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What are you reading? March 31, 2023 [1]

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Date: 2023-03-31  

In WAYR?, I note what I’m reading and comment...you note what you are reading and comment. Occasionally, I may add a section or a link related to books…The Kindle is misplaced yet again...there’s a good chance that it’s in an obvious place that I can’t remember.

Also, I am used to participating in the comments but was not able to do so last week because of computer issues...I have applied a temporary fix...which will become a permanent one in another week or two. My apologies.

I am reading:

Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson Basically covered the 2-3 years from the General Theory of Relativity to Einstein’s Nobel Prize in 1921 (awarded in 1922); a period which Isaacson writes that Einstein had “suddenly achieved superstar status as the most internationally celebrated scientist since the lightning-tamer Benjamin Franklin was paraded through the streets of Paris...” (I disagree with Isaacson...by the time Einstein won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921, Einstein’s good friend Marie Curie had already won Nobel Prizes for Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911) and her love life became a bit of a scandal).

It was during this period, after the end of the First World War, that Einstein first became deeply politically active, in large part, because of rising anti-Semitism in Germany and, chiefly, because of the assassination of his father’s one-time business competitor and his personal friend, the German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, in 1922.

Indirectly, driven by popular misunderstandings rather than a fealty of Einstein’s thinking, relativity became associated with a new relativism in morality and art and politics. There was less faith in absolutes, not only of time and space, but also of truth and morality… Einstein would have been, and later was, appalled by the conflation of relativity with relativism. As noted, he had considered calling his theory “invariance,” because the physical laws of combined spacetime, according to his theory, were indeed invariant rather than relative.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/31/2160797/-What-are-you-reading-March-31-2023

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