> Einstein was not the “father of the atomic bomb” as is sometimes still claimed, based on his famous equation, E=mc2, or “Energy equals mass times velocity squared.” His equation itself wasn’t a breakthrough, but it did explain what was going on. Einstein’s theory behind the equation holds that energy and mass are essentially the same thing. In splitting atoms —fission—the energy in their mass is released, producing enormous power.
More than that, the equation is not E= mc^2 except when we are talking about particles with rest mass and are not moving. The equation is really E^2 = (pc)^2 + (mc^2)^2. For example, the second term vanishes for photons without rest mass. I agree that the equation weren't that of a breakthrough in itself until we think about the negative solutions which will lead Dirac to the path of anti-matter.
What Einstein did do for the Atomic Bomb was to co-sign Leo Szilard's letter which got the attention of President Eisenhower and kick-started the Manhattan Project.
It raised a flicker of polite interest that died, from your own link:
The Advisory Committee on Uranium was the beginning of the US government's effort to develop an atomic bomb, but it did not vigorously pursue the development of a weapon.
What did move the needle, again from your link:
The Frisch–Peierls memorandum and the British Maud Reports eventually prompted Roosevelt to authorize a full-scale development effort in January 1942.
In essence, the letter from Einstein did not start the Manhatten Project, it was instead the direct efforts and in person meetings of Oliphant:
People are usually using E=mc^2 equation because it is simpler. Introducing the concept of relativistic mass and Lorenz transformation to get the rest mass (what most people think of mass) will be less intuitive for the common culture.
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.
> 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.
I suspect many scientists are not especially rational outside their field of study. Probably worse, being scientific authorities can make them overconfident.
> 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.
This framing is interesting considering how HN is such an IQ-worshipping forum: The context is the most pig-headed, blatant racism imaginable—doesn’t even try to rationalize it, just “Jewish Physics”—and then we pivot to how these exalted rational people (translation: physics-smart specifically) must clearly be more rational than “less rational people” (average people?) and in turn how racist they (less rational people) must be. So we went from blatant racism exhibited by physicists to inferring how these scientists must be leagues better than “less rational people” in terms of racial tolerance or rationality with regards to race (if race is even a thing).
Except the only thing we have in front of us is racism expressed by physicists. Not commoner racism.
So what grounds do we have to expect “less rational people” to be more or less racist than these exalted scientists? Absolutely nothing.
Imagine if a gaggle of biologists in Antarctica committed mass murder of another group of scientists and smeared their blood in some Satanic ritual. I bet the conclusion would be to speculate about how less rational people would be even more inhumane and cruel if they had to live through an Antarctic winter or two? Absolutely bonkers.
Scientists are not more rational people than $anyone_else. And being more or less rational does not make one any less capable of emotions, hatred, evil, or all sorts of other bad things.
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.
Don't dismiss the cultural ubiquity in the 20th century of eugenics, like phrenology and misapplication of Darwin's works just because we know it to be pseudoscience now and even then, it's origins in American slavery justification and being taken up by Germany, doesn't mean it didn't give a horrible false authority to all kinds of horrors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-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
This feels like a trollish way of making a point about "PC" culture. Linus Torvalds is hardly a beacon of said culture already and it's going just fine
This is flat-out wrong. Even Hans Reiser himself (pre-murder) had essentially given up on ReiserFS 3 and had been saying "just wait ReiserFS 4, which will fix all the problems" in response to bug reports and such for ReiserFS 3, which mostly went unfixed.
Some development and maintenance has happened after Hans Reiser's conviction, such as enabling ReiserFS to use more than one core.
However, some problems like y2038-compatibility or 1 second date resolution are not even easy to fix without changing the on-disk format. It's a right pain, y2038 in particular. And ReiserFS doesn't actually have a lot of usage, partly due to this and other problems, so why bother going through a difficult and painful migration?
It's slated for removal now due to the y2038 issue, but even with that the removal of ReiserFS is conditioned on "no one really objects and/or brings a good use case to front", similar to the Itanium removal.
It's more than likely that ReiserFS would have been in the same state if Hans Reiser has died in a sudden accident before he killed his wife.
> But the danger became a reality when on April 30, 1933, Nazi assassins killed Theodor Lessing, a controversial German-Jewish philosopher living as a refugee in Czechoslovakia. He was shot and died the next day. There had been a price on Lessing’s head, and the killers were honored in Germany. Lessing’s photo had also been published with the caption “Not yet hanged.”
Readit News
More than that, the equation is not E= mc^2 except when we are talking about particles with rest mass and are not moving. The equation is really E^2 = (pc)^2 + (mc^2)^2. For example, the second term vanishes for photons without rest mass. I agree that the equation weren't that of a breakthrough in itself until we think about the negative solutions which will lead Dirac to the path of anti-matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szilard_lette...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Oliphant#Manhattan_Projec...
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Unless 'm' is the relativistic mass. Which, yes, is a perfectly valid and useful concept. See also this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425252
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https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-plot-against-e...
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.
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.
This framing is interesting considering how HN is such an IQ-worshipping forum: The context is the most pig-headed, blatant racism imaginable—doesn’t even try to rationalize it, just “Jewish Physics”—and then we pivot to how these exalted rational people (translation: physics-smart specifically) must clearly be more rational than “less rational people” (average people?) and in turn how racist they (less rational people) must be. So we went from blatant racism exhibited by physicists to inferring how these scientists must be leagues better than “less rational people” in terms of racial tolerance or rationality with regards to race (if race is even a thing).
Except the only thing we have in front of us is racism expressed by physicists. Not commoner racism.
So what grounds do we have to expect “less rational people” to be more or less racist than these exalted scientists? Absolutely nothing.
Imagine if a gaggle of biologists in Antarctica committed mass murder of another group of scientists and smeared their blood in some Satanic ritual. I bet the conclusion would be to speculate about how less rational people would be even more inhumane and cruel if they had to live through an Antarctic winter or two? Absolutely bonkers.
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.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-baseball-player-t...
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
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.
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
In any case they didn't remove it because of the murder.
Some development and maintenance has happened after Hans Reiser's conviction, such as enabling ReiserFS to use more than one core.
However, some problems like y2038-compatibility or 1 second date resolution are not even easy to fix without changing the on-disk format. It's a right pain, y2038 in particular. And ReiserFS doesn't actually have a lot of usage, partly due to this and other problems, so why bother going through a difficult and painful migration?
It's slated for removal now due to the y2038 issue, but even with that the removal of ReiserFS is conditioned on "no one really objects and/or brings a good use case to front", similar to the Itanium removal.
It's more than likely that ReiserFS would have been in the same state if Hans Reiser has died in a sudden accident before he killed his wife.
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History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
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