FROM A BRILLIANT E-PAL ON “OBAMA VS. EINSTEIN” …PLEASE READ
On February 7th I posted and interesting column on Obama and Einstein…..see below. Here is a response from a brilliant and observant e-pal…..
Dear Ruth,
Mr. Tipler is wrong, and his claim of understanding the theory of relativity is disproved by everything he writes. The theory of relativity is not a special case of Newtonian physics. It’s based on the postulate that the speed of light in vacuum is absolute. This postulate does not follow from Newtonian physics or from anything else that was known before Einstein. Actually, the exact opposite is true: the Newtonian laws are a special case of the relativistic physics when the velocities involved are small enough to make the relativistic effects negligible. Quantum mechanics does not follow from Newtonian mechanics. It has brought us the knowledge of things like wave-particle duality and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle that cannot be even described in the classical terms.
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However, ignorance of physics is not Mr. Tipler’s worst sin. Mr. Obama should not be criticized for the contents of his articles on the subject. Mr. Obama should be criticized for writing on the subject regardless of what he writes. Why? Because, while his qualification for the presidency of the United States remain unclear, his lack of qualifications for writing anything meaningful about any science should be perfectly clear to everyone who bothered to learn the basic facts about the man currently occupying the Oval Office.
He is a professional community organizer — to the extent that community organizing can be considered a profession. I have no idea how he organized his community, although I have a pretty good idea against whom. However, his opinion on Einstein’s work is no more meaningful than his attempt to perform a root canal or an appendectomy would be. The farther away the subject is from community organizing, the more Mr. Obama is out of his depth. His year in the White House has demonstrated this beyond doubt.
And while I am unable to understand Mr. Obama’s motives in venturing so far from the area of his expertise, I am familiar with other similar ventures. As a Soviet émigré, I vividly remember the quotation from V. I. Lenin that was prominently displayed above every building that housed any institution even remotely related to physics. It said, “The electron is as inexhaustible as the atom†and was taken from Lenin’s work devoted, in part, to the criticism of the contemporary physics (sounds familiar?). It reflected on the then recent discovery that atoms, contrary to their name, were not indivisible, but built from smaller parts. The sentence hinted that the electron one day will be disassembled even further, and whatever parts it was made of could be divided ad infinitum. From today’s perspective, this is patently absurd. Unbeknownst to him, Lenin was displaying a kitchen level of understanding of physics by thinking of subatomic particles as subjects to Newtonian mechanics. Today we know that their nature lies far beyond our everyday experience and can only be understood via a complex mathematical apparatus. But what does it matter when our current administration so vividly illustrates another Lenin’s thesis: Every kitchen maid must be able to administer state affairs?
Take another example: Iosif Stalin, a Georgian who had no education except for a few years at a provincial seminary (roughly equivalent to our fifth grade), from which he either dropped out or was expelled, and who spoke Russian with the Georgian accent of such intensity that, compared to him, the bearer of the most intense Texan twang ever registered would effortlessly qualify for a position of a leading announcer at the BBC — why, at the height of his power, did he feel compelled to author a voluminous work on linguistics? Why did he allow his minions to glorify him as the leader in every scientific field known to humankind — as long as that field, like genetics, cybernetics, the theory of relativity, and quite a few others, was not officially proclaimed a reactionary pseudo-science maliciously invented by the evil imperialists with the sole purpose of distracting their working class from its struggle?
The theory of relativity, by the way, was not accepted by the Naturfilosofers from the NKVD because one of its fundamental results (expressed in the well known equation E=mc2) proved that energy was a form of matter, which was deemed to be in contradiction with Lenin’s definition of matter: the objective reality which is given to us in sensation. Although this definition is essentially meaningless, the Politburo had chosen to take it literally: if you can’t see it, or touch it, or smell it, or, at the very least, drink it, it’s not matter.
Another piece of Lenin’s eternal wisdom inevitably decorated every power plant in the country: Socialism is the Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country. Don’t waste too much time trying to make sense out of it. Instead, try to see how perfectly it applies to us. Mr. Obama is, without doubt, a Socialist, and his dream is to turn this country into yet another failed Third World Socialist experiment. Fortunately for him, this country has been fully electrificated long before his time. Therefore, all that remains is to institute the Soviet power, to turn the USA into the USSA.
By the time he is done with his reforms, the Soviet power may very well be our last hope.
referenced column….
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2010/02/07/obama-versus-einstein-mustread/
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/obama-vs-einstein/Â
By Frank J. Tipler :According to the Washington Post [1], David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s senior advisor, said that the president worked with “[Harvard professor] Laurence Tribe on a paper on the legal implications of Einstein’s theory of relativity.†I’ve read that paper, “The Curvature of Constitutional Space.†It’s complete nonsense. It shows no understanding of Einstein’s theory of relativity, or of the relationship between relativity theory and Newton’s theory……
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