Original Einstein Manuscript Discovered

vinlud writes "The original manuscript of a paper Albert Einstein published in 1925 has been found in the archives of Leiden University's Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics. The German-language manuscript is titled "Quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas," and is dated December 1924. It is considered one of Einstein's last great breakthroughs. High-resolution photographs of the 16-page manuscript are posted on the institute's web site."

Comments

Other than

[LordChaos]

... being one of the first people to make the world see that atomic warfare was not such a good idea - to which he devoted much of his later life.

Re:Other than

[raider_red]

They're best not fought at all. This may not always be possible, and war may sometimes be a necessary evil.

Though it may be necessary, it is still evil, and should only be approached with the greatest trepidation and after all good options have been exhausted.

Re:Other than

[Anonymous Coward]

yes that is very acceptable. maybe you should study military history sometime. there are no innocent enemy civilians. anybody contributing to that country is contributing to the death of OUR soldiers. women/children/civilians work in factories help producing weapons/ammo to kill our soldiers. even just working to help feed their soldiers, aids them. there are no innocent people in the country you go to war with.

Re:Other than

[Rakishi]

...as does almost every other fuckin weapon and war. Dresden had more deaths than either atomic bomb.

The alternative was an invasion, had that happened you'd be bitching about how we should have used the bomb to save the millions that died due to the invasion.

In Berlin children and the elderly were forced to fight or be shot by their own side. Many died, most were lacking decent weaponry or supplies and simply acted as a last ditch human shield. You think the Japanese would somehow act "better" during an invasion than the Germans did?

Of course, this is not counting the thousands who would die of disease or famine as they resist invasion on their already supply starved island. Then there would have been the inevitable massive non-nuclear bombings so common during WW2, which would probably lead to many more deaths alone than the two atomic bombs did.

In a more philosophical sense, there were few real civilians as they were almost all helping the war effort one way or another (Japanese are efficient that way). The American troops were also civilians till they got dragged into this, so were the Japanese troops for that matter.

Re:Other than

[nukem996]

Actually no. We nuked Japan because we did not want the USSR to liberate Japan, like they did Germany(they were the first ones in Berlin and who killed all the remaining Nazis while we stayed about 60 miles away cleaning up any insurgents). We thought that it would make it look like the Soviets won the war and not the US. In fact many of the leaders in Japan were considering surrendering but would not surrender unconditionally like we wanted, they wanted to be able to keep there emperor who they viewed as God like. Many also believe that it was a race thing, many people hated the Japanese which is one of the reasons why we had interment camps for them. Now you go get your facts please.

Re:Other than

[Rakishi]

Actually no. We nuked Japan because we did not want the USSR to liberate Japan,

While that may have been to some extent an unwritten view, the official one asfaik was to prevent an invasion. Then again, nothing ever does stop conspiracy theories does it?

like they did Germany(they were the first ones in Berlin and who killed all the remaining Nazis while we stayed about 60 miles away cleaning up any insurgents).

They got to Berlin first because Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt agreed beforehand that the area would belong to the Soviets no matter who took it over. I believe the argument was that it would be a waste of Allied lives to take over Berlin only to have to give it back to the Soviets, may as well have them make the sacrifice.

. In fact many of the leaders in Japan were considering surrendering but would not surrender unconditionally like we wanted, they wanted to be able to keep there emperor who they viewed as God like.

That is true asfaik; I believe the emperor would also retain some powers and his divine status. The US still kept the emperor although with no power and no longer officially divine. Such a conditional surrender may have proved devastating in terms of rebuilding Japan in such a way as to prevent future conflicts.

Many also believe that it was a race thing, many people hated the Japanese which is one of the reasons why we had interment camps for them.

Yes racism is fun, anti-semitism was also rampant everywhere at the time not just Germany. Then again, after what the Japanese did to prisoners of war and those they conquered a certain level of hatred during the end of the war was understandable.

Now you go get your facts please.

Same to you.

Re:Other than

[larry bagina]

USSR didn't declare war on Japan until august 8, 1945. For reference, the atomic bombs were dropped August 6th and August 9th.

If you take a look at the Yalta conference, you have to wonder if Roosevelt was the most incompetent President ever, or just liked getting fucked up the ass by "Uncle Joe" Stalin.

Consider: in exchange for declaring war on Japan (which they did at the last possible moment), USSR got

1. All of Eastern Europe
2. Some of the Japanase Islands
3. US troops sant around and waited 2 weeks so the Russian troops could "liberate" berlin.

Re:Other than

[benna]

I don't look at it that way. I would prefer to minimize civilian deaths on both sides before minimizing soldier casualties on my own. I realize many of the civilians (though by no means all) contribute to the war effort, but this is not really an excuse. They are not the ones dropping the bombs, firing the bullets, etc. And what about the children? They weren't contributing.

Re:Other than

[nathanh]

The alternative was an invasion...

Because there are only ever two options.

Re:Other than

[Rakishi]

Japan was already starving, didn't do much to them. There is no such thing as "military complexes" as all industry was at the time basically a military installation. You'd have to bomb them back a few centuries, and even then they could secretly make weapons to send against your fleet. Suicide attacks to them weren't exactly against the rules.

From a US point of view a blockade would be expensive and probably unpopular, and Japan could last a while. Humanitarian agencies would object, complain and Japan would sooner or later get sent food anyway.

I'm rather sure that a lot more than a few hundred thousand would die of starvation before they managed to get farming up to a level where it could support the nation, probably millions would be dead as without industrialization farming could never support their population. So you advocate the starving of millions compared to the nuking of thousands, interesting position.

If you wish to see what a nation can degrade into given an insane enough government, look at North Korea. Doesn't mean the people are somehow unintelligent" or "uncivilized" simply that the government is too oppressive. Remember, for a long time most of Europe was composed of peasants (ie: mindless slaves).

Re:Other than

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, Berlin invades YOU!

shit, where is my suicide pill?

Re:Other than

[Rakishi]

No, these were simply the two options asfaik seen at the time as solutions which are likely to lead to the desired result. It is documented that an invasion was expected if the bombs were not dropped as Japan was not likely to surrender, as such I am working within the confines of history. If you have another one, which doesn't rely on some horrid amount of hindsight to work, then please post it. It would be even better if you had some historical references that the idea was thought up at the time, as otherwise it really wasn't a workable solution. Otherwise, goodbye Mr. Troll.

Re:Other than

[peculiarmethod]

Other than in video games, thusly improving your hand/eye coordination?

no.

Re:Other than

[Rakishi]

From what I've read he was a blind fool who believed Stalin was a "good guy." Churchill didn't seem to have any such illusions. Russia was also able to by not declaring war on Japan to get three nice new US bombers to take apart, it was neutral (as far as the Japan-US war was concerned) so by international treaty it could not give them back to the US after they landed on Russian soil.

Point 3 made sense actually after the conference, Stalin got Berlin anyway so he may as well waste his own man in claiming it instead of the Allies wasting their own men only to give it to Stalin anyway.

Re:Other than

[ErikZ]

Yeah shocking, isn't it? Hating people you're at war with. :-P

Re:Other than

[drgonzo59]

The issue of "civilian" vs. "fighter" is often not a black and white kind of thing. If someone is supporting the Nazis and chose to help build the concentration camps, even though they could have had other equally paid job, are they an enemy combatant? What about those that produced Zyklon B (hydrocyanic acid) used in gas chambers, are they enemy combatants? I think they are.

Why doesn't the same apply to the people who worked for the Mitsubishi arms plant in Nagasaki? Most of the town employees where working at the plant building weapons and ammunition to kill Americans. They could have chosen to be farmers, or say teachers, instead they most likely did support the goverment policy and the war against us.

You are right, the children weren't fighting yet, but the ones in Berlin were, and if we invaded Japan a lot more children would have been dead, because they would have been forced to defend "the Empire"

One thing that is always usefull to keep in mind is that it was the Japanese that attacked the U.S. What in the hell were they thinking? It is like me attacking the local police department with a baseball bat, I know I will get in trouble and end up in jail for a long time. If I get my family and friends on it, they will end up in jail for a long time too. Someone might ask me "what in the hell were you thinking?" Same thing with Japan. It was their goverment that sealed the fate of its children and elderly when they attacked U.S. It wasn't a defensive war, it wasn't even a preemtive attack, I don't think US would have ever attacked Japan unprovoked. So when they sent the battleships and the airplanes to Pearl Harbor, they technically "killed" a lot of Japanese civilians and as well as fighters.

On the other side, let's imagine that Japan would have won the war (impossible but let's try) do you think they would hesitate bombing New York, or LA or other major city because there are civilians in it? Probably not, judging by what they did in China

Re:Other than

[PsiPsiStar]

You bomb the fuck out of their military structures, and you form a blockade around the country. You starve it.

I don't suppose you authored the policy on Cuba, huh?

If you took the time to do a proper blocade,

1. The Japanese Atomic bomb program, which was more advanced than the German Atomic bomb program, might have resulted in usable Japanese atomic weapon. Japan had bases on the Asian mainland free from the steady bombing that Germany was subjected to, which maked enrichment feasible.

2. China and Russia were waiting in the wings to invade, and get revenge on Japan for all the pain it had caused those countries. The US wanted to deal with postwar Japan. Things would have been worse for the Japanese if the Chinese and Russians had invaded instead of the Japanese surrenduring to the US.

Re:Other than

[Dionysus]

One thing that is always usefull to keep in mind is that it was the Japanese that attacked the U.S. What in the hell were they thinking?

They believed that by taking out the US Pacific fleet, they had about a year to fortify the resources they needed to conqueror most of Asia.

For some reason, most Americans think the Pacific War started with Pearl Harbor. Instead, they really should look at the political situation after WWI. Doesn't excuse the Japanese or justify what they did, but it does make it understandable.

Re:Other than

[benna]

Well then perhaps we should have used that as leverage to get them to surrender as opposed to nuking them. But of course, we could have gotten a conditional surrender anyway. Truman just wanted to send a message to Stalin.

Re:Other than

[commodoresloat]

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the first times the US or allied forces targeted civilians. The firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden killed many civilians -- I think in Tokyo more were killed than Hiroshima -- and not only that, they were specifically targeted at civilians as a war strategy to try to turn the population against the government. The claim that civilians and children in Nagasaki, or Tokyo, or Dresden were "combatants" was not made, I don't think; the explicit point of the military strategy was to attack the civilians with such force that they would rise up against their own governments and demand an end to the war. It was a strategy spelled out by air power theorists since WWI. Whether it was effective is another question, but I don't think you find the same moral concern about attacking civilians in WWII as you do in the latter part of the twentieth century.

Re:Other than

[MemoryDragon]

Dresden was an act of warcrime, the city basically was a refugee camp for people who fled from other cities, there was no major industry surrounding it. It simply was retaliation for the atrocities of the germans, nevertheless, it was a warcrime.

Re:Other than

[Coryoth]

Other options were discussed I believe, though never all that seriously. There was some consideration of dropping an atomic bomb (or two) away from a heavily populated area as a demonstration. How effective that would have been is debatable. The targetting was already well underway by that point (see the firebombings of many Japanese cities that killed about a million civilians), so militarised populated areas were most certainly fair game. Basically the ethics had already been thrown out a while ago, so there were few compunctions about pushing ahead with using a nuclear weapon in a heavily populated area.

There is also the issue of the necessity of the second bomb at Nagasaki. By the time it was dropped the Japanese were still dealing with confused reports of what had happened at Hiroshima (the Japanese military command didn't actually believe it). Very little time as given for the Japanese to fully come to grips with what they now faced, and it is entirely possible that once the full details of Hiroshima were determined (which was a few days after Nagasaki) a surredner may well have been forthcming regardless of whether a second bomb was dropped. This is, again, debatable - second guessing history is a fools game really - but it is likely Japan would have surrendered regardless of the Nagasaki bombing.

Jedidiah.

Re:Other than

[nathanh]

No, these were simply the two options asfaik seen at the time as solutions which are likely to lead to the desired result. I

The military commanders weren't even consulted before the bomb was dropped.

"MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed." He continues, "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."

Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.

Eisenhower recommended against dropping the bomb.

"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."

- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380

Admiral Lehay opposed the bombings, stating that they achieved nothing.

"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.

- William Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441.

The vice chairman of US bombing survey said that the a-bombs were not necessary.

"While I was working on the new plan of air attack... (I) concluded that even without the atomic bomb, Japan was likely to surrender in a matter of months. My own view was that Japan would capitulate by November 1945."

Paul Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, pg. 36-37 (my emphasis)

However the most damning evidence came from the Director of Naval Intelligence.

"Just when the Japanese were ready to capitulate, we went ahead and introduced to the world the most devastating weapon it had ever seen and, in effect, gave the go-ahead to Russia to swarm over Eastern Asia.

