> mark, of all people, ought not to give any kind of comfort to the
> enemy.
I didn't think I was. Well, it was exactly Newton's appearances he was saving. Einstein's mission was not to overthrow classical mechanics; it was the conservative one of rescuing Newton from Michelson-Morley. The need to do so flowed from his own early work on Brownian motion, to which you refer; in each case he was bent on preserving the Newtonian-Galilean synthesis. He was no closet radical, in this anyway (if that's what you are suggesting). He was an arch-conservative. The fact that after he rejected it, calling it his 'greatest blunder', the cosmological constant turned out to be the clue to perhaps the single greatest discovery in the history of physics: that the universe is expanding, and began with a spacetime singularity - is one of the interesting oddities of the last century's cosmological revolution.
Einstein's meeting with Lemaitre must have been a dramatic occasion, no?
Mark Jones http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList