Lisa Jardine: The intellectual ties that bind the West
[Whatever the state of relations between London and Washington, Europe and the US should remember their long history of shared intellectual activity, championed chiefly by Albert Einstein.]
The campus of the California Institute of Technology, Caltech, in Pasadena, where I spent this week, looks more like a Latin-American hacienda than a top-flight university dedicated to teaching and research in fundamental science.
Practically all the giants of modern science have been associated with Caltech during the hundred years since its foundation. The best known of these by far is Albert Einstein, perhaps science's only folk hero - Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, forever associated with the evocative formula E = mc2 ....
Of course, the Einstein papers for the Caltech years are full of important science .... But the very human Einstein who emerges from the pages of the California travel diaries is for me a kind of symbol for the way in which the United States took up the torch of fundamental scientific research and kept its flame alight, giving great original thinkers like Einstein a home and public recognition, when National Socialism in Germany was turning its back on the future.
It is also, for me, a reminder that the ties that bind European intellectuals to our fellow human beings in the United States are far stronger than the agendas of particular political administrations on either side of the Atlantic. If we take the long view - back to the founding years of Caltech, and forward, beyond the disaster of the Iraq war, and what some like myself regard as the damagingly anti-science ethos of the Bush administration - the common intellectual understanding between our two countries has to continue to be nurtured and cherished.
Because beneath the surface differences in attitudes and beliefs, there runs a historically strong set of values connecting us. It was out of the debris of World War II, and the team-work and collaboration between leading scientists in America and Europe that one of the lastingly important statements about war and weapons of mass destruction was issued by a group of distinguished scientists which included a number of Caltech illuminati -the "Russell-Einstein manifesto".
Together, Einstein in America and Bertrand Russell in England produced what still stands as one of the most important statements of the need for cooperation between nations. It was the last letter Einstein signed, shortly before he died on 18 April 1955, having drafted and redrafted the text with Russell in the weeks before his death.
The Russell-Einstein manifesto was addressed to the leaders of the western world. It urged them to recognise that weapons of war (specifically the atomic bomb) were now too deadly for war between opposed factions any longer to be an option ....
As I wandered the campus at Caltech, and as I talked to faculty and students, the culture of serious reflection on the big issues in science and in human values filled me with a sense that together they and we could achieve a great deal for the future of the human race. As my plane touched down back at Heathrow on Wednesday, it struck me forcibly that we must hold on to that strong sense I had at Caltech of future purpose and possibility. We must not squander science's dream of an increasingly open world of discovery and opportunity.
Read entire article at BBC
The campus of the California Institute of Technology, Caltech, in Pasadena, where I spent this week, looks more like a Latin-American hacienda than a top-flight university dedicated to teaching and research in fundamental science.
Practically all the giants of modern science have been associated with Caltech during the hundred years since its foundation. The best known of these by far is Albert Einstein, perhaps science's only folk hero - Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, forever associated with the evocative formula E = mc2 ....
Of course, the Einstein papers for the Caltech years are full of important science .... But the very human Einstein who emerges from the pages of the California travel diaries is for me a kind of symbol for the way in which the United States took up the torch of fundamental scientific research and kept its flame alight, giving great original thinkers like Einstein a home and public recognition, when National Socialism in Germany was turning its back on the future.
It is also, for me, a reminder that the ties that bind European intellectuals to our fellow human beings in the United States are far stronger than the agendas of particular political administrations on either side of the Atlantic. If we take the long view - back to the founding years of Caltech, and forward, beyond the disaster of the Iraq war, and what some like myself regard as the damagingly anti-science ethos of the Bush administration - the common intellectual understanding between our two countries has to continue to be nurtured and cherished.
Because beneath the surface differences in attitudes and beliefs, there runs a historically strong set of values connecting us. It was out of the debris of World War II, and the team-work and collaboration between leading scientists in America and Europe that one of the lastingly important statements about war and weapons of mass destruction was issued by a group of distinguished scientists which included a number of Caltech illuminati -the "Russell-Einstein manifesto".
Together, Einstein in America and Bertrand Russell in England produced what still stands as one of the most important statements of the need for cooperation between nations. It was the last letter Einstein signed, shortly before he died on 18 April 1955, having drafted and redrafted the text with Russell in the weeks before his death.
The Russell-Einstein manifesto was addressed to the leaders of the western world. It urged them to recognise that weapons of war (specifically the atomic bomb) were now too deadly for war between opposed factions any longer to be an option ....
As I wandered the campus at Caltech, and as I talked to faculty and students, the culture of serious reflection on the big issues in science and in human values filled me with a sense that together they and we could achieve a great deal for the future of the human race. As my plane touched down back at Heathrow on Wednesday, it struck me forcibly that we must hold on to that strong sense I had at Caltech of future purpose and possibility. We must not squander science's dream of an increasingly open world of discovery and opportunity.