"Washington decided that Japan had been given its chance and now it was time to use the A-bomb.

"I submit that it was the wrong decision. It was wrong on strategic grounds. And it was wrong on humanitarian grounds."

Ellis Zacharias, How We Bungled the Japanese Surrender, Look, 6/6/50, pg. 19-21.

Ellis makes it clear beyond reasonable dispute that the a-bombs were dropped for POLITICAL reasons, not MILITARY reasons.

These repeated restrospective justifications that the a-bombs were dropped to "save lives" are lies. They are lies that you wish to believe because otherwise you might have to face up to the reality that sometimes the USA has done evil things. It's better to accept that the USA is fallible - just like every other democracy - and admit that the a-bombs were a MISTAKE.

PS: all credit goes to DABANSHEE for the research.

Re:Other than

[Anonymous Coward]

Even being on slashdot, I find this post getting modded insightfull troubling.

The poster ignores several facts:

- Those working in the war industry don't always do so by choice (in the US they forced people to work in munitions-factories, My (danish!) grand-grandfather was one of them during WWI I believe.)
- Even if they do, they are clearly not combatants, but civilians. If we do not leave this clear distinctions, we might as well just kill everyone.
- Even assuming they are combatatnts, you can never avoid having "real" civilians in a city. They are killed too, if you bomb the others. this clearly is unacceptable.

You are right, the children weren't fighting yet, but the ones in Berlin were, and if we invaded Japan a lot more children would have been dead, because they would have been forced to defend "the Empire"

The logical conclusion from this argument is that we should eradicate an opposing country completely, otherwise they might fight back later. And even better, a pre-emptive strike would be best.

Clearly, the parent post is misguided.

Re:Other than

[Morganth]

What a load of horse shit. Try actually studying history, not being taught the pseudo-history of our high schools and middle schools.

So the reason the US was justified in dropping the bombs was because we're big and powerful and you just don't mess with big and powerful countries? You say their government sealed the fate of their children, but that is a total logical fallacy (as, sadly, is often employed by writers on Slashdot). US wouldn't have dropped bombs if Japan hadn't attacked Pearl Harbor. Therefore, Japan's decision to attack Pearl Harbor caused the US to drop the bombs.

The problem with the argument is that Japan didn't know we'd decide to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent lives in response to Pearl Harbor. Although the US wouldn't have dropped the bombs without Pearl Harbor, the US could have done a lot of other things as a military response.

I too was taught that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed in order to save the 1 million American lives that would have been lost in an invasion (since learning that, the figures have been dropped by historians to well under 300,000 American lives, making the argument much less compelling even if one buys into the amoral numbers game). Unfortunately, there's a difference between a soldier's life and a civilian's life, and there's a difficulty in measuring either's value. A soldier is an instrument of his or her country, and his or her purpose is to die in battle with enemy forces. One might say that all soldiers ascend the plane of morality, since they are given the right to kill others without remorse, and likewise to be killed by unregretful forces.

But innocent lives are innocent lives. Yes, there were SOME soldiers (or even people helping the Japanese government's attacks on the US) in Nagasaki, in arms plants and elsewhere. But there were also enormous numbers of completely innocent people, who were wiped out in an instant. This mass killing is more than just that: it's murder, on the largest instantaneous scale we've ever seen. And, to put it lightly, it is highly immoral and intolerable.

-President Truman claimed that Hiroshima was attacked because it was a "military center." But over 120,000 people died outright in the bombing, and 95% of them were civilians.

-The second bomb was prefaced by leaflets which were dropped upon Nagasaki, informing the people that Hiroshima had been destroyed, and that they were next if they didn't tell their leaders to surrender. Since their leaders didn't surrender promptly, they had no choice but to face death. Another 100,000 lives, of which 95% (perhaps more) were innocent civilians.

-We are taught in high schools that this was the "hardest decision a president ever had to make." I disagree. I think it was the easiest decision any immoral person could make, if he were placed in that same situation. It's easy to wipe out a thousands upon thousands of innocent families in order to break the enemy into surrender. It's much more difficult to conduct a war in a manner that still makes it possible for us to be "the good guy" and keep intact our general moral framework with its respect for human life. In exchange for committing a greatly immoral act, Truman was not placed in jail or made into a great villain by the Western World; instead, Truman was attributed with having "ended the war," and received such accolades for this feat that he was even at one point awarded an honorary degree at Oxford University for his peacemaking.

If Japan would have won the war, would they hesitate bombing New York? I don't know, but clearly from the way you pose the question, you find it a highly disgusting and immoral act for a government to bomb a great city like New York (which is full of innocent life, great history, and hardly any military bases) to respond in a military battle with the US. So why should we, the US, have done the same? As beautifully put by Elizabeth Anscombe ("Mr. Truman's Degree"), whose brilliant simplicity casts much light on the reality of

Re:Other than

[drgonzo59]

The problem with your argument is that it assumes there are innocent lives and there are enemy combatants. The line is not so clear always. What about the ones in the factories, making bombs, are they innocent? A more complete discussion of this is in this topic (civilian vs. enemy fighter) is here

Re:Other than

[Teun]

They could have chosen to be farmers, or say teachers, instead they most likely did support the goverment policy and the war against us.

That's not how a war is fought.
People are forced to do certain labour.
They might still get a regular wage, they are not slaves in the historic sence but non the less they cannot freely choose their job.

Besides that as Japaneese they had been brought up with the notion they were waging a fair war by defending the Emperor.

Einstein was one of the few that saw the future trouble caused by National Socialism and Anti-Semitism well in time and was able to get out in a relatively simple way.
Not much later he would have had to either buy his freedom or secretly sneak across the border.

Re:Other than

[Teun]

Perfect write up!

Re:Other than

[drgonzo59]

The makers of Zyklon-B, that gas that used in the Nazi concentration camps, were convicted and executed for war crimes. The makers didn't kill a single person, they just made chemicals, yet some of these "civilians" were executed for it. You ignore the fact that there is _not_ a sharp destinction between enemy combatant and civilian in two countries that fight each other.

Do you really think that everyone was forced at the gunpoint to work in the factories? I highly doubt it. Some were but most probably were not.

You kill (your own) civilians by starting a war with another country. Then also you commit attrocities in other territories that you already occupied and you are set. You can just sit and wait, some will come and kill your civilians.

That is what Japan did. It could have responded in other ways to the embargo and it could have just stayed on its island in peace and not commit horrible attrocities in China, but they chose not to. By choosing to attack a country much more powerfull than they are they condemned themselves (civilians and military).

Re:Other than

[Teun]

Thanks for sharing this interresting compilation.

I'm sure you could find a similar number of high ranking officials with a contrary view but they are allways in the lime light anyway.

It is the fact we hear these statements so rarely that gives them an extra dimention.

Re:Other than

[drgonzo59]

That is the first mistake, having a goverment that will completely dictate to its people and distort everything any way it sees fit. Having an emperor with an absolut, god-like power is a recipe for disaster. Sooner or later you are bound to have a Caligula that will go nuts and convince everyone that the sky is actually lime green instead of blue .

In a certain way, that still doesn't change the argument that it was the Japanese Emperor that is responsible for the deaths of its people. He might have made them work in the factories (such as the Mitsubishi) but as far as the country being attacked is concerned these individuals are the ones building bombs and torpedos that kill its soldiers.If you remove the builders of the bombs, you save your own soldier's lives. The correct thing would have been not to invade China, not to attack US, to stay nice and quiet in the island and mind its own business.

Re:Other than

[marx]

On the other side, let's imagine that Japan would have won the war (impossible but let's try) do you think they would hesitate bombing New York

By this reasoning it would have been acceptable for the USA to have gassed 6 million Jews to death, because the Germans did not hesitate to do it.

Perhaps you should consider the consistency of your moral system before you desperately try to justify the nuclear bombing of civilians.

Your entire post is just grasping at straws. Isn't it easier for everyone involved if you just admit that it was wrong? In the end, both you and I know that no matter what, you're not going to be able to morally justify dropping a nuclear bomb on a city full of civilians.

Re:Other than

[marx]

The alternative was an invasion, had that happened you'd be bitching about how we should have used the bomb to save the millions that died due to the invasion.

What you are saying here justifies the 9/11 attacks. If the alternative was an invasion by Al Qaeda forces, then certainly the 9/11 attacks were preferable, no? An invasion would have been much messier.

Just stop being such idiots. At least try to apply your argument to the opposite situation, i.e. an attack on American civilians by an enemy of the USA, and I'm sure you would not defend it as morally justifiable.

