[lit-ideas] Re: Einstein -Scene 2

  • From: Michael Chase <goya@xxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 17:29:03 +0100


Le 1 nov. 05, à 14:39, Andy Amago a écrit :

[Original Message]
From: Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 11/1/2005 12:47:58 AM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Einstein -Scene 2

SCENE II

Swiss Patent Office. Night.

EINSTEIN: And so I told him, either the cat is dead [pulling
deeply on joint] ...

MAN: Yeah?

EINSTEIN: [exhaling a huge cloud of smoke] Oh that was too-oo
much. [Einstein coughs and doubles up coughing]

MAN: Take it easy, dude. Bogart is still an infant.

EINSTEIN: Whew yeah.

[silence as the smoke cloud settles around them]

MAN: You bring your violin?

EINSTEIN: Left it.

[Knock at the door. Man's voice.]

SECOND MAN: Is this Dr. Frankenstein's office?

MAN: Four doors down on the left.

SECOND MAN: Thank you.

MAN: So, how's things with Mileva?

EINSTEIN: She's good. I have a feeling, you know, that she might
be the one.

MAN: What one?

EINSTEIN: THE one. The mate. Mrs. Genius.

MAN: That's cool.

EINSTEIN: She's the best thing that ever came out of the Swiss
Federal Institute of  Technology. Just the other day we were
watching the bong water...

MAN: The what?

EINSTEIN: The bong water. You know that water pipe that Dr. Stark
Von Roten-Augen built?

MAN: Oh yeah, that
Einzelne-Maßeinheit-Rauchenden-Schlauch-des-Hauchs thing?

EINSTEIN: The very same.

MAN: Let me get this straight. You were watching bong water?

EINSTEIN: It's got these little bits of resin and ash in it that
swirl around and around.

MAN: You guys must have been ripped.

EINSTEIN: We were. Anyway we're watching the bong water, and
Mileva says to me, she says "Albert, this is Brownian movement."
And I say, "like yeah? And she says, "Well if the motion of the
molecules of the bong water makes them strike the suspended
molecules of the resin in a random way, there must be a
mathematical solution to the description of their motion that can
be included into normal kinetic theory."



This caricaturization captures the type of conversation Outsider Einstein
would have had with his wife and the people in his circle. He had no room
in his life for anything other than physics.

M.C. Andy, I'm afraid your ignorance is showing. At least from the time he settled in the States in the early thirties, Einstein was extremely active in radical politics. He fought against racism, agitated for control of nuclear arms, protested against McCarthyism. He turned down the presidency of Israel because of injustices committed against the Palestinians. He was friends with Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Dubois (this was one main reason why J. Edgar Hoover kept him under surveillance for the last 20 years of his life), agitated on behalf of the members of the Lincoln Brigade after the Spanish Civil War, joined the Civli Rights Congress, spoke out in favor of the Rosenbergs, became co-chair of the American Crusade to End Lynching, spoke on racism in an address to the primarily black student body at Lincoln University in 1946 (he almost always turned down requests to address Ivy League campuses) where he said, among other things

"My trip to this institution was on behalf of a worthwhile cause. There is separation of colored people from white people in the United States. That separation [segregation] is not a disease of colored people. It is a disease of white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it"

Etc., etc. There's lots of literature on Einstein's political activism, but I know it would be a waste of time citing titles for Andy.

        



Michael Chase
(goya@xxxxxxxxxxx)
CNRS UPR 76
7, rue Guy Moquet
Villejuif 94801
France


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