Chasing down an intellectual rabbit hole at Wednesday lunchtime... Why this animus against Einstein? Am I wrong in misreading this as, at base, simply Hayek viewing a prominent Jew (pretty much any prominent Jew) as an Enemy of the People (George Soros today, anyone?)? In the same era as The Fatal Conceit was published, you could read the right-wing American Spectator stating as fact that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was simply an enormous conspiratorial con game
Many conservatives hate the idea of relativity. If space and time are not absolute, what is? I discovered this when browsing the entries for Einstein and Relativity at Conservapedia.com (warning: very amusing and very terrifying time sink).
In a strange serendipity I just yesterday watched a lecture that Leonard Bernstein gave in 1973 on Mahler's Ninth Symphony. (YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5I7lYN5adU). Bernstein did a very good job of describing the intellectual/moral/emotional problem that the 20th Century posed for many people, including Mahler.
Old, rock-solid understandings about "how things worked" crumbled at every turn, and the Theory of Relativity somehow (as Thomas Hewitt describes) became central to it all. This is, of course, in spite of the fact that Special Relativity asserts an even greater constancy to the speed of light than we had guessed.
In the 20th Century, or most of it, including the 70s, it was commonplace to assert that our morals were not the same as the morals of (in one of our more racist moments) "some tribes in Africa". This was still possible because there were peoples on this earth as late as the 1930's who had never come into contact with outsiders.
This primitive notion ("our morals are not their morals") has been developed and become a lot more subtle. There are no isolated peoples now, the earth is much more within our scope. And we have found that our morals don't vary nearly so much as we once imagined - though they *do* vary.
So I think Einstein was sort of a stand-in, an effigy, a pinata to club around in protest to the many unsettling changes in science, art, music, and common social interaction, which came into the 20th Century. This is, of course, not the only possible reaction to those changes. One could, for instance, write a transcendent symphony.
I think a big part is conflation, deliberate or otherwise of relativity of spacetime, versus relativity of moral systems. Conservatives fear the later, as in theory it allows humans to re-invent morality.
Of course there is special relativity, which is a consequence of the fixed speed of light, and general relativity which is a big extension bringing in gravitation. GPS uses results from GR. However I'm not convinced of its engineering necessity, one could have arrived at empirical fudge factors that corrected orbital computations without understanding why the universe demanded them.
Remember that a considerable portion of the American right wing believes that global warming is a conspiracy among climates scientists to get more government grant money. On that logic why couldn't physicist embrace relativity to épater la bougeosie.
Many conservatives hate the idea of relativity. If space and time are not absolute, what is? I discovered this when browsing the entries for Einstein and Relativity at Conservapedia.com (warning: very amusing and very terrifying time sink).
https://conservapedia.com/Counterexamples_to_Relativity
In a strange serendipity I just yesterday watched a lecture that Leonard Bernstein gave in 1973 on Mahler's Ninth Symphony. (YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5I7lYN5adU). Bernstein did a very good job of describing the intellectual/moral/emotional problem that the 20th Century posed for many people, including Mahler.
Old, rock-solid understandings about "how things worked" crumbled at every turn, and the Theory of Relativity somehow (as Thomas Hewitt describes) became central to it all. This is, of course, in spite of the fact that Special Relativity asserts an even greater constancy to the speed of light than we had guessed.
In the 20th Century, or most of it, including the 70s, it was commonplace to assert that our morals were not the same as the morals of (in one of our more racist moments) "some tribes in Africa". This was still possible because there were peoples on this earth as late as the 1930's who had never come into contact with outsiders.
This primitive notion ("our morals are not their morals") has been developed and become a lot more subtle. There are no isolated peoples now, the earth is much more within our scope. And we have found that our morals don't vary nearly so much as we once imagined - though they *do* vary.
So I think Einstein was sort of a stand-in, an effigy, a pinata to club around in protest to the many unsettling changes in science, art, music, and common social interaction, which came into the 20th Century. This is, of course, not the only possible reaction to those changes. One could, for instance, write a transcendent symphony.
I think a big part is conflation, deliberate or otherwise of relativity of spacetime, versus relativity of moral systems. Conservatives fear the later, as in theory it allows humans to re-invent morality.
Of course there is special relativity, which is a consequence of the fixed speed of light, and general relativity which is a big extension bringing in gravitation. GPS uses results from GR. However I'm not convinced of its engineering necessity, one could have arrived at empirical fudge factors that corrected orbital computations without understanding why the universe demanded them.
Remember that a considerable portion of the American right wing believes that global warming is a conspiracy among climates scientists to get more government grant money. On that logic why couldn't physicist embrace relativity to épater la bougeosie.