[lbo-talk] Picasso and Einstein1

moominek at aol.com moominek at aol.com
Mon Nov 3 01:14:09 PST 2008


Chuck wrote


>Many of these guys came here in the 1930s (right along with
>the architects, designers, writers, filmakers, painters, musicians and
>philosophers) and helped develop the US military industrial complex,
>nuclear weapons of course, but also helped bring US math and science
>higher education up to speed.

Yes, Konrad Wachsmann had leftist ideas to the end of his live and spoke them out, he opposed war and arms race politically, but constructed hangars for the B-52. Cultural history has to be paid too.

But that's not the point here: So to say I'm coming from the other side of the story. I tried some times to state in the necessary clear and explicit way seemingly convincing intuitive concepts - and that way some of these concepts came out to be not so convincing at all. To take a more impressive example: Einstein only afterwords learned, that in his theory of general relativity space and time are not completly dynamized, that there remained some "a priori" - and had to, to make scientific experience possible. (Compare: Horst-Heino v. Borzeszkowski and Renate Wahsner: Mach’s Principle and the Dualism of Space-Time and Matter; http://redshift.vif.com/BookBlurbs/kharagpurmach.htm)

The problems of convincing new concepts can be seen in the case von Ludwig Boltzmanns H-theorem on the irreversibilty of processes in closed systems, objected by Lohschmitdt because of the time-symmetry of newtonian mechanics, the objection proved by Henri Poincare, the mathematician. The physicist Einstein followed Boltzmann, not Poincare and Ernst Zermelo, and only a little later the mathematicians (Caratheodory, based on Lebesgue) proved, that he was right: The proof of Poincare misses the statistical nature of Boltzmanns work and lacks a well defined concept of measure of a set.

Sebastian PS: Wachsmann recalls in the interviews, that the Stalin portrait made a lot of trouble for Louis Aragon, publishing it for the first time in a jounal of the french communist party, because the great Stalin was not shown the right way. That's the problem with that kind of culture.

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