''..But conspiracy theories and anti-scientific quackery in America today
are nothing compared with what raged in Central Europe in the years
between the two world wars. That overlapped with some of the great
scientific discoveries of the modern era, and a disproportionate share
of that work was done in the universities and laboratories of Central
Europe. As we learn from Fritz Stern in Einstein’s German World,
the great men of science of this era—Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Paul
Ehrlich and Fritz Haber in the first echelon—were by and large outsiders
to the world of politics. For the most part they were proud of the
accomplishments of the Wilhelmine era, but their pride focused more on
their universities and research institutes and less on the Kaiser. In
the face of a storm of political craziness, xenophobia and hysteria,
they had remarkably similar advice to dispense to their students and to
society in general: keep your own counsel and don’t get caught up in the tumult of mobs and the delusion of conspiracy theorists..''
0 comments:
Post a Comment