: that today still has some of the greatest interest. It's
Speaker 2: called the EPR paper after the initials of the authors Einstein,
Speaker 2: Podolski and Rosen, and Einstein argued that quantum mechanics was
Speaker 2: not complete. Basically, he argued that there was there were,
Speaker 2: it would have to be hidden variables to account for
Speaker 2: certain behavior, and quantum mechanics to avoid the concept of
Speaker 2: spooky action the distance. In nineteen thirty nine, he collaborated
Speaker 2: with a friend of his, Leos Zillard, to write a
Speaker 2: letter to President Roosevelt, suggesting that the US should start
Speaker 2: an atomic bomb research project, which did happen, of course,
Speaker 2: led to the Manhattan Project, and in nineteen fifty five
Speaker 2: he ended up dying in Princeton. So that is the
Speaker 2: conventional biography that you would get if you asked your
Speaker 2: physics teacher to explain Einstein's career. And what I want
Speaker 2: to do now is go a little further in depth
Speaker 2: into his personal career and some of the personal background.
Speaker 2: And Einstein credited an Austrian physicist named Ernst Mock with
Speaker 2: inspiring a lot of the ideas behind relativity. He said
Speaker 2: that it was mock who, in his History of Mechanics,
Speaker 2: shook his dogmatic faith in classical mechanics, and that the
Speaker 2: book exercised a profound influence upon him. Mack had a
Speaker 2: what came to be known as a positivist approach to science.
Speaker 2: He argued that the world isn't composed of things, but
Speaker 2: of sensations, that it's our observations that matter. He argued
Speaker 2: that atams aren't things, they are a mental model for
Speaker 2: classifying our observations, that we can't ascribe any reality to them.
Speaker 2: He argued that it really doesn't matter. It doesn't make
Speaker 2: any sense to talk about whether the Toolemaic versus the
Speaker 2: Copernican model of the solar system, that one is right
Speaker 2: versus the other. They're both just ways to organize the
Speaker 2: data of our observations we make of the planets, and
Speaker 2: that it doesn't make sense to talk about one being
Speaker 2: real versus the other. And that idea developed into logical positivism,
Speaker 2: and it was a great influence not only on Einstein,
Speaker 2: but on the physics community in general. The quote by
Speaker 2: James Jenes is really kind of telling, where he argues
Speaker 2: that physics has driven us to the positivist conception that
Speaker 2: we cannot understand what events are, but can only describe
Speaker 2: them in terms of mathematical terms organizing our observations, and
Speaker 2: that as we dig into it is really a reversal
Speaker 2: of cause and effect. It was more Mock and Einstein
Speaker 2: having adopted those principles which drove the interpretation of physics,
Speaker 2: and not the discoveries in physics which drove the adaptation
Speaker 2: of those principles. But what we'll see that as we
Speaker 2: get a little deeper into what's going on here. Now,
Speaker 2: what's really interesting is if you go back can read
Speaker 2: Einstein's paper. And Max Borne, his friend and fellow physicist,
Speaker 2: pointed out that many people will have looked up Einstein's paper,
Speaker 2: and when you read it, you will notice that it
Speaker 2: doesn't have a single reference to the prior literature. It's
Speaker 2: like it just appeared out of nothing from Einstein's imaginative
Speaker 2: creative intelligence. And of course Born pointed out that that
Speaker 2: is not true. A real interesting, fascinating sidelight. Einstein skipped
Speaker 2: his math classes and got a friend to take notes,
Speaker 2: and that was pretty much the only way he was
Speaker 2: able to pass his undergraduate math classes. His professor was
Speaker 2: Hermann Minkowski, who ended up developing the space time geometry
Speaker 2: that we now use and is sometimes confused as being
Speaker 2: something Einstein did. Minkowski said that Einstein always cutting lectures,
Speaker 2: I really would not have believed him capable of it,
Speaker 2: of developing relativity, And he also said for me, Einstein's
Speaker 2: success came is a tremendous surprise. For in his student days,
Speaker 2: Einstein had been a lazy dog, never bothered about mathematics
Speaker 2: at all. So there's been some question about whether his
Speaker 2: wife may have been involved in assisting him. It's really
Speaker 2: hard to sort that out. I don't have a firm
Speaker 2: opinion on it. There's a lot of people who've argued
Speaker 2: that one way or the other. But what has become
Speaker 2: known as their letters have become public in recent years
Speaker 2: is in nineteen oh two, Malava, who was then his
Speaker 2: girlfriend and fellow student, gave birth to their daughter, Leseral,
Speaker 2: and no one really knows what her fate is. It's
Speaker 2: not recorded in any of the letters. We don't know
Speaker 2: if she died in infancy of scarlet fever. That's one hypothesis.
Speaker 2: Some people argue that she was adopted. We don't really
Speaker 2: know for sure, but Apparently Einstein had a daughter with
Speaker 2: his girlfriend, Maliva before they got married. They were married
Speaker 2: in nineteen oh three. In nineteen oh four, their first son,
Speaker 2: Hans Albert, was born. In nineteen ten, their second son,
Speaker 2: Edward was born, and in nineteen twelve Einstein began an
Speaker 2: affair with his first cousin, Elsa. He ended up moving
Speaker 2: to Berlin in nineteen fourteen. He stayed in Berlin, Malava
Speaker 2: had had enough at that point he had been very
Speaker 2: dictatorial and abusive. There are letters that he wrote to
Speaker 2: her with his demands of how she should run the
Speaker 2: household if she wanted to remain in it. So she
Speaker 2: ended up going to Zurich with the boys, leaving Einstein there. Finally,
Speaker 2: in nineteen nineteen, Einstein divorced Malava and married Elsa. One
Speaker 2: interesting highlight that really stuck with me is, you know,
Speaker 2: it's important to understand Edward developed schizophrenia and had to
Speaker 2: be institutionalized when he was in his early twenties, and
Speaker 2: in nineteen thirty nine Einstein was busy helping Jews escape
Speaker 2: from Germany. Malabar wrote him, Now she would have been safe.
