🚀 go-pugleaf

baylor@force.ssd.lmsc.lockheed.com writes:
>
>Although, when I was in college I had heard a story (with attributed quotes, 
>which makes it more credible) about the communist party originally rejecting
>the concept that there was no ether (a hypothesized medium through which
>light waves were supposed to propagate) and therefore no absolute (true 
>rest) frame of reference for motion, because the idea that there are no 
>absolutes is contrary to the principal of dialectic materialism.
>Time frame on this story is a good 80 years ago, but tall tales might
>have stretched it to the story Koenig told.

The following is quoted without permission from Banesh Hoffman's biography
`Einstein':
  In 1965-67 the Russians brought out the complete scientific works of
  Einstein in 4 volumes ... But in earlier days Communist officialdom had
  never quite known what line to take about Einstein's theory of relativity.
  In 1952 a Soviet Academician attacked it as being contrary to Dialectical
  materialism, the philosophical basis of Marxism, and he chided certain
  Soviet scientists for supporting Einstein's theory. On receiving a letter
  about this, Einstein replied in lighthearted vein, saying that it had
  cheered him up considerably.

The promotion of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union during the same period is
probably the most notorious example of this kind of thing.  
--
 +-------------------  pete@bignode.equinox.gen.nz  -------------------+
 | The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things |
 | that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some   |  
 | of the grace of tragedy   -  Steven Weinberg                        |
 +---------------------------------------------------------------------+