Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 570.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2003 06:27:31 +0000
From: "C. M. Sperberg-McQueen" <cmsmcq@acm.org>
Subject: Re: 16.556 the lone scholar in the sciences
At 2003-03-16 01:40, Willard wrote:
>Albert Einstein, from an address at a celebration of Max Planck's 60th
>birthday (1918), delivered before the Physical Society in Berlin; published
>in Mein Weltbild (Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934); the following is from
>Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, transl. Sonja Bargmann (New York:
>Three Rivers Press, 1954): 224-5. ...
Call me slow, but I don't see anything in Einstein's remarks that
corresponds to the subject line. He talks about people without much
in the way of social graces, "odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows",
but Planck was in no way a "lone scholar" as I would understand that
term. He held, on the contrary, a chair in Berlin and served as
secretary of the Mathematics and Natural Sciences Section of the Prussian
Academy of Sciences and as president of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellshaft.
Einstein's tribute to Planck does seem to be a good example of the
pure-science form of part of what we today sometimes recognize as Geek
Mythology.
-C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
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