RE: Dyson (Was: Paths to Uploading)

Ken Kittlitz (ken@audesi.com)
Fri, 08 Jan 1999 12:48:50 -0700

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.com
AudeSi Technologies Inc.
http://www.audesi.com