A new preprint to the arXiv discusses Caltech’s decision to repudiate the Nobel laureate Robert Millikan. The preprint takes the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to task for its decision. What follows is a digest of that 64-page preprint.
Nobel Laureate in physics
Robert A. Millikan (1868-1953) was the second American to win the Nobel Prize in physics. At the peak of his influence, no scientist save Einstein was more admired by the American public.
Millikan’s greatest scientific achievement was the isolation the electron and the measurement of its charge. Millikan was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1923 for the famous oil-drop experiment, which measured the electron charge. These measurements also led to reliable estimates of Avogadro’s number.
His second greatest scientific achievement was the experimental verification of Albert Einstein’s photoelectric equation, which was also recognized by the Nobel Prize. Einstein’s and Millikan’s Nobel Prizes are closely linked: Einstein’s for the theoretical derivation the photoelectric equation and Millikan’s for the experimental verification. (Contrary to what some might expect, Einstein’s Nobel Prize was not for the theory of relativity.) As a bonus, Millikan obtained what was then the best experimental value of Planck’s constant.
The photoelectric effect gave one of the first strong indications of wave-particle duality. Even today, wave-particle duality poses puzzling philosophical questions. Einstein hypothesized the existence of what is now called a photon – a hypothesis that flew in the face of the settled science of wave optics. This unsettling concept of light motivated Millikan in his experiments, and he eventually confirmed Einstein’s equation. The photon and the electron were the first in the timeline of many elementary particles. Millikan’s student Anderson later won a Nobel prize for the discovery of the positron.
Head of Caltech
Millikan, the head of Caltech during its first 24 years, oversaw its rapid growth into one of the leading scientific institutions of the world. Millikan was appointed the chief executive of Caltech in 1921, the year after an unexceptional manual training school was renamed the California Institute of Technology; he held the position for 24 years. He was offered the title of president but instead chose an organizational structure that made him the chairman of an eight-member executive council.
When Millikan first arrived at Caltech, “the faculty and graduate students were still a small enough group so that at the first faculty dinner we could all sit around a single long table in the basement of the Crown Hotel.” Through Millikan’s vigorous leadership, Caltech swiftly grew. “Millikan was everywhere planning, deciding, admonishing.” Linus Pauling wrote, “Millikan became a great public figure, who in the minds of the people of the country represented the California Institute of Technology….” The book jacket to Goodstein’s history of Caltech states, “To the public in the early days, Caltech soon became known as ‘Millikan’s school’ for Millikan, who functioned as the school’s president, brought to Pasadena the best and the brightest from all over the world….” According to Goodstein, “by 1930, Caltech was ranked as the leading producer of important physics papers in the country.”
In education, Millikan and Gale’s “First Course in Physics” is perhaps the best selling English-language physics textbook of all time. Including all editions and title variations, Millikan and Gale sold over 1.6 million copies between 1906 and 1952. It is particularly remarkable that these numbers were achieved in the first half of the twentieth century, when the physics textbook market was much smaller than it is now. In the international textbook market, “The Feynman Lectures on Physics” (another Caltech icon) holds the record with more than 1.5 million English-language copies and many more in foreign translation.
Demands for social justice
In response to demands for social justice following the murder of George Floyd, Caltech launched an investigation into Millikan. Caltech reached a decision to strip Millikan of honors (such as the library named after him), following accusations from various sources that he was a sexist, racist, xenophobic, antisemitic, pro-eugenic Nazi sympathizer. In short, Millikan’s School threw the book at Millikan.
Japanese internment camps
An article in Nature about Caltech’s decision accused Millikan of collaborating with US military to deprive Japanese Americans of their rights during their forced relocation to internment camps during the Second World War. The Caltech report on Millikan draws a similar conclusion. An examination of original historical sources shows that this accusation is false. On the contrary, Millikan actively campaigned during the war to promote the rights of Japanese Americans. The preprint traces the stages of misrepresentation that led to current false beliefs about Millikan.
Here is some relevant context.
- After the end of World War II, the US Army, Navy, and Air Force organized large expeditions to Japan to evaluate Japan’s scientific capabilities. The physicist Waterman (remembered today for the Waterman Award) asked Millikan for names of Japanese scientists and engineers who had studied at Caltech to assist in the scientific expeditions to Japan. The Nature article and the Caltech report completely misunderstood the historical context of the scientific expeditions, conflating the scientific expeditions to Japan after the war with Japanese internment in the United States during the war. On the basis of this glaring misunderstanding, Caltech unjustly criticized Millikan for his treatment of Japanese-Americans.
- In fact, during the war, Millikan was an officer in the Fair Play Committee, an organization that was formed in Berkeley to defend the rights of Japanese Americans. The day after the proclamation from FDR that ended internment, the chairman of the Japanese community council at one of the internment camps wrote a personal thank-you note to Millikan, saying “We realize that you played no small part in realizing this very important move” (of lifting the restriction on Japanese). Millikan received the Kansha award, which recognizes “individuals who aided Japanese Americans during World War II.”
