At 12:58 PM 1/8/99 -0600, Billy Brown wrote:
>If we condemn Einstein because he failed to see the fallacies of the
>mainstream of thought in a field he did not even practice, we are expecting
>perfection. We might as well condemn all ancient Athenians who didn't rail
>against slavery, or all medieval scholars who failed to fight for women's
>rights.
What I, and perhaps some of the other posters, object to is not that Einstein was partly a prisoner of the memes of his time (we all are), but that he attempted to affect society by pontificating on a subject that, as you say, "...he did not even practice". I suspect Einstein would have savaged a physics paper written by someone as ill-informed about that subject as he apparently was about economics, and rightly so. Einstein's brilliance as a physicist does not give his opinions in other areas any special currency.
Ken Kittlitz http://www.wendigo.comAudeSi Technologies Inc.