Speaker 2: She was a Serbian Orthodox Christian. You know, even if
Speaker 2: Switzerland had fallen to the Nazis like neighboring Austria did.
Speaker 2: She'd probably been okay, but her half Jewish son, Edward,
Speaker 2: who was in the mental institution. He would never have
Speaker 2: made it to a concentration camp. The Nazi policy was
Speaker 2: they just shocked mental patients out of hand for eugenic reasons.
Speaker 2: So she asked Albert to help get Edward out of Switzerland,
Speaker 2: to get him safe to America, and he didn't do anything.
Speaker 2: He refused to help. So, you know, his personal life
Speaker 2: was pretty questionable. But there's been a mythos built up
Speaker 2: around Einstein as being the ultimate wise sage and benevolent figure.
Speaker 2: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has earned an estimated quarter
Speaker 2: billion dollars licensing his image, everything from Little Einstein's toys
Speaker 2: to all kinds of promotional uses of the Einstein name. Recently,
Speaker 2: a physicist argued that the relationship between Einstein and the
Speaker 2: press is a case in which a scientist's fame triumphed
Speaker 2: over the substance of his work. And I think that
Speaker 2: as we develop the story a little further, you'll see
Speaker 2: how that turns out.
Speaker 1: I think that's true, But like this, his images everywhere,
Speaker 1: sticking his tongue out, riding a bike. People quote him
Speaker 1: as kind of like a more philosopher to personal life,
Speaker 1: not really batting one hundred percent or whatever, so to speak.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it is interesting how what a cultural impact
Speaker 1: he has, more so than any of this information in
Speaker 1: the Eclipse of nineteen nineteen.
Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely, And in fact, that's one of the things
Speaker 2: that I want to explore where I've reached some dead
Speaker 2: ends on the publicity campaign and how Einstein got promoted,
Speaker 2: because I suspect there may have been other people involved
Speaker 2: in pushing Einstein for their own reasons. I mean, some
Speaker 2: of that's in the open, some of it isn't, and
Speaker 2: you know, we can only speculate and look at some
Speaker 2: of the clues.
Speaker 1: He wouldn't be the first cultural figure promoted by other people.
Speaker 1: I mean this is a common phenomenon, certainly.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, Yeah, And you can see where there was people
Speaker 2: had a lot of motives to do so, right, gotcha.
Speaker 2: I want to go to the Eclipse of nineteen nineteen.
Speaker 2: I mentioned that a bit how previous attempts had failed.
Speaker 2: But then two teams from England, one went to Brazil
Speaker 2: and one went to an island off the coast of Africa,
Speaker 2: and they through some pretty questionable means that a lot
Speaker 2: of people have commented look very suspicious selectively throughout some
Speaker 2: of the results, and the results that were left confirmed
Speaker 2: Einstein's theory, and they went full speed ahead saying that
Speaker 2: with complete confidence the theory had been confirmed. Now, a
Speaker 2: lot of people spend a lot of time arguing that
Speaker 2: I think it's kind of a waste of time to
Speaker 2: argue about the possible chicanery involved in the nineteen nineteen results,
Speaker 2: because it was definitively confirmed in subsequent eclipses in nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty two and nineteen twenty nine. So if there was
Speaker 2: some kind of selective editing or selection of the data,
Speaker 2: it didn't it doesn't affect the overall result. So his biographer,
Speaker 2: Abraham Pace said that November sixth, nineteen nineteen, that was
Speaker 2: the day the results were announced. He called it the
Speaker 2: day on which Einstein was canonized, which I think is
Speaker 2: a jact just privigious term. Oh yeah, he's one of
Speaker 2: the saints of the modern day religion of scientism. And
Speaker 2: the New York Times had the headline you see there
Speaker 2: about lights all askew in the heavens. This started the
Speaker 2: myth of only twelve men alive could understand relativity, and
Speaker 2: scientists were a gog at the results. The Times of
Speaker 2: London also promoted this revolution in science, new theory of
Speaker 2: the universe, Newtonian ideas overthrown. And there was this a
Speaker 2: kind of famous photograph of a rather brooding Einstein on
Speaker 2: top of the cover of the Berliner Illus Street. I
Speaker 2: don't even try the German pronunciation. They're a major German magazine,
Speaker 2: and the you can't really read the German below Einstein,
Speaker 2: but it reads a new greatest in world history, Albert Einstein,
Speaker 2: whose research means a complete re evaluation of our view
Speaker 2: of nature and is equivalent to the discoveries of Copernicus
Speaker 2: and Kepler and Newton. So, you know, as I started to,
Speaker 2: uh you dig into this, it was fascinating seeing, you know,
Speaker 2: who was promoting Einstein and and what their their reasons were. Uh.