Eugenics
The preprint also treats Caltech’s central accusation against Millikan: he lent his name to “a morally reprehensible eugenics movement” that had been scientifically discredited in his time. The preprint considers the statements in the Caltech report purporting to show that eugenics movement had been denounced by the scientific community by 1938. In a dramatic reversal of Caltech’s claims, all three of Caltech’s scientific witnesses against eugenics – including two Nobel laureates – were actually pro-eugenic to varying degrees. Based on available evidence, Millikan held milder views on eugenics than Caltech’s witnesses against him. The preprint concludes that Millikan’s beliefs fell within acceptable scientific norms of his day.
The history of eugenics has become a significant academic discipline, and a few paragraphs cannot do justice to the topic. The word eugenics evokes many connotations; a starting point is the Oxford English Dictionary definition of eugenics: “the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable.” From this starting point, the definition diverges in many directions. In California, eugenic practice took the form of a large sterilization program. The state government ran several hospitals for the care of those with mental illness or intellectual disabilities. During the years 1909-1979, over twenty thousand patients at those hospitals were sterilized. The “operations were ordered at the discretion of the hospital superintendents,” as authorized by California law. About three-quarters of sterilizations in California in 1936 were performed by request or consent of the patient or guardian (but the legal and ethical standards of informed consent fall short of what they are today).
The preprint devotes several pages to Millikan’s relationship with the eugenics movement.
- Where did Millikan fit into the eugenics movement? Millikan was a bit player. His name does not appear in the definitive histories of eugenics, and biographies of Millikan do not mention eugenics. Caltech emeritus professor Daniel J. Kevles, who is a leading authority on both Millikan and eugenics, did not mention Millikan in his history of eugenics. Overwhelmingly, Millikan’s most significant contribution to the biological sciences was his part in establishing Caltech’s division of biology. Caltech was his legacy.
- As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Millikan was strongly opposed to eugenics in 1925. He denounced the race degeneration theories of Lothrop Stoddard. Millikan maintained, “We can’t control the germ plasm but we can control education” and consequently, education was the “supreme problem” and a “great duty.”
- The only other sentence in Millikan’s own words about eugenics appeared in 1939 in an article in which he made forecasts about how science might change “life in America fifty or a hundred years hence.” He wrote, “I have no doubt that in the field of public health the control of disease, the cessation of the continuous reproduction of the unfit, etc., big advances will be made, but here I am not a competent witness, and I find on the whole those who are the most competent and informed the most conservative.” There is no mention of specific methods such as sterilization. There is no suggestion of the use of coercion. He speaks in the future tense, “advances will be made” in the coming fifty or hundred years. He is cautious. He humbly professes his lack of expertise.
- That is all that we have in the form of direct statements from Millikan on eugenics. The 1925 and 1939 statements from Millikan had not yet surfaced when Caltech issued its report. These direct statements from Millikan supersede the indirect case that was made in the Caltech report.
- Millikan joined the board of a Pasadena-based pro-sterilization organization called the Human Betterment Foundation in 1938. His reason for joining is not known. Millikan did not attend board meetings. His non-participation in the organization is documented in the form of signed proxy-vote slips that are in the Caltech archives for those years that the board met. There is no evidence that he read or endorsed the pamphlets issued by the foundation. Board members were free to disagree with the pamphlets, and sometimes they did. When the foundation closed down in 1942, its assets were donated to Caltech. It was Millikan who redirected the funds away from sterilization research.
- The section about eugenics in the Caltech report contains major historical falsehoods. The report used fabricated quotations from scientists of that era to make it appear that eugenics had been abandoned by the scientific community by the 1930s. To give one example, the report claims that in 1931 the Nobel laureate H. J. Muller denounced eugenics as an “unrealistic, ineffective, and anachronistic pseudoscience.” He made no such denunciation. In fact, Muller’s message was quite different: he said, it “is over course unquestionable” “that genetic imbeciles should be sterilized.” His 1936 book “Out of the Night” is a classic in eugenic writing. Muller continued to make a public case for eugenics until 1967, shortly before his death. In brief, Caltech got its history very wrong.
To be clear, nobody proposes a return to the California sterilization practices of the 1930s. According to science historian Alex Wellerstein, sterilization rates in California declined sharply in the early 1950s. The practice died not with a bang but a whimper. “No one took credit for killing the practice, and no one at the time appears to have noticed that it had ended.” “The horror we attach to sterilizations today, and to eugenics in general, did not become widespread until the 1970s, with the rise of interest in patient autonomy, women’s rights,” among other reasons (Wellerstein). During earlier decades, the largest institutional force in moral opposition to eugenics had been the Roman Catholic Church. The moral outrage at Caltech grew out of the Black Lives Matter movement and was directed toward the cause of “dismantling Caltech’s legacy of white supremacy.” The landscape has changed in other irreversible ways: birth control and genetic engineering have advanced far beyond the capabilities of the sterilization era.
Postscript on Diversity at Caltech
The preprint was written with a focus on Millikan. However, the larger message of the Caltech report is diversity. The word diversity and its inflections appear 78 times in the 77 page Caltech report. The word appears as many as nine times per page. The report, which is hosted by the Caltech diversity website, makes repeated reminders that Caltech has an “ongoing effort to forge a diverse and inclusive community.”
The Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Daniel Golden has written on admission practices at elite American universities. Caltech was unique among the most elite. Not long ago, Caltech boasted that on matters of admission, it made “no concessions to wealth, and it won’t sacrifice merit for diversity’s sake” (Golden, p278). David Baltimore, who was the president of Caltech, assured Golden that “Caltech would never compromise its standards. ‘People should be judged not by their parentage and wealth but by their skills and ability,… Any school that I’m associated with, I want to be a meritocracy’” (Golden,p284).
Never say never. The era of uncompromising standards at Caltech has come to an end. The Los Angeles Times reported on August 31, 2023 that Caltech is making historic changes to its admission standards. “In a groundbreaking step, the campus announced Thursday that it will drop admission requirements for calculus, physics, and chemistry courses for students who don’t have access to them and offer alternative paths….” “Data … showed a significant racial gap in access to those classes.” Caltech’s executive director of undergraduate admissions explained the new policy in these terms “‘I think that we’re really in a time where institutions have to decide if everything that they’ve been saying about diversity and inclusion is true,’ she said, noting that the challenge is especially acute now that the U.S. Supreme Court has banned affirmative action. ‘Is this something fundamental about who we are as an institution … or is this something that was just really nice window dressing.’” (LA Times, 2023).
The action against Millikan has been one campaign within a much larger political movement against standards of merit. Millikan himself had this to say about those who engage in mean-spirited attacks against America’s finest: “To attempt to spread poison over the United States with respect to the characters and motives of the finest, ablest and most public spirited men whom American has recently produced is resorting to a method which, it seems to me, all men of honesty and refinement can only abhor and detest.”
To be sure, Caltech has stirred up a hornets’ nest.
Thomas Callister Hales (born June 4, 1958) is an American mathematician working in the areas of representation theory, discrete geometry, and formal verification. In representation theory he is known for his work on the Langlands program and the proof of the fundamental lemma over the group Sp(4) (many of his ideas were incorporated into the final proof of the fundamental lemma, due to Ngô Bảo Châu). In discrete geometry, he settled the Kepler conjecture on the density of sphere packings and the honeycomb conjecture. In 2014, he announced the completion of the Flyspeck Project, which formally verified the correctness of his proof of the Kepler conjecture.
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For many years it was widely argued that Millikan had fudged the data from his oil-drop experiment. He had, allegedly, used the measurements he liked and discarded the ones he didn’t like, on no better grounds than his desire to get a particular answer.
Does anyone here know where the debate on that proposition has got to?
The Caltech physicist David Goodstein has made a thorough analysis of Millikan’s original lab notebooks. He discusses in detail the accusations of scientific fraud. According to Goodstein, “Millikan was clearly being selective, but his choice of drops did not bias the overall result.” Goodstein’s conclusion is that “he certainly did not commit scientific fraud in his seminal work on the charge of the electron.”
A false statement does appear in Millikan’s paper about the selection of drops. According to Goodstein,
Goodstein, David L. “In defense of Robert Andrews Millikan.” Engineering and Science 63.4 (2000): 30-38.
The consequences of Cal Tech’s efforts to diversify will be the destruction of just about everything.
These dipshits who are admitted won’t be good engineers for anything; everything will just fall apart.
I just finished reading the full prepint in question, which I’d highly recommend.
The sheer ignorance and incompetence of the Caltech “witch-finding committee” is utterly appalling.
Nobel Laureate Robert Millikan was one of our greatest scientists and he served as the founding father of Caltech, but during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, he was purged from all of his honors.
One of the main charges against him had been his alleged support for Japanese internment during World War II. But in actuality, he courageously served as Vice President of the California organization formed to support Japanese-American civil rights.
Another top accusation against him was his support for Eugenics, which seems to have been quite minor and little different from that expressed by the overwhelming majority of educated individuals in his era. Ironically enough, the supposedly “anti-Eugenics” academics cited by the purging mob actually included leading supporters of Eugenics, most notably Hermann Muller. Here’s a 2017 comment of mine that briefly touched on him:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/damnatio-memoriae-in-silicon-valley-who-is-next/#comment-1804790
What I find so utterly shocking is less the ideological extremism than the total and utter ignorant incompetence of the activist committee that persuaded Caltech to purge its own George Washington.
It sounds like Millikan was a great scientist and university founder. The fact that his name was removed from his university’s library shows how crazy the climate was in spring/summer 2020 because of the anti-police activists.
Caltech might be one of the few colleges that has practiced affirmative action for women in recent years. The female share of its undergraduate population has grown a lot recently, almost to parity with men:
https://www.unz.com/enrollments/?r&ID=110404&Institution=California+Institute+of+Technology
Although if their public statements have been true regarding their approach to admissions (until last month), Caltech hasn’t been giving women any boost in undergraduate admissions. It could be that male academic performance has gotten worse recently and so more women are being admitted.
The photo the article leads with is a pasteup. The heads are cut out of other photos and pasted on. Also, the guy on the left is doing the Hidden Hand. I am not exactly sure what that all means, but I doubt it’s good.
Assuming what this author says about Millikan’s very casual relationship with eugenics is correct, I’m inclined to agree it’s a tempest in a teapot. Caltech is simply trying to appear virtuous at the expense of a long-dead scientist.
While making a few searches on the situation, I did run into an issue I personally find to be more serious.