Re:Other than

[Wieland]

I probably shouldn't feed the troll, but here's some facts for you:

Your claim that the atomic bombs saved many lives is a (much repeated) myth. Japan was already on the verge of total collapse when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. It would most likely have surrendered within weeks, if not days, anyway. Especially since the Russians were about to join the war in the Pacific.
The latter is probably why the Americans were very keen to end the war ASAP: they (understandably, perhaps) wouldn't have wanted the Soviets to gain ground in Japan. Because of this, hundreds of thousands of people, almost all of them innocent civilians, women, elderly and children, died instantly in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even now, sixty years later, people die as a result of the attacks. Among them are children born decades after the war who suffer from genetic deceases caused by the radiation their (grand) parents were exposed to.

Re:Other than

[Echnin]

Dresden only had a fraction of the dead (most say 35,000, some claim more than 100,000 at maximum) of either Hiroshima (240,000), Nagasaki (75,000), or the often-forgotten fire bombings of Tokyo (over 100,000). Many nationalist Japanese actually see this comparison as an example of how the westerners were more reluctant to take the lives of other westerners than Japanese.

Re:Other than

[Cyberax]

Yes, and people in WTC were working towards strengthening USA economic, so they were a valid military target. Right?

After all, you bombed oil plants in Iraq during the Gulf War. How WTC is different?

Re:Other than

[Cyberax]

But was a single plant _worker_ executed for this crime?

Re:Other than

[XchristX]

"there are no innocent people in the country you go to war with."



Hamas, Al-Quaeda and the bloody IRA say the exact same thing.
I guess white people don't like it when the same rule is applied to their women and children, but have no propblem using it to massacre those they consider to be 'der untermenschen'.

Re:Other than

[Alomex]

These repeated restrospective justifications that the a-bombs were dropped to "save lives" are lies.

Wow, quite a statement. And completely false. Truman always insisted (and there is no reason to doubt it) that saving American lives was a prime reason for him to drop the bomb. After Iwo Jima, where the casualty rate was a thousand soldiers a day even while the Japanese defenders were starving and running out of food and water made it obvious that the invasion of a weakened and starved Japan would result in at least ten thousand American soldiers dead.

Moreover, war is politics by other means. So this supposed distinction between military and political reasons is quite artificial. Every single battle we fought in the war was for political reasons, as we could have surrendered (like the French did) rather than fight.

Re:Other than

[Alomex]

Truman always insisted (and there is no reason to doubt it) that saving American lives was a prime reason for him to drop the bomb.

To make this more clear, Truman was a politician and he knew that he could never be reelected if it ever became known that he had sat on a weapon that could have finished the war at once while American soldiers died in the Pacific theatre.

All the same this does not negate the fact that dropping the bomb was (i) convenient politically and (ii) resulted in all likelihood in a lower number of deaths in Japan.

In other words, any way one looks at it, dropping the bomb made sense: in terms of internal politics, in terms of global politics, and in saving deaths.

Remember the battle for Berlin, entirely surrounded and isolated had a death toll of over 70,000 Soviet soldiers and 150,000 German soldiers. And that was just one battle! Imagine how many would have been lost in the battle for Honshu, before reaching Tokyo and then in Tokyo itself.

Re:Other than

[eyeye]

yes that is very acceptable. maybe you should study military history sometime. there are no innocent enemy civilians. anybody contributing to that country is contributing to the death of OUR soldiers. women/children/civilians work in factories help producing weapons/ammo to kill our soldiers. even just working to help feed their soldiers, aids them. there are no innocent people in the country you go to war with.

So none of the people who died in the WTC were innocent?

Re:Other than

[MikeBabcock]

This is cloudier than you make it out to be.

IMHO, scientists and labourers may be immoral or even valid targets for war prisons, but are not in any means enemy combattants until they hold a weapon and aim it at their enemies.

What defines a civilian? They're the people with no means to defend themselves and probably no real interest in being active members of the war.

Are the singers who go to the front and sing for the soldiers combattants? They raise moral and troop effectiveness more than some of those in your list would.

Re:Other than

[Alomex]

There is the small matter of the Japanese being ready to surrender.

They were not ready to surrender in any short term kind of way. Even after two atomic bombs it took Japan seven days and a strong push from the Emperor to issue a surrender. Without the bombs it would have taken at least six months to muster the internal political forces to defeat the Hawks.

