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On 2017-08-19 14:26, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:>
https://colddarkstars.wordpress.com/2017/08/18/the-tragedy-of-the-socialist-atomic-bomb/
This article is remarkably inaccurate historically and misleading in
regards to the dispositions of "scientists" which it talks about in
sweeping general terms that, if applied to any other identifiable social
entity (other than class) would be roundly denounced. And in particular
it is absolutely slanderous toward Albert Einstein. The sad part is that
this author is a leftist who I would probably agree with on almost any
given political issue, but through his self-righteousness he displays
his ignorance of the history of physics to the point that I find it
embarrassing to have to address it. If he had spent two minutes checking
out each of his historical "facts" then I would not need to be writing
this.
Yet, the biggest socialist name behind the
atomic bomb was Einstein.
This has got to be one of the greatest fallacies prevalent in popular
culture based on both historical and scientific ignorance. I guess its
prevalence can explain why a physics student could repeat it though he
absolutely should have known better. Einstein had absolutely nothing to
do with the development of the atomic bomb (or atomic energy for that
matter); more on this below. The tiny grain of truth in such a statement
is that Einstein discovered the equivalence between mass and energy,
given by the well known equation (well known only because it's the
simplest of his equations to write down) E=Mc^2. This was just one
direct consequence of the special theory of relativity, which he
proposed long long before WWII (actually long before WWI) and before
anyone had the slightest idea about nuclear fission. And if Einstein
hadn't written it, unquestionably it would have been written soon
thereafter by other contemporaries of Einstein developing what Einstein
would name the theory of relativity, such as Henri Poincare or Hendrik
Lorentz (both of whom had already written the "Lorentz transforms," the
kernel of the theory of special relativity).
Einstein's work was great, but had nothing at all to do with nuclear
fission. It simply stated that when energy is given off by a reaction,
such as burning gasoline, a tiny amount of mass is lost which accounts
for that energy according to that famous equation. And in the other
direction, it allowed nuclear scientists to calculate the energy that
would be produced if the particles in an atomic nucleus were
reconfigured into different nuclei by subtracting the resulting mass
from the original mass, multiplied by that huge number c^2.
According to relativity, the fissioning of
an Uranium-235 nucleus releases high energy
particles and heat.
Wrong. Relativity says nothing about the uranium nucleus or fission
(which was unknown until decades after the discovery of the theory of
relativity). It simply supplied the equation through which you could
compute the kinetic energy liberated by such a process by comparing the
masses of the uranium and its fission products.
Yet, the second world war forced Einstein to
apply the laws that regulate the starry night
to the science of human massacre.
The same man that had a thousand page FBI file.
was now an acolyte of the cult of nuclear death.
Although the author probably believes these popular fictions, I cannot
think of a more slanderous statement that could be made against the
great scientist! Of course Einstein never applied any of his expertise
to the "science of human massacre" or joined the "cult of nuclear
death," if only because he was NOT ALLOWED to work on the Manhattan
project (which first developed the atom bomb). Einstein continued on as
a theoretical physicist especially in the development of quantum
mechanics, very abstract work with no connections to anything as
specific as a uranium atom let alone making a bomb with it. It wasn't
until the 1930's I believe that nuclear fission was discovered and the
possibility of a chain reaction predicted and its energy yield
calculated, at which point warmakers in America and Germany suddenly
became very interested.
But beyond Einstein, the following narrative greatly distorts the
history of the atom bomb and scientists associated with it:
The atomic bomb had domesticated the brightest
minds of the world into becoming the mercenaries
and slaves of presidents and politburos.
This can only be a reference to scientists' role in the Manhattan
project. Now we can start actually talking about politics and the
