Neoclassical bizarreness!!!

[Charles Brown <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

*       From: Leigh Meyers


I don't know that "narrow" is the correct word.
I converse with many folks that have graduate & Ph.Ds

Whereas I have 9 years of "formal" education, and have gone back
to community college at the age of 51. It does give me an interesting (ok ok
misanthropic) AcademiaWorld view.

What I see in academia is the tendency towards... hyper-specialization(?)
which in the long run, quite literally leaves the academician not seeing the
forest for the trees. What was it Einstein said about the atomic
bomb...something like: If I had known what they were going to do with my
work I would never have participated. That's a paraphrase, forgive. But I
think it illustrates what I see happen in other fields as well. You'd think
Einstein would have known the potential, but his mind was... elsewhere.


*****
CB: I like the legendary, loveable scholar persona, but Comrade Einstein was
so focussed on finding the things-in-themaelves, he was not cognizant of the
necessity to discover things-for-us,nor of the fact that imperialist
warmongers would clearly use physics  discoveries against-us ( the human
race) and not for-us. I'll look for my essay on this presented at the
University of Mich. Einstein, I am sad to say, ends up a kind of Sorcerer's
Apprentice, who released powers that he was unable to call back under
control.

Here is a critical example of why natural scientific "enterprise" is not
politically neutral. Sure the relativity of "the universe" is the same for
workers and bourgeoisie, but knowledge of relativity has a different impact
on the world in the hands of one or the other. Physicists, biologists,
computer scientists have got to have consciousness of what science for the
People really is. Imperialism will exploit the discoveries of geniuses to
make weapons and devices of mass destruction and control.