To give an idea of how long this can take see under the V for Vietnam, where the US command knew they had lost by during the late periods of the LBJ administration, yet the actual surrender did not take place until 1972, under Nixon/Kissinger.

Re:Other than

[srleffler]

keep in mind is that it was the Japanese that attacked the U.S. What in the hell were they thinking? It is like me attacking the local police department with a baseball bat

Keep in mind that the US was not then the superpower that it is now. IIRC, at the start of the war Japan's military was larger than the US's. They probably didn't think they had so much to lose.

Re:Other than

[canuck57]

Ellis makes it clear beyond reasonable dispute that the a-bombs were dropped for POLITICAL reasons, not MILITARY reasons.

These repeated restrospective justifications that the a-bombs were dropped to "save lives" are lies. They are lies that you wish to believe because otherwise you might have to face up to the reality that sometimes the USA has done evil things. It's better to accept that the USA is fallible - just like every other democracy - and admit that the a-bombs were a MISTAKE.

The political reasons were the emperor wasn't talking peace. This drove the Jananese military to fight even though winning was hopeless. This would cause more deaths. Dropping the bomb sent the message straight to the (political) emperor that the US was resolved at winning the war and thus he had to come to grips with reality. This message was strong enough the emperor could not self deny it.

It might be best phrased, it saved American lives. Iwo Jima was bloody, as were other fronts at the time. The world was tired of war (WWW II) and anything to end it would be popular. And a land invasion of Japan would be a blood bath for both sides.

Things might be different for you if you had relatives in China, Pearl Harbour, a Nazi camp or in the eastern front that could pass down their stories of Germany and Japan.

Fighting a half assed war gets you Vietnam.

Now time for the moderators to mod this down for being critial of a popular but historically incomplete post.

Re:Other than

[ThirdOfThree]

Are you implying that citizens of a nation can "have" any government they want at the snap of a finger?

Get real, bud. You didn't choose whatever democratic nation you were born into, and those who are born into totalitarian states have no choice but to obey their ruler.

You can rant and rave about how bad this or that type of government is, but a so-called "regime change" is a little harder to implement.

Re:Other than

[MightyMartian]

I think it's very easy to judge the actions of people 60 years after the fact. At the time, the objective was to win the war. Right or wrong, that's where the US was. Those bombs could end the war very quickly, and that was what was decided. Was it immoral? Possibly. Was it strategically wrong? Well, no, because after the second bomb, the Empire of Japan was completely prostrate, having lost all will to continue. That was the military point. Like it or not, in a total war, you don't sit there and go "I hope I don't kill too many civilians." It's an ugly thing to say, but to think that Truman and his military advisors were thinking any other way betrays such an absolute misunderstanding of the nature of WWII that, whatever the moral certitude applied, the reality seems much different. Truman had the life and death of Americans to hold, and, whether or not it was a moral decision, he chose to preserve American soldiers by stopping the war immediately.

I'll wager you right now that if the Brits had had the bomb in 1943, they would have dropped it on some major German city, and the likes of Churchill would not have stopped to think about it for a second. Sure the Americans and the Soviets were in the war, and Germany was doomed, but imagine the lives and resources that would have been spared.

That's the ugly, hideous math of war, and it's as good an argument for why we should strive to do everything in our power to not go to war. But at least the spectre of Hiroshima and Nagasaki kept the two superpowers and their allies from doing anything incredibly stupid during the Cold War. Perhaps the bomb was not only a peacemaker, but a peacekeeper.

Re:Other than

[Sparr0]

Most of the town employees where working at the plant building weapons and ammunition to kill Americans.

No, they were building weapons and ammunition.

Guns don't kill people, ... you know the rest.

Re:Other than

[russotto]

By attacking at Pearl Harbor, Japan was opening the door to war. They knew what war entails; they'd been conducting it for some time by then. They didn't know the means which would be used on them, but that's not really critical.

The definition of "innocent", is in fact, key. The assumption seems to be that civilians are and members of the military aren't. But that's not so. The sailors killed at Pearl Harbor were every bit as innocent as any Japanese civilian killed. The US wasn't at war with Japan, after all. Further, assuming that conducting war against Japan was justified for the US, the soldiers and sailors the US then subsequently sent to war against Japan were _also innocent_. So were all those who would have had to participate in an invasion if the bombs hadn't dropped. On the other hand, those civilians working in munitions factories and such were just as culpable for the war as any Japanese soldier was.

