Albert Einstein Quotes
All our scientific progress is like an axe in the hands of a madman.
Einstein saw the war as madness but what distressed him most was that his friend and colleague, Fritz Haber, to help the war effort developed poison chlorine gas as a weapon which killed and maimed hundreds of thousands. He was a devoted pacifist thereafter. It took an even greater madman like Adolf Hitler and his Nazis to reach the mental point where he recommended to President Roosevelt that scientists develop an atomic bomb.
Albert Einstein, 1879-1955, Nobel laureate in Physics, Letter from Germany to a friend during the First World War
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His wife also had a Doctorate in Chemistry—the 2nd woman to achieve that in Germany—and she was distraught that he had been the leading scientist developing not only the poison gas which the Germans introduced in WWI, but he also developed the tactics of use and personally went to the battlefield and supervised the first major gas attacks. This was much against the ethical value of most scientists and Jewish ethics in particular. Haber had been a close colleague of Albert Einstein and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and while Einstein was trying to get scientists to sign a petition against the war, Haber was developing the first weapon of mass destruction. After Haber gave this response to his wife, we left to go to the front to supervise another major gas attack. His wife committed suicide. Haber, while a German national hero to militaristic Germany, never again had the kind of pre-war relationship that existed with Einstein and many other fellow scientists.
He was warning the majority and blaming them for what was to happen. Ironically, at the end of the First World War, Germany was so harshly treated because the allies felt that the Germans had been aforewarned not only by others but by opposition Germans as well.
Almost every use of war weapons of mass destruction in history have been justified with the rationale that the total casualties would be reduced. It sometimes has been such as with the use of the atomic bomb in WWII but usually it has not. The same argument was made incidentally by Dr. Gattling, the inventor of the machine gun. In WWI far more men were killed by machine gun fire than poison gas.
The President was also getting ominous news from England. See {41111}
Ellsworth was pleading for resolving the slavery issue then.
This declaration, drafted by Russell and Einstein two days before Einstein’s death was signed by a number of other prominent scientists.
One fascinating thing about this quotation is the date. It would be the next 150 years where the great scientific leaps would take place. There was no inkling of computers or nuclear weapons.
There was much political Japanese opposition to attacking the United States. Most military judgments were that Japan could not win such a war. The militarist hawks in the Japanese leadership argued that while Japan might not be able to defeat the U. S., Japan could not be defeated in the Pacific. And the U. S. would not spend the money to rebuild their navy of the Japanese could destroy most of the capital ships with surprise attack. Therefore starting a war might provide the opportunity to negotiate for more favorable terms and less pressure, boycotting, and castigation of Japan by the United States and they could come out with control of a number of lands of the Pacific. However, the Naval Chief of Staff told the Emperor that war ight be inevitable as America or Great Britain might attack one of the Japanese held territories and force Japan into war. Later, the Japanese conservatives and Militarist hawks, were able to purge opponents of war from the Cabinet, and when they had control of the government, convinced the Emperor to flip flop, and started WWII with the Attack on Pearl Harbor.
The Scientific Project that developed the Atomic Bomb. After the development of the atomic bomb there were great pressures on the involved scientists to downplay the dangers of nuclear weapons development. The weapons developer arm of the government was anxious not to frighten the public which might call for more oversight or even limitation of development and testing. Equally important was the scientists themselves who understood the forces that they had unleashed and were worried that if the public realized the worst of the possibilities, science and scientific research itself might be in jeopardy from a new Luddite reaction. Oppenheimer urged candor with the public. Most scientists took his advice but the Atomic Energy Commission had become politicized and when Oppenheimer went public with his and others scientific concerns they punished him by calling him a security risk and withdrawing his clearance thus cutting him off from new developments and discrediting him and his views at the same time.
Bryan participated as a prosecutor in the infamous Scopes Trial in Tennessee where a school teacher was convicted of a crime for discussing the idea of evolution in a high school classroom. He had written this for his summary to the jury, but the summaries were dispensed with when it was obvious that Scopes would be convicted. He had admitted to breaking the law, but the law itself was on trial.
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest physicists of all time. Einstein is known for developing the theory of relativity, but he also made important contributions to the development of the theory of quantum mechanics. Relativity and quantum mechanics are together the two pillars of modern physics. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which arises from relativity theory, has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation". His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. His intellectual achievements and originality resulted in "Einstein" becoming synonymous with "genius".