Speaker 2: You know, The New York Times worked very hard to
Speaker 2: be a paper of record and be impartial, but it
Speaker 2: had Jewish ownership and occasionally, uh you know, Adolf Hawke's
Speaker 2: who was the editor and publisher, he would push Jewish
Speaker 2: causes very heavily. The New York Times did a lot
Speaker 2: of publicity on the Leo Frank case, which was just
Speaker 2: a few years before this, and really heavily pushed Einstein,
Speaker 2: which we'll see further when we talk about Einstein's visit
Speaker 2: to the US in nineteen twenty one.
Speaker 1: And for people, sorry interrupt, but for people don't know,
Speaker 1: the eclipse of nineteen nineteen supposedly proved that mass influenced light, right,
Speaker 1: that was basically.
Speaker 2: The core of it, yes, and that Einstein's theory of
Speaker 2: curved space. It was taken to validate Einstein's theory of
Speaker 2: curved space. And I think part of the reason relativity
Speaker 2: became so popular is these scientific ideas were labeled as
Speaker 2: relativity and were taken popularly to mean, well, there are
Speaker 2: no absolutes anymore. All truth is relative. And I think
Speaker 2: that's a large part of soul. So why it got
Speaker 2: the play and interpretation that it did.
Speaker 1: Interesting. Okay, so Einstein, the New York Times maybe pro Jewish.
Speaker 2: Well, the fascinating thing is when you look at the
Speaker 2: Times of London, because you know then is now of
Speaker 2: course they don't even say of London. You're supposed to know,
Speaker 2: you know, when you say the Times by itself that's
Speaker 2: the one they mean. But then is now it was
Speaker 2: the paper of record for the British Empire, and you
Speaker 2: could kind of understand how they would be. They were
Speaker 2: interested in reconciliation after the war and in promoting internationalism.
Speaker 2: Einstein had been a good German one who was a pacifist,
Speaker 2: who disapproved of the war, and so it was kind
Speaker 2: of a way of contributing to the internationalization of science.
Speaker 2: It was fascinating to me. Just a few months after
Speaker 2: they were busy promoting Einstein very heavily. That's when The
Speaker 2: Times published the Protocols of Zion at least initially when
Speaker 2: they were regarding them as being the legitimate publication. Then
Speaker 2: they published a debunking of them a year or so
Speaker 2: after that, but they were very involved in the promotion
Speaker 2: of Einstein. And it kind of goes back to some
Speaker 2: interesting speculations I've seen from Richard Pohe recently wrote a
Speaker 2: book about how the British invented Communism, and he argued
Speaker 2: that they were responsible for bifurcating Judaism into the Bolshevik
Speaker 2: branch and supporting it in Russia and into the Zionist branch.
Speaker 2: Some interesting speculations that may be involved in the promotion
Speaker 2: of Einstein, but that takes us a little far afield here,
Speaker 2: So as you continue looking at some of the over
Speaker 2: the top headlines about the learned being confound owned, one
Speaker 2: of the popular spokespersons for physics of the day was
Speaker 2: Oliver Lodge. He had done some of the pioneering work
Speaker 2: on radio and in developing Maxwell's equations, and ironically, at
Speaker 2: the meeting where Einstein's where the general relativity results were
Speaker 2: first published, everyone was expecting him to speak, and he
Speaker 2: rose and left because he said he had another engagement
Speaker 2: and offered half hearted refutations. It was peculiar seeing how
Speaker 2: limply one of the champions of the ether theory just
Speaker 2: folded in the face of these results. So one of
Speaker 2: the things I think isn't widely appreciated is how even
Speaker 2: physicists regarded relativity and one's appreciation of it as being
Speaker 2: almost an issue. Jay Robert Oppenheimer said that Einstein's work
Speaker 2: was widely understood and applied in the physics community, but
Speaker 2: there were always those who didn't like it, as there
Speaker 2: are those who might not like the painting of Seshon
Speaker 2: or the quartets of Beethoven. Max Bourne said that the
Speaker 2: foundation of general relativity appeared to me then and still
Speaker 2: does as the greatest feat of human thinking about nature,
Speaker 2: the most amazing combination of philosophic penetration, physical intuition, and
Speaker 2: mathematical skill. But he acknowledged its connection with experience is slender.
Speaker 2: It appeared to me like a great work of art
Speaker 2: to be admired and enjoyed at a distance. Ernst Rutherford,
Speaker 2: who was one of the pioneers of nuclear physics and
Speaker 2: something of a relativity skeptic, said he made the offhanded
Speaker 2: compliment that the theory of relativity, quite apart from its validity,
Speaker 2: cannot but be regarded as a magnificent work of art.
Speaker 2: So the fundamental concept here is, you know, physicists, even
Speaker 2: if they used the Renz transforms and some of the
Speaker 2: principles that arose from relativity, did not necessarily appreciate the
Speaker 2: esthetics of relativity. And that really gets back to the
Speaker 2: whole top down versus bottom up approach to science, whether
Speaker 2: it should be deductive from basic principles like Einstein did,
Speaker 2: or inductive looking at electromagnetic phenomenon and deriving the you know,
Speaker 2: the appropriate transforms and conclusions from that and you know,
Speaker 2: the the unprecedented publicity campaign really antagonized a lot of
Speaker 2: Einstein's contemporaries, and Einstein really through fuel on the fire.