So what you end up with is not a choice of killing innocents to save those who are not innocent, but of killing their people to save your own. There's no morally clean choice, which isn't surprising; morality has already broken down when there's war, so those Marquis de Queensbury-type rules Ms Anscombe pooh-poohs are all you have left.

Re:Other than

[Alomex]

Us command didn't lose shit in Vietnam, LBJ and the U.S. media gave victory to the NVA.

This is the standard BS put out by the pentagon. All wars are fought until one side cries uncle. If one side is willing to fight forever and the other isn't then the former wins (see Afghanistan vs USSR).

Our side was unwilling to see more than 50K soldiers die. In contrast the other side (VC) was quite comfortable to launch several offensives (such as Tet) even if the kill ratio was 10 to 1. So we had to cry uncle.

The United States Military carried out every single objective laid out to them by the politicians.

But they didn't carry them at the personnel cost that America was willing to bear. So they failed.

Re:Other than

[mickwd]

"In a more philosophical sense, there were few real civilians as they were almost all helping the war effort one way or another (Japanese are efficient that way)."

What a deplorable, inhuman, racist comment.

Wouldn't civilians in ANY country at war "help the war effort one way or another" ?

And yet most people (other than yourself) seem to maintain a distinction between civilians and the military.

Then again, if you dehumanise the people of another country, and make them seem less than human, it makes it easier for people on your side to want to kill them. An important factor during WW2, and one you seem unwilling to learn from.

Re:Other than

[mickwd]

"The issue of "civilian" vs. "fighter" is often not a black and white kind of thing."

"You are right, the children weren't fighting yet, but the ones in Berlin were, and if we invaded Japan a lot more children would have been dead, because they would have been forced to defend "the Empire""

"It was their goverment that sealed the fate of its children and elderly when they....."

Have you ever considered joining Al-Qaeda ? Your views about deaths of civilians seem remarkably similar to theirs.

Re:Other than

[Rakishi]

Of course it makes them easier to kill, in addition if you distance yourself from being human it is also easier to kill the other side.

WW2 was a something very different from what you or I have ever lived through. I think this comment says it quite well: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=159590&cid=133 65768

Re:Other than

[onepoint]

Well, for a perspective of war, NYC would have been a major target, along with NJ and it's coast line. why, it's a hub, and hub's have to be brought down to reduce the flow of supplies. this is only during war, but if japan won, most americans would have become slaves to the new government. don't forget what happen to the Asians that were defeated.

as for the gassing, the American legal system had a check and balance that went lopsided ( the American japanese suffered in there own Concentration camps here in US soil ), lucky for us, the ability to kill in the manner that the Nazi's did ( racial purity upbringing and brain washing ) is not common.

onepoint

Re:Other than

[Rakishi]

I simply meant that saying some group is "unintelligent" or "not deserving of modern civilization" is stupid considering where our ancestors came from. The Germans in ww2 followed almost as blindly as the Japanese, and so did the Soviets after the war (seems they loved Stalin and couldn't believe he'd be sending them to siberia).

Can't really blame a people for their government or following their government, psychology studies show we have some ingrained desire to follow authority figures even if they make us commit horrid acts. Add in some good propaganda, maybe some fear, and it goes downhill even faster, look how much Americans hated communists after ww2.

Re:Other than

[lgw]

The proper response to all of your points is "who cares". The purpose of war is and can one be one thing: render the enemy *unable* to resist your political will by destroying his warfighters, his manufacturing base and logistical infrastructure, and the will of his people to continue fighting.

Unpleasant, isn't it?

Considerations of combatants vs civilian targets, willing vs unwilling workers, and anything else are only relevant to optimizing the process of destroying the enemies ability and will to resist.

The only "moral" war is the war not fought. Once you're at war, through your choice or your opponent's, the only consideration is victory. If you don't understand this, you will be conquered by someone who does, and therefore when you're drafted by your oppressors for the *next* war, you'll be back to the way wars are really fought (unless, of course, another country saves your ass).

Re:Other than

[Rakishi]

...seeing as Al-Queda had no plans to invade, no.

In addition, in ww2 the US was in the "morally correct" camp to a rather large degree. The Japanese in their imperialistic campaign of conquest tortured and murdered untold thousands. Go look up the "Rape of Nanking" or as the