Lawsuit says Caltech Provost and others ignored Israeli spying and then retaliated against whistleblower
https://ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/sp-caltech.html
Spying by the Apartheid state has virtually no consequences in the US, and since Caltech has many government contracts by way of its JPL division, they’d have found it prudent to ignore spies of the shithole state. After all, two parts of American Government are controlled by God’s Favorite Thieves and Murderers – they’re content to allow the Vatican to retain control of the Supreme Court.
But kicking around dead scientists isn’t at all risky.
(Warning off-topic)
It’s generally accepted today that Mileva Marić was responsible for the Theory of Rekstivity as well as other discoveries attributed to Einstein. Einstein even gave Mileva Marić his Nobel Prize money.
Today, Mileva Marić, is considered equal to Tesla or Pupin in her contributions to the advancement of mankind.
Science was conceived as the means by which inquiry sought to dispatch superstition, ignorance, and false assumptions to the wastebasket. On a few occasions exuberance caused scientists to reach further than their grasp. It takes too long sometime to falsify the conclusions where certainty reigned. Scientists wander down hallways where there is no illumination. Sometimes scientists hang on to assumptions long after the futility of pursuing them any further has been seen as redundant. Science is presently concerned about the intrusion of superstition, ignorance and false assumptions, once thought slain, overwhelming scientific enquiry to the detriment of scientific pursuit and its benefits.
Minds never opened is ignorance. The closing of minds only partially opened is tragedy.
Ashkenazi Jewish controlled Caltech are attacking Millikan and other non-Ashkenazi Jews because they don’t want people to find out that the actual people behind Japanese internment are Ashkenazi Jews like Karl Bendetsen and Ashkenazi Jewish organized crime like the Chicago Outfit.
As a holder of a Masters Degree in Physics I very much enjoyed this article and thank the author. It does appear that there is a little more to the oil-drop controversy than noted. From the Wikipedia article on Millikan…
David Goodstein argues that Millikan’s statement, that all drops observed over a 60 day period were used in the paper, was clarified in a subsequent sentence which specified all “drops upon which complete series of observations were made”. Goodstein attests that this is indeed the case and notes that five pages of tables separate the two sentences.
For anyone interested, here is a link to the David L. Goodstein article “In defense of Robert Andrews Millikan” that is referenced by the author in Comment 2 above.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100625194742/http://eands.caltech.edu/articles/Millikan%20Feature.pdf
Clearly it’s a witch hunt. Every institution is looking for someone to crucify in order to get with the fashionable “purge us of white supremacy” program initiated by the anti trump establishment.
What percentage of Americans know who Robert Millikan was? A tiny percentage of the more elite STEM students. How many know he was founder of cal tech? The ones of those who went to caltech! How many know anything about him biographically? Nada.
So clearly the opinions of robert Millikan could have no influence on contemporary American racial politics. Certainly neither George Floyd nor Derrick chauvin knew any of this, least of all Floyd. Clearly this and the entire statue removal pageant is a modern iconoclasm, similar in all respects to the various religious iconoclasms throughout history.
Using the US uni Putnam competition as the proxy for the quality of US STEM students. For Putnam Fellows, i.e. rank 1-25, Caltech has 0 since 2015, for MIT 2022 rank 1-5: 5/5, rank 6-15: 9/11, rank 17-25: 7/9.
For Putnam Rank 1-100, Caltech has 0 since 2019, for MIT 2022: 70/100.
And for 2022 Putname Rank 101-500, Caltech has measly 4, for MIT: 74/400.
Application to MIT requires standard test SAT/ACT score, optional for other unis.
I was shocked hearing this on CBC Saturday morning years ago on Quirks and Quarks (an excellent radio program on all things scientific) 1985 and the presenter stated what I thought was Fallacy –some woman responsible for theory of relativity and then I headed to Library and went “ape shit” trying to investigate all angles and sure enough—–Meliva Maric was genius and Albert was a complete opportunist and an ungrateful one at that—-this Unz Review is so wonderful and some commenters are great –Thanks again to Anon and no —you are not really off topic —Truth –only the Full Truth-
But he sounds really white though. He even looks it. That can’t be good for POC students!
In the original photo there are three other men standing behind Michelson, Einstein, and Millikan.
https://www.bridgemanimages.com/en-US/unknown-photographer/albert-abraham-michelson-albert-einstein-robert-andrews-millikan-walter-sydney-adams-walther-mayer/photograph/asset/4147615
Dr. Hales’ article reminds me of the hullabaloo surrounding the still-living Dr. James Watson. Certainly the circumstances are different but the outcome is the same – a man of rare brilliance and achievement must be ostracized because he is brilliant, because he is not one of the masses.
It was sickening to read that Caltech has willfully succumbed to the pressures of our American Idiocracy. Many people believe that human logic and intelligence, the frontiers of the human mind, will always (if incrementally) advance. I disagree. The example of Caltech, circa A.D. 2023, is another arrow in my quiver should I want to argue the point.
It is of note that Dr. Hales’ own curriculum vitae is quite remarkable. In the West such persons are becoming more rare, because (at least to some degree) such persons are becoming viewed as a threat rather than an asset.
Ideological extremism makes competence irrelevant (and personally dangerous: “he is unreliable” = he may reach the wrong conclusion)
In line with the whole idea of canceling, and of affirmative action: if the result is politically correct, the methods don’t matter. We already know the answer, right?
In a way, it makes sense, or at least it’s consistent (ironically enough). Ideally, the Counsel of Science will simply list all the “facts,” and you just have to agree. No need for wasteful, time consuming, HARD things like constructing valid arguments or conducting experiments. Progress!
Come to think about it, that’s how theology works. The difference btw historians and “biblical scholars”, even at the same institution, is that the latter already know the answers (depending on their denomination) and their job is to shake, prune and jam together the pieces to fit.
Who do you think you are, Miles Mathis? Einstein’s head is disproportionate because of all his big brains!
Indeed. It’s the “contagion” theory of ritual pollution, as studied by Mary Douglas and others. Millikan’s sinful nature contaminates all he touched, and is passed down to those who touch those things in turn. He, Caltech, and all his papers must be put to the torch and purified by fire.
BTW, this is how the OT works. It’s almost as if Levitical priests are in control.
Perhaps CalTech can get away with just swinging a chicken over their school?
Yet elsewhere you seem reluctant to concede that a similar kind of ‘ideological extremism’ may result in affirmative action, i.e. explicit racial preferences, in admissions at Caltech, specifically that it may be behind the rise in the number of Hispanics being admitted to Caltech.
But thanks for publishing this article; otherwise I may not have seen it — and special thanks to the author, Thomas Hales, for writing it, and helping to expose the foul ex post facto political condemnation of Millikan.
I have long regarded the early 20th century as a remarkable and very interesting period of achievement in the physical sciences, and have a whole collection of books about that era, including biographies of the major figures — Mr Hales was right to point out that Einstein received the Nobel Prize for his work on the photoelectric effect, one of his annus mirabilis papers that came to be regarded as a cornerstone of quantum physics, rather than for his paper on special relativity, for which he is much better known.
Interesting. I’d heard it was Henri Poincare who came up with the idea. One way or another, it sounds like Einstein was a shameless plagiarist.
The destruction of Caltech by shit-for-brains liberals is not unique. There is a concerted effort to weaken our institutes of higher education.
I’ve read in several different places that Olinto DePretto published “Einstein’s relativity formula” in 1903 (2 years before Al) in the scientific journal Atte. I hadn’t heard of Maric before, but I’ll have to look into him. When I was at school, we had a professor who swore Albert’s wife was actually the source of his “genius”. In order to actually find out, we’ll have to contact his royal holiness, high priest and head Kleagle, Fauci the Magnificent. He is, after all, “The Science”.
As is the case with most universities…Caltech has screwed the pooch.
The woke crowd don’t let the truth get in their way in their quest to destroy the reputations of eminent dead white males like Millikan, who aren’t around any more to defend themselves. As well as telling complete lies about such men, the woke crowd pick and choose what they want and judge the world of the past by today’s standards. If held up to proper journalistic and authorship standards, very few woke writers would even get the lowest grade. It’s so easy to kick a corpse.
Theology and Biblical scholarship are (ideally at least) two separate disciplines. A good Biblical scholar uses the scientific method to arrive at his conclusions, and avoids theology like the plague. Sound scholarship frequently proves to be a thorn in the side of the theologians, who often have some metaphysical axe to grind.
It is generally a good idea not to comment on things you know nothing about to avoid embarrassment. It is not generally accepted, with the possible exception of this blog. Einstein, being a Jew, has taken many bad raps from those who wish to denigrate all Jews. There is no evidence that Einstein’s first wife contributed anything to Albert’s theories. Einstein was in the process of divorcing Mileva, so he offered his wife any prize money he received from an expected upcoming Nobel Prize. This was to support Einstein’s two children.
Are you a Serbian? Where do you get this bullshit?
What an unpersuasive defence. “Millikan was clearly being selective, but his choice of drops did not bias the overall result.”
What does he mean by “bias”? What on earth is “the overall result”? Is Goldstein saying that the results Millikan inferred from his selected drops agreed with each other? That’s essentially a tautology.
What does Goldstein mean by “selective”? The question is surely whether Millikan had sufficient reason to reject the unwelcome results.
I’m not surprised that some people think there’s an odour of stinking fish about this business. Is there also an odour about a Caltech employee defending Millikan? Could be.
What? They all do. Affirmative action started with females and females have historically benefitted most from the practice.
Millikan is, unfortunately, low-hanging fruit in the culture war. As opposed to Washington or Jefferson, few people have heard of this eminent scientist or will defend him. Yet his elimination from the history of Caltech continues to set a precedent, like the removal of statues, in our march towards the Communist dream of a year zero, at which point all of American history will be declared irredeemably racist and thus removed
The unwitting victims of the Frankfort School are now in charge of most all universities. Einstein’s mathematical calculations were notorious off the mark and several books have recounted this fact. If Milliken is being executed it is for one reason – he is not Jewish and therefore, not protected.
Just wait until the widget inventor is great as Newton because in a world where the penis-piano Zelensky is compared to Churchill then anything is possible.
” in our march towards the Communist dream of a year zero, ” What Communists or Communism have to do with this idiocy? It is all of your own capitalistic liberalism going mad doing. Great Pavlov was anti Soviet yet, Lenin and Soviet gave him everything he needed for his work. Not a single one Czarist era great scientist or statesman was cancelled or removed form history during Soviet times. It is all yours hence do not use the word Communism because you clearly doe snot understand the meaning. USA and the world under imperialism is moving in opposite to Communism direction hence degradation of everything.
As a layman myself in this area it is still very difficult for me to believe that Einstein was a plagiarist in any way. Anti Semitism was certainly a more prevalent and more powerful entity during his time and I cannot accept the idea that his academic peers, and any talented critics, would not have completely reviewed Einstein’s work for any possible measure of dishonesty or professional inaccuracy. It would have been virtually impossible for him to escape such focused review of his work.
I disagree, on first encountering the idea in physics classes and confirming it in lab. assigments, it is fascinating. For a few weeks, enjoyed doing the calculations for particle equivalents at different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum and the wavelengths of elementary particles and larger objects. Fun.
In the end, though, the maln points for intuitive understanding are that electrons display very wave-like behaviour in free space and under other conditions, and electromagnetic waves become increasingly particle-like with increasing frequency. Thus the terms ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ X-ray.
Does any electrically neutral particle really display wave-matter duality, as basic examples the neutron or neutrino? Sure, one may calculate an equivalent wavelength for the neutron, but it doesn’t seem to mean anything as far as actual particle behaviour. Neutrons don’t have wave-like behaviour, and except for similar velocity to electromagnetic waves, neither do neutrinos.
I don’t see any puzzling philosophical questions here.
It’s all part of the culture war. The Bolsheviks upended the imperial government and murdered the royal family. Furthermore, imperial Russia was officially an Orthodox Christian country and the Tsarist government was intertwined with the Russian Orthodox Church. Communism outlawed Christianity and replaced it with atheism. Thus, a thousand year history came to a halt. How is this not a year zero event?
Of the tens of millions of people killed under the Bolshevik regime, are you arguing that not one of these people was a Tsarist-era scientist or statesman? How many fled the country before Lenin closed the border?
The atrocities that occurred in the Soviet Union against its own people were known to Americans. Furthermore, capitalism had raised the standards of living for countless Americans. Therefore, economic Communism was never going to succeed in that country. In its place, cultural Marxism pitted social classes against each other. Rather than capital versus labor, American Communism takes the form of oppressors versus the oppressed, and the unfortunate Mr. Millikan has just been deemed an oppressor
Agree, and excuse my earlier non-reply, it was meant to start with a reply to your comment, but after losing the reply thrice, I became impatient and forgot that part.
This guy is not Chinese. He cannot have founded Cal Tech.
Some say einstein plagiarized? Bin Lanza, bin laden..
” Some latter-day writers have seized on these observations as proof that Einstein was a fraud, notably Christopher Jon Bjerknes, author of Albert Einstein: The Incorrigible Plagiarist (2002). The gist of his argument: (a) Einstein got many of his ideas from his first wife, Mileva Maric; (b) Maric herself plagiarized her ideas from others; and (c …”
https://www.straightdope.com/21343699/was-einstein-a-plagiarist
In the most recent light of what happened to Trump, confiscation of his property, revocation of his business licenses, with no trial, hearing, or even a shred of legal and precedent law, I am not surprised at the total breakdown of law and order in the USSA.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trump-rages-deranged-ny-judges-corporate-death-penalty-decision
Lately many chain stores in the place on the map called The JUSA, announced the closings of several hundreds of stores nationwide. The annual cost of theft from retailers is about $116 billion dollars.. This cost, of course is passed on to the consumer.
There is an entity behind all of these assaults on order, civilization, and law. A very small group, out of sight, using proxies and fronts, are determined to wreck all civilizations and make the World into one big Weimer Republic, at its worst and lowest erstwhile point. It’s various agents are spread to the wind as locust larvae, that now swarm the world, devouring all that is sustaining and necessary for existence.
A question answers the question: Who OWNS the World? Find the answer for yourself and yours.
So, why hasn’t UCSD removed Ted Geisel’s name from their very distinctive library?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_messages_of_Dr._Seuss
OTOH, Stalin made the nonsense of Lysenko official state policy. and it’s said biologists who opposed him were sent to the Gulags.
Neutrons wave. De broglie and all? Any particle will as a function of size
I suspect that it is true to some extent, she may have been responsible for the neat and readable notation, perhaps more.
However, neither paper on relativity had any original ideas, both were syntheses of earlier work, Maric may have been responsible for that (my opinion, at least an important, likely prime role, but written evidence for that no longer exists, if it ever did).
I made a detailed edit on the sources of Einstein’s plagiarism for both special and general relativity, mentioning the likely role of his wife, on English Wikipedia.
The reaction was furious, I did nothing but my initial edit, but checked at times to see what was happening. It was very funny and demonstrated that many people understand that Einstein is, to a large extent, a fraudulent mythos.
After three days of people fighting over the page, the Wikipedia Jews closed editing of the page. It had been fun to watch,
This is even more off-topic, but this thread would attract those interested in physics, irritating tone at times, but very educational (many points I never knew before) and entertaining, and is about a stage of transition. Recommended reading.
https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html?m=1
If Einstein was a fraud, then so were the likes of Bohr, Godel, Oppenheimer, Pauli, (long list omitted ….) who all interacted with him and had huge respect for him. You can’t fake your way with every single one of these big brains unless you also have a theory how these were all fakers just like good old Albert.
Indeed, this is true. These accusations against Einstein are relatively new and are meant to denigrate all Jews by bringing down the most prominent Jewish scientist.
100 Authors against Einstein. Published 1931
I taught myself Special Relativity from a book decades ago. The author suggested that Einstein had misbehaved by giving no credit to precursors, especially Fitzgerald, Poincare, and Lorentz?. Note, however, that that isn’t at all the same thing as saying that his work was not original, it simply says that it didn’t appear out of a clear blue sky.
I’ve never seen anyone suggest that General Relativity wasn’t original. Einstein was more generous at giving credit, acknowledging the chap who’d done the maths for him. That mathematician confirmed that his contribution was secondary; it was Einstein who invented the physics.
I assume that was the context in which Einstein described himself as not being much of a mathematician.
Attributing anything of consequence to Einstein’s first wife seems to me to be footling childishness.
Not a very nice man, Herr Einstein, but a remarkably successful theoretical physicist.
Illuminating story – thank you.
World needs to know more about these american, british and elite banking jew completely fake, hugely double standarded criminals and terrorists that they have been all their history. These and their criminal, sick minds are their secret weapons to their current positions, but everybody is finally starting to see through these completely fake, sick and criminal people.
CalTech is as woke and retrograde as any American institution nowadays. I must be cagey about my remarks because litigation is ongoing, but I’ve worked at CalTech and I can say from my own experience that feminism is taken for granted and given priority in many practical considerations. Ideology has as strong an influence on hiring practices as any school I’ve had experience with, and noticeably, consistently impedes workflow and general prospect of getting anything done to a degree of expedience or a standard of quality that one would have expected just 15 or 20 years ago. Every department seems filled with a critical mass of the type of woman who cannot see the forest for the trees and simply does not seem to “get it,” for all of their competence in the narrow fields they’ve been hired on to work in.
A pity. In my English state school we 17 year olds repeated Millikan’s Experiment as part of Physics A-Level*.
* the highest qualification most people will do at school. On “A-level” results depends admission to university.
“Does any electrically neutral particle really display wave-matter duality, as basic examples the neutron or neutrino?”
Isn’t a photon electrically neutral? Why should a charge make a difference? We know electron diffraction exists.
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-university/content-assets/images/physics/lab-in-a-box/LabInABox_ElectronDiffraction.pdf
It looks as if neutrino diffraction is a thing, at least theoretically.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006A%26G….47e..31F/abstract
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0920563211007948
I have advised those on here with college age children to consider sending their worthies to a Russian university. It is obvious that Russia has a vast intellectual class and has had. Simply, Russian cultural values are high values and stress excellence, as they have always done.
Higher learning centers of the West are all degraded and demoted in mission and commission.
No contemporary, modern, Post Modern excrement has been allowed to come close.
Major Russian universities are highly internationalized. Russia is and will continue to pivot EAST, “where the action is”. Where the various diseases caused by the (((Plague Givers))) have no influence. For someone looking for a future, I would tell you The West Has Been De-Blessed. Real power and quality of life will be centered in the East and the Global South. Tuition- ~ $5,000.00 a year
I think generally these days colleges get more qualified female applicants than male applicants, so in order to maintain gender balance, there’s a boost given to male applicants, however the reverse is true at the schools more focused on STEM.
https://hechingerreport.org/an-unnoticed-result-of-the-decline-of-men-in-college-its-harder-for-women-to-get-in/
https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2023/03/brown-has-largest-acceptance-rate-gap-between-men-women-in-ivy-league
Some of the large state universities, like Texas and Florida, are almost 60% female. These schools probably don’t want to have that much of an imbalance.
Perhaps some or all of the authors disbelieve his theories. But any asshole can write a book.
The book is in German; I take it you can read German and have read it.
Peanut butter and chocolate more important than Relativity.
So too is buttered popcorn.
Every department seems filled with a critical mass of the type of woman who cannot see the forest for the trees and simply does not seem to “get it,” for all of their competence in the narrow fields they’ve been hired on to work in.
Exactly, a common situation. Book smart at reproduction, but unable to apply it in real world or de novo situations. Although there are some outstanding women.
Cessation of the reproduction of the unfit means abortion and birth control. Having read thousands of comments over the years, I’ve noticed the Men of UNZ are opposed to both.
“…– they’re content to allow the Vatican to retain control of the Supreme Court.”
So are we his second favorite thieves and murderers?
As far as “these accusations against Einstein are relatively new”, please allow me to translate the German for you. One-nine-three-one, or 1931. One could also interpret it as “not relatively new”
“In California, eugenic practice took the form of a large sterilization program.”
Isn’t the “transgender” movement a “form of a large sterilization program”?
That follows the usual account you find on, for example, Britannica’s website.
Millikan was indeed awarded the Nobel prize for measuring the charge of an individual electron, one of the most famous experiments in physics, but the prize should have been shared with another man if not given to him alone. What came to be known as the Millikan Oil-drop Experiment was actually devised and performed by Millikan’s graduate student, Harvey Fletcher, using work done by Erich Regener as a starting point.
Fletcher wrote an article describing what really happened, instructing his heirs that it be published after his death. Here it is:
My Work with Millikan on the Oil-drop Experiment
Physics Today June 1982.
(The layout is a bit confusing because the editor’s background material, set in a slightly smaller font, is interleaved with Fletcher’s article.)
Fletcher is too polite in his article. Turns out I talked with Fletcher casually – a stranger in the lobby of an auditorium – about a year before he died. He was much more forthright talking to me about the affair than he was in his article. He was most emphatic that it was he who was responsible for the Millikan Oil-drop Experiment, not Millikan.
Though in his article he goes out of his way to say he feels only gratitude towards Millikan for helping his career and doesn’t feel too badly about not being bylined in the first and most important paper – most of which he wrote – describing the groundbreaking discovery, talking with him in the late 70’s I got the impression that he was still concerned about it at the age of 92.
The Wikipedia entry on the experiment is halfway more accurate than Britannica in that the beginning says the experiment was performed by both Millikan and Fletcher, but then the rest of the article forgets about Fletcher. The Wikipedia entry on Fletcher says he is credited with collaborating with Millikan on the experiment.
About the photoelectric effect: has Millikan’s experiment ever been duplicated, or as they say, replicated? Carver Mead, also at Caltech, doesn’t believe the result (which he mentions in his book Collective Electrodynamics) but I haven’t looked into it.
All this is a digression from the TUR / Jigger Wit article, which argues that Millikan doesn’t deserve the treatment the blasted leftists – call them by their right name: communists – give him.
Yes, I partly forgot about de Broglie’s work, after all, the wave nature of electrons was at the core of his work.
Indeterminacy may apply to positions and trajectories of neutrons too, but I haven’t seen a convincing demonstration or theory of it, fission power and weapons rely on ballistic behaviour of neutrons.
Neutrinos don’t seem to have any wave-like nature at all.
Einstein’s main role was as a show-pony for Herzl in the latter’s tour to promote Zionism in the very early twenties of last century, now referred to as ‘Einstein’s world tour’, but in fact Herzl’s world tour.
Perhaps people are just tired of it?
Something as blatant as ‘Doctor Know’ in Spielberg’s progaganda-fest AI is pretty ugly. Much more in the same line in Jewish-dominated pop culture.
The photo-electric effect, sure, interesting and worthwhile, but the world’s greatest genius evar (as claimed by Jews) would never recognise its relation with quantum mechanics.
Let me do some interpretation for you. In 1931 Germany, the Nazis were prominent. One of their more stupid ideologies was that Jewish science was wrong and not worthy of Aryans. So where is the surprise that a book discrediting Einstein was printed in 1931, Germany? Only a dumbass would use that as a legitimate reason to discredit Einstein.
You are a troll.
What is the meaning of the term ‘dumbass’ in this context? Are you suggesting that the non-dumbass position is to assume that all of those signatories were lying because the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was two years away from attaining power?
Yes, in 1931, the Nazis had virtual control. In 1933, they had absolute power. Furthermore, there were not 100 scientists in the world, let alone in Germany with the knowledge or intelligence to understand or dispute Relativity in 1931. And since you have not read the book you mentioned and sure as hell have no chance to understand it…what is the point of your futility? What don’t you understand about this???
Agree. I could not believe the latest, that a judge, who already brought one of the legal cases against Trump, actually raised a civil case against him.
WTF, outrageous, found it hard to believe, even that it is allowed. The bitch has no personal interest in the situation of Trump properties, so how can she even bring the case?
Also, one would assume that Trump has clever accountants working to minimise his taxes, but overstating property values would clearly raise related taxes.
Taxes are the source of high income for this rabid bitch, and such actions convince the non-‘murricans, not just lowly workers like me, but any foreign policy experts and thinking diplotats, that U.S.A. is like a car running on a blown tyre at high speed.
As bad as this is, the overall situation is accelerating to chaos and horror. The threat of WWIII is very real.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/11-assumptions-about-future
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/human-industrial-complex
> “No contemporary, modern, Post Modern excrement has been allowed to come close.”
> “…successfully introduce Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, having also taken part in the development and implementation of the Unified State Exam to modernize education and health care systems of Russia.”
I know this is old, but for the sake of anyone reading your ill-informed advice in the future, you are omitting crucial details of how prevalent the sentiment is among the Russians themselves that:
1) the EU Bologna Process (“system”) is considered a destruction of the good old Soviet education;
2) the Unified State Exam is widely reviled for its ABC test questions with no substance;
3) Russian universities are deemed as breeding grounds for rabid anti-Russian liberals, and are full of American NGOs.
As to the sources… Just use your web search engine to type anything along the lines of болонская система жж, and there you go.
The Bologna system is a system for the destruction of classical European education
https://arctus.livejournal.com/1077021.html
Fun facts:
Later resaearch proved Lysenko right.
The West still refuses to accept the abiotic origin of Oil.
The only reason I can see for the campaign against Millikan is to cull white males from the canon.
In other words, sheer racial/ethnic discrimination.