These passages are embarrassing. Lenin as having "realistic" judgment? No one who promotes Josef Stalin to a high position can be accused of having "realistic judgment.
H.A. Lorenz as "preferring theory to fact"? Nobody sane would accuse Lorenz and the other physicists of 1890-1920 as preferring theory to fact--they knew that the facts required new theories, and were extremely inventive in trying out different approaches. Lorenz was not Einstein, but who was?
"[N]o ether... [of] interest to physicists"? Anyone who has seen enough of QED to know what a vacuum diagram is, or who has contemplated the cosmological constant, could possibly say such a thing...
Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, p. 261: "In Russian intellectual circles the influence of the revolution in physics and philosophy was already such in 1908 that Lenin felt impelled to write a large book against Ernst Mach, whose influence on the Bolsheviks he regarded as both serious and deleterious: Materialism and Emperiocriticism. Whatever we think of Lenin's judgments on science, his assessment of political realities was highly realistic."
Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, p. 249: "It will not surprise readers familiar with the history of science that Lorentz preferred theory to fact, and therefore attempted to explain away the Michelson-Morley experiment, and thus to save that ether which was considered the 'fulcrum of modern physics', by an extraordinary piece of theoretical acrobatics that was to trun him into 'the John the Baptist of relativity'. Suppose that time and space could be pulled slightly apart.... Then the contraction of Michelson-Morley's apparatus might have concealed the stationariness of the ether. This supposition, it is argued, was very close indeed to Einstein's special theory of relativity, but the point about Lorentz and his contemporaries was that they broke the egg of traditional physics in a desperate attempt to maintain it intact, whereas Einstein, who had been a child when Michelson and Morley came to their surprising conclusion, was prepared simply to abandon the ancient beliefs. There was no absolute motion. There was no ether, or if there was it was of no interest to physicists..."
Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War...
Posted by DeLong at August 18, 2002 01:39 PM | Trackback