Speaker 2: He had a number of critics, Probably the single most
Speaker 2: prominent was a Nobel laureate named Philip Leonard, who took
Speaker 2: issue with relativity. Leonard and another optical physicist, Ernst Gerk,
Speaker 2: they both challenged Einstein's priority. They pointed out people had
Speaker 2: come up with the formula for light bending around the
Speaker 2: sun before he did that Puan care had largely developed
Speaker 2: the theory and advance of Einstein, and Einstein's response to
Speaker 2: this was to write a dialogue that looked suspiciously like
Speaker 2: a takeoff of Galileo's system of the two worlds, and
Speaker 2: it was a dialogue between a critic and a relativist
Speaker 2: with a touch of condescension towards the simplicity arguments that
Speaker 2: the critic was unable to understand, and that was about
Speaker 2: as endearing to Einstein's critics as Galileo's version of the
Speaker 2: same kind of approach was to the pope at the time.
Speaker 2: So it was not a good way to win friends
Speaker 2: and influence people by implying that they were stupid and
Speaker 2: slow for not being able to understand you. So one
Speaker 2: of the really fascinating things is in ninety teaen twenty
Speaker 2: a physicist named Paul Well, not even a physicist. No
Speaker 2: one really knows what his background was. He claimed to
Speaker 2: be an engineer. There's no record that he was ever
Speaker 2: an engineer. He seems to be a kind of grifter
Speaker 2: and con artist named Paul Wayland claimed to be the
Speaker 2: head of what he called a working group German Scientist
Speaker 2: for the Preservation of Pure Science. And he wrote a
Speaker 2: very inflammatory letter in August of nineteen twenty claiming that
Speaker 2: relativity was scientific hypnosis and a big hoax and it
Speaker 2: was all plagiarized. And a few weeks later he rented
Speaker 2: the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, which is was one of the
Speaker 2: premier event spaces, huge capacity, and hosted a public presentation
Speaker 2: on relativity. He gave a very inflammatory talk. Geek also
Speaker 2: made a presentation that was a lot more academic and
Speaker 2: matter of fact. Einstein attended and laughed and plained he
Speaker 2: found it very amusing, but he was obviously very disturbed
Speaker 2: by it because he then threatened to leave Berlin, and
Speaker 2: he wrote what even his friends regarded as an angry
Speaker 2: and vicious polemic, and chose Leonard to blame for the presentation,
Speaker 2: even though Leonard was not there and was not involved.
Speaker 2: Some of Leonard's writings were distributed, but he had not
Speaker 2: been involved in it. And then Leonard took personal offense
Speaker 2: at Einstein's comments. That was really the start of the
Speaker 2: feud that they had. There was a meeting a few
Speaker 2: weeks later that I'll pick up a bit later, But
Speaker 2: it's kind of important to understand the attitude toward publicity
Speaker 2: at the time. Einstein was getting all of this intense
Speaker 2: publicity on the cover of magazines, articles lauding him as
Speaker 2: the greatest thinker ever and above Newton and Kepler and
Speaker 2: Galileo and so forth. This was at a time when
Speaker 2: his friend Max Bourne wrote a book on relativity and
Speaker 2: he thought, let me put a photo of Einstein in
Speaker 2: the book, and their mutual friend Max van Lowie was
Speaker 2: just utterly scandalized at this act of promotion. It was
Speaker 2: it was too far for a popular book let alone
Speaker 2: what purported to be a professional text in relativity to
Speaker 2: have this dramatic glamour shot of Einstein on it, and
Speaker 2: Born promptly deleted the figure from the future additions so
Speaker 2: as not to engage in that shameless promotion. It's fascinating
Speaker 2: looking at all of the early nineteen twenties promotion of Einstein,
Speaker 2: because we today are so jaded and skeptical and capable
Speaker 2: of exercising a lot more discernment on the propaganda that
Speaker 2: is coming down the pike and being thrown at us.
Speaker 2: Not that we're always capable of resisting it, but it's
Speaker 2: fascinating to look at the nineteen twenties when all these
Speaker 2: techniques were new, and how comparatively crude and heavy handed
Speaker 2: they were, because you can really see the propaganda machine
Speaker 2: in action when you look at these things now. This
Speaker 2: is one of the most fascinating aspects of the promotion
Speaker 2: of Einstein. Mysterious gentleman named Alexander Muskowski. He described himself
Speaker 2: as being an adherent of the Cult of Einstein. He
Speaker 2: was an author of a number of books and novels.
Speaker 2: He wrote books on jokes, he wrote books on the
Speaker 2: occult and on sin's fiction. Of course, when I heard
Speaker 2: he was an occult author, that immediately perked up my
Speaker 2: antenna's and I looked into that a bit, and I'll
Speaker 2: talk more about what I found in the dead ends
Speaker 2: I reached. But he had a lot of long conversations
Speaker 2: with Einstein and collaborated with Einstein on a very fawning
Speaker 2: biography of Einstein. You know, it scandalized Einstein's friends. They
Speaker 2: urged Einstein to stop the publication. He made a half
Speaker 2: hearted effort, but you know, most of the biographers who've
Speaker 2: discussed this agreed that, you know, he kind of let it,
Speaker 2: let it happen, and it was over the top. There
Speaker 2: are some some phrases in it that are just, you know,
Speaker 2: very much, you know, exaggerated and caused a lot of
Speaker 2: problems and caused a lot of offense. One of Einstein's contemporaries,
Speaker 2: the mathematician Felix Line, said, in his personal utterances, Einstein
Speaker 2: is always so charming, quite unlike the foolish publicity circus
Speaker 2: set in motion for him. And when I looked into Moskowski, yeah,
Speaker 2: of course, when I see someone has written books on
Speaker 2: the occult, my initial reaction is, Okay, what a cult
Speaker 2: group was the guy involved with? Near as I can tell,
Speaker 2: he was involved with a group called Geselle Schaft der Freunde,
Speaker 2: which was near as I can tell, just a fraternal,
Speaker 2: self help professional organization of Jewish businessman, mostly in Berlin.
Speaker 2: But when you take a look at some of this
Speaker 2: early history of Einstein, it's said that Puan care attributed
Speaker 2: the discovery of relativity to Einstein, and Moskowski said so,
Speaker 2: but it wasn't mentioned at all in puan Carey's nineteen
Speaker 2: eight books. We have this account from Moskowski that he
Speaker 2: went and he heard this talk by puon Carey on relativity.
Speaker 2: And even though pwon Carey had not really mentioned or
Speaker 2: given credit to Einstein in his book just a couple
Speaker 2: of years earlier, according to Moskowski, he had spoken of
Speaker 2: Einstein in such terms that Muskowski became obsessed with understanding
Speaker 2: Einstein and the importance of his ideas. He reported that
Speaker 2: puon Carey was filled with misgivings and obviously very stressed
Speaker 2: about the potential of Einstein's revolutionary approach to threaten science
Speaker 2: as currently understood, but we only have his word for it.
Speaker 2: He reported that puon Carey had lauded how wonderful Einstein's
Speaker 2: creativity was in a letter of recommendation, which normally you
Speaker 2: would think those kinds of letters are kept private, but
Speaker 2: Muskowski got behold of it somehow without disclosing how he
Speaker 2: got it, and reprinted the letter without any details of
Speaker 2: who it was to or how he got it. And
Speaker 2: he was the author of one of the most over
Speaker 2: the top articles, the one that appeared behind that cover
Speaker 2: photo of Einstein, and wrote that biography that all of
Speaker 2: Einstein's friends were concerned and appalled about how flattering and
Speaker 2: sympathetic it was. And with ponkar A dead in nineteen eleven,
Speaker 2: it would be very hard to challenge what he had
Speaker 2: to say. So he very clearly was working extremely hard
Speaker 2: to promote Einstein and develop this legend behind him. But
Speaker 2: I haven't been able to come up with any ties.
Speaker 2: Further so, if you or any of the audience have
Speaker 2: any ideas of whether he might have been involved in
Speaker 2: a broader effort to promote Einstein in particular, be interesting
Speaker 2: to run that down. But I pretty much reached a
Speaker 2: dead end on that.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, that's a message out to the audience, guys,
Speaker 1: keep an eye on Moskowski.
Speaker 2: Moskowski. A little bit of background. In nineteen seventeen, the
Speaker 2: British issued the Balfour Declaration, basically expressing their approval and
Speaker 2: support of Jewish colon colonization in Palestine, which was a
Speaker 2: bit presumptuous of them because it was still under Ottoman
Speaker 2: control at the time. But after the war and after
Speaker 2: the Ottoman Empire was defeated, they were able to take
Speaker 2: possession and nineteen eighteen Chime Weitzman founded the Hebrew University
Speaker 2: in Jerusalem. He's a fascinating character. He did a lot
Speaker 2: of very important chemical work for the British. He came
Speaker 2: up with an organic process for generating actone, which was
Speaker 2: kind of new and in chemical engineering at the time,
Speaker 2: and that being a very critical war chemical. So there's
Speaker 2: some thought that some of the British support, in addition
Speaker 2: to the Rothschild angle, that some of it might have
Speaker 2: been paying back the favor of Weitzmann for his contributions. Well.
Speaker 2: In nineteen nineteen, a German Zionist named Blumenfeldt, Kurt Blumenfeldt
Speaker 2: recruited Einstein and got Einstein interested in Zionism. In nineteen twenty,
Speaker 2: Einstein was trying to raise money. This was before he
Speaker 2: got his Nobel Prize winnings, you know, supporting the ex
Speaker 2: wife and kids in expensive. Zurich was kind of tough.
Speaker 2: The hyperinflation was just starting to It hadn't really hit
Speaker 2: full blast, but it was in process. He didn't have
Speaker 2: a lot of money. He solicited a bunch of American
Speaker 2: universities asking for fifteen thousand dollars per lecture, got rebuffed
Speaker 2: and decided to go to Belgium, to Leiden and attend
Speaker 2: the Salve Conference instead. Well, Blumenthal persuaded Einstein to join
Speaker 2: Weizman on a fundraising tour to the US. A lot
Speaker 2: of Einstein's colleagues were very upset. Fritz Haber, who I'll
Speaker 2: talk more about later, fascinating character. He was an assimilated Jew,
Speaker 2: he'd converted to Christianity. He regarded it as akin to
Speaker 2: fraternization with the enemy, hanging out with the you know,
Speaker 2: the British and the Americans. Walter Nernst was upset because
Speaker 2: he was one of the co founders of the Salve Conference,
Speaker 2: but amid the post World War One tensions, you know,
Speaker 2: the Belgians were not inclined to invite any Germans to
Speaker 2: the conference except for Einstein because of his international reputation,
Speaker 2: and he was angry that Einstein backed out and that
Speaker 2: Germany would be unrepresented. Einstein declared that he was annoyed
Speaker 2: by the undignified assimilationist cravings and strivings which he has
Speaker 2: observed in so many of his Jewish friends. So when
Speaker 2: Einstein came to Mamerica with the Zionist Party, over five
Speaker 2: thousand people were there at the docks to greet the party,
Speaker 2: and it turns out they were there to greet the
Speaker 2: Zionists that the Eastern European and Russian Jews in New
Speaker 2: York had. You know, their newspapers had promoted the Zionist mission.
Speaker 2: It was very popular with that element of the Jewish
Speaker 2: culture at the time, and that was what motivated this turnout.
Speaker 2: Well at the non Jewish reporters who were present saw
Speaker 2: this huge crowd and they were asking you who they
Speaker 2: were there for, and you know, people were talking about Weitzman,
Speaker 2: but they'd never heard of Weitzman, but they had heard
Speaker 2: of the Einstein guy. So it got misinterpreted as people
Speaker 2: there to celebrate the scientific achievements of Albert Einstein. So
Speaker 2: kind of a case of mistaken identity. Now there was
Speaker 2: another dynamic at play was kind of fascinating. The more
Speaker 2: establishment assimilated American Jews, the ones running New York Times
Speaker 2: controlling the media, were very skeptical of the Zionist program.
Speaker 2: There was a bit of a rift between the longtime
Speaker 2: establishment Jewish community and the newcomer Russian, Eastern European Jewish community.
Speaker 2: You know, the newcomers were in favor of the Zionist cause.
Speaker 2: The more established assimilationist American Jews were willing to charitably
Speaker 2: support their brethren in Palestine, but they weren't interested in
Speaker 2: promoting the concept of an independent Zionist state in Palestine.
Speaker 2: So that tension played out in the trip and is
Speaker 2: part of why Einstein got promoted. He was promoted to
Speaker 2: distract from the Zionist mission. Walter Isaacson, who wrote a
Speaker 2: biography of Einstein, declared that Einstein's trip to America triggered
Speaker 2: the kind of mass hysteria that would greet the Beatles
Speaker 2: four decades later, and that of course got me thinking
Speaker 2: about some of the speculations about the Beatles and their
Speaker 2: popularity and how that might have been engineered. And when
Speaker 2: I started digging into the question of whether there was
Speaker 2: some engineering involved in the mass and unprecedented publicity Einstein
Speaker 2: got when he arrived in America, I landed at a
Speaker 2: gentleman named Edward Burnez, who's no the father of propaganda
Speaker 2: and public relations. He started off his career as a
Speaker 2: theatrical publicist on Broadway. His first big triumph was in
Speaker 2: nineteen thirteen he promoted a book called or a play
Speaker 2: called Damaged Goods about a man with syphilis who has
Speaker 2: a child and passes on the syphilist child. Know, of course,
Speaker 2: talking about sexually transmitted diseases in Broadway plays was you know,
Speaker 2: beyond the pale at the time, and you know, no
Speaker 2: one would would support the play. He generated or created
Speaker 2: an organization to promote it as an educational exercise, and
Speaker 2: he got support from Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, and you know,
Speaker 2: even a young Franklin delan Or Roosevelt signed on backing
Speaker 2: this and ultimately got the the play produced. That really,
Speaker 2: that starting point in his career kind of illustrates, you know,
Speaker 2: not only his effectiveness at promoting his clients, but how
Speaker 2: he often mixed his political activism as kind of a
Speaker 2: side interest with his publicity projects that he took on.
Speaker 2: When World War One broke out, he started the in
Speaker 2: on the US Committee on Public Information that was the
Speaker 2: American War Propaganda Group, and he declared that the war
Speaker 2: opened the eyes of the intelligent few to the possibilities
Speaker 2: of regimenting the public mind, and that is what he
Speaker 2: set out to do by founding one of the first
Speaker 2: public relations consulting groups in America. Unlike a conventional public
Speaker 2: relations expert, who would you take a reporter out to
Speaker 2: lunch and try to wheedle and cajole him into printing
Speaker 2: a press release or talking with an editor about, Hey,
Speaker 2: why don't you promote my client? For these reasons, his
Speaker 2: approach was to create events and circumstances which newspapers are
Speaker 2: compelled to notice as news. Some of those examples include
Speaker 2: when he got married, he wanted to promote his wedding,
Speaker 2: and instead of just submitting a wedding announcement to The
Speaker 2: New York Times, he got his wife to go to
Speaker 2: the Waldorf Astoria and register for the honeymoon suite under
Speaker 2: her maiden name, which ended up causing a lot of
Speaker 2: pearl clutching and publicity. Over two hundred newspapers reported the scandal,
Speaker 2: and the August Hotel ended up allowing that to happen,
Speaker 2: and what are we? What have we come to? And
Speaker 2: so on and so forth. Uh The Waldorf Astoria was
Speaker 2: one of his clients, and he ended up promoting the
Speaker 2: cause of feminism. Uh you know, he was an early
Speaker 2: supporter of women's rights and feminism, so that was another
Speaker 2: uh politically charged tuffer in. To his credit, he coined
Speaker 2: the or. He started the art of celebrity endorsement. He
Speaker 2: got Calvin Coolidge elected in part because he got a
Speaker 2: bunch of Broadway actors to come to the White House
Speaker 2: for a pancake breakfast. He was instrumental in getting women smoking.
Speaker 2: He got a bunch of women to smoke cigarettes up
Speaker 2: and down New York Smith Avenue on Easter Sunday, which
Speaker 2: got a lot of press. And then when the owner
Speaker 2: of Lucky stro Ike's complained women still weren't smoking enough
Speaker 2: because they didn't like the packaging, Burne said, well, that's easy.
Speaker 2: Changed the color of your packaging. And the owner of
Speaker 2: Lucky strike said, no, we spent a lot on this packaging.
Speaker 2: You changed the colors that women like so Brenez went
Speaker 2: often did that. He got parish fastened designers to adopt
Speaker 2: green as the color of the season, even held a
Speaker 2: green ball to promote the color of green. A bacon
Speaker 2: manufacturer hired him to promote bacon and he came up
Speaker 2: with the idea of setting up a medical educational group
Speaker 2: where doctors promoted the idea of a hearty breakfast. So
Speaker 2: the American eggs and bacon breakfast. That's Brene's handiwork, still
Speaker 2: in operation a century later, promoting sales of bacon.
Speaker 1: Bacon was the throwaway item that used to be now
Speaker 1: used to be the unwanted piece, so they elevated it
Speaker 1: into something that's now ubiquitous. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Absolutely think that was fascinating. Is in his memoirs he
Speaker 2: notes how he was a friend of Jane Whisman, and
Speaker 2: so much of a friend that he claims Whitesman offered
Speaker 2: him the position of foreign Minister for the new Zionist
Speaker 2: state in Palestine when it was would be founded. And
Speaker 2: when you look into the records, there's no There are
Speaker 2: contemporary records that say he consulted with Whitesmen, but there's
Speaker 2: no record I was able to find on what he
Speaker 2: consulted about with Whitesman. So my speculation is he may
Speaker 2: well have been involved in the publicity tour. Whether he
Speaker 2: was or not, it was clearly an example of the
Speaker 2: kind of events and circumstances publicity that was his hallmark.
Speaker 2: And he also commented the conscious and intelligent manipulation of
Speaker 2: the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an
Speaker 2: important element in democratics society. Those who manipulate this unseen
Speaker 2: mechanism constitute the ruling power of the country. So very prescient.
Speaker 2: He's well worth studying, and his book Propaganda is a
Speaker 2: very short and easy read. I recommend it. So I
Speaker 2: want to go ahead and kind of speed up a
Speaker 2: bit on the publicity that was.
Speaker 1: At just a sec Hans. We are at the one
Speaker 1: hour mark. You're on slide twenty six. You have sixty
Speaker 1: five slides. Do you want to break this into two
Speaker 1: or do you want to just hurry up and make
Speaker 1: it through and a half an hour? What do you
Speaker 1: leave the choice up to you?
Speaker 3: We'll probably have to break it up. Okay, let's do that.
Speaker 3: Let's just plan to meet sometime early in June. So
Speaker 3: this will be part one. Where can people find kinda
Speaker 3: to catch up with your stuff? I know website substack.
Speaker 3: Can you mention those?
Speaker 2: Yeah, my substack website at Ether's dot substack dot com.
Speaker 2: My fields and Energy substack. This is basically a summary
Speaker 2: of a number of posts I've done over the last
Speaker 2: six months or so.
Speaker 1: Gotcha? So these you can kind of see all of
Speaker 1: the articles here. You can see this Fields and Energy,
Speaker 1: a lot of articles, a lot of different postings. And
Speaker 1: can you talk about what's the Society for Post Quantum Research?
Speaker 1: Can you talk about that?
Speaker 2: That is a group that I set up to kind
Speaker 2: of provide a commercial basis for my work. The slide
Speaker 2: or the post that you're sharing right now. I mentored
Speaker 2: a high school student to do quantum entanglement for his
Speaker 2: high school science project. What he did was take a
Speaker 2: radioactive substance, sodium twenty two, that emits positrons basically antimatter
Speaker 2: versions of electrons, and they immediately annihilate and they create
Speaker 2: an entangled pair of gamma rays, and he was able
Speaker 2: to set up a pair of Geiger tubes to measure
Speaker 2: those and to count the number of coincidences and demonstrate
Speaker 2: that there was a statistically improbable number of coincidences that
Speaker 2: demonstrated that quantum entanglement was happening in the system. So
Speaker 2: it's really a very cool little experiment he was able
Speaker 2: to pull together because normally the laboratory equipment to do
Speaker 2: any sort of experiment with quantum entanglement is at least
Speaker 2: thirty to fifty thousand dollars if you want to look
Speaker 2: at single photon measurements. But if those photons are gamma
Speaker 2: ray photons, then you can use a Geiger counter tube.
Speaker 2: It's not all that sensitive, but you're able to do
Speaker 2: an enough you'll get enough data to get a meaningful
Speaker 2: result off of it. It's based on, or was inspired by,
Speaker 2: a Scientific American article by it's listed there. I think
Speaker 2: it was George Musser in a few years ago. And yeah,
Speaker 2: he's the author of that book Spooky Action at a Distance,
Speaker 2: which I would recommend. It's a good book if you
Speaker 2: want to understand how quantum entanglement works from a layman's perspective.
Speaker 2: But he described this experiment and we unfortunately the equipment
Speaker 2: that he used is no longer available, so we had
Speaker 2: to cobble together a set of equipment that Corbyn was
Speaker 2: able to put together for his science project.
Speaker 1: Gotcha, that's so you've got a sub stack. You have
Speaker 1: your website which is SPQR. Right, that's the Society for
Speaker 1: Post Quantum Research. Why is it post quantum?
Speaker 2: I don't understand that well, because I think we're going
Speaker 2: to be moving into a new realm of quantum physics.
Speaker 2: That term has been used before to denote the possibilities
Speaker 2: of quantum computing. It's thought that if we had a
Speaker 2: quantum computer, it would be able to solve all sorts
Speaker 2: of previously intractable problems, like factorization of prime numbers, which
Speaker 2: is one of the key ideas behind cryptography. I'm kind
Speaker 2: of skeptical about quantum computing, particularly when you consider that
Speaker 2: the biggest number that has been successfully factorized using quantum
Speaker 2: computing is fifteen. So I think there's a long way
Speaker 2: to go there, and a little skeptical about some of
Speaker 2: the premises underlying quantum computing. But I think that the
Speaker 2: fields and energy approach to electromagnetism and quantum mechanics could
Speaker 2: allow us to leap frog some of those limitations. And
Speaker 2: why I set up the Society for Post Quantum Research
Speaker 2: and kind of hearkening back to a more classical motif
Speaker 2: in physics.
Speaker 1: And Johnny Sumatra mentions Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of
Speaker 1: these kind of science experts that's promoted. It's interesting, so
Speaker 1: Einstein could be in the veila. There's another guy, the
Speaker 1: science guy or whatever, like he was an actor before
Speaker 1: he became the science guy. Then he got promoted and
Speaker 1: he's totally He has some interesting political opinions. I forgot
Speaker 1: his name, Bill, not the science guy.
Speaker 2: That's yes, well, and that's another feature. The people who
Speaker 2: get promoted and get publicity are the ones who are
Speaker 2: on message with what you know. The people who control
Speaker 2: that media want you to hear. So it's very tough
Speaker 2: to get independent views, and I think podcasts like yours
Speaker 2: are an important element of letting people hear independent perspectives
Speaker 2: on things.
Speaker 1: I agree with you, you know, that's kind of want
Speaker 1: to do what I do. But Hans, thanks so much
Speaker 1: for your time. I tried to keep up with you.
Speaker 1: Really interesting. I didn't know a lot of that history
Speaker 1: about Einstein, and they never talked about him in the
Speaker 1: context of other physics luminaries. You know, it's just him,
Speaker 1: which I think is interesting in itself.
Speaker 2: Well, he's kind of a physics icon, but you know,
Speaker 2: it's a mythology that has been built up around him.
Speaker 2: And it's very telling that when you know there was
Speaker 2: an existential threat and America was busy working on the
Speaker 2: Manhattan Project, Einstein was not invited to participate, and that
Speaker 2: really kind of shows you the attitude that the physics
Speaker 2: community had of Einstein even then, that they were quite
Speaker 2: content for him to stay, you know, puttering and theorizing,
Speaker 2: you know, at Princeton instead of being involved. There's the
Speaker 2: conventional wisdom is he had this brilliant youth where he
Speaker 2: came up with relativity and probably the last significant thing
Speaker 2: he did was the Bow's Einstein statistics, and he just
Speaker 2: couldn't keep up with the creative new ideas and quantum mechanics,
Speaker 2: and you know, even his EPR paper, well that was
Speaker 2: just the you know, the the last cry of the
Speaker 2: angry old man arguing that the Copenhagen interpretationists needed to
Speaker 2: get off his lawn. You know, he really wasn't taken seriously.
Speaker 2: And my perspective, is i'll get into the next time,
Speaker 2: is that he came to realize that his approach to relativity,
Speaker 2: focusing on observables was wrong, and that a you know,
Speaker 2: the causal connectedness of reality was very important. That God
Speaker 2: didn't play Guy didn't play dice with the universe, and
Speaker 2: it's important a lot of people's conceptions of quantum mechanics.
Speaker 2: They'll focus on things like Schrodinger's cat being the live
Speaker 2: and dead until you open the box and look in,
Speaker 2: or this concept of spooky action at a distance. And
Speaker 2: both of those concepts were reductio ad absurdums that were
Speaker 2: invented by Schrodinger in Einstein, respectively, to show how ludicrous
Speaker 2: the conventional interpretation was. So we'll get to that here
Speaker 2: in part two.
Speaker 1: Cool and Johnny writes amazing broadcast. Gents, sub to Hans
Speaker 1: at substec. Now, Johnny, thanks for listening. He's listening on
Speaker 1: X so you can least see these live on X two.
Speaker 1: I'm now streaming there or rumble. And also I will
Speaker 1: put a link to Hans's substacks, so people check that
Speaker 1: out Fields and Energy, and then also our earlier conversation
Speaker 1: we had last month in April about the wives of
Speaker 1: Heart of modern day reimagining of the scopes monkey Trill
Speaker 1: check that out too. I'll put a link in the
Speaker 1: show notes for this, and then we'll I'll start put
Speaker 1: something together for June and we can go back into
Speaker 1: the rest of these slides. So it's Hans G. Shaantson
Speaker 1: S C, H A N t Z. And the title
Speaker 1: for the talk today was Einstein, Relativity and Modern Physics
Speaker 1: Thanks so much.
Speaker 2: For your time. Sure, thank you for having me on.
Speaker 1: Are cool? Stay there, Stay there all right, I just
Speaker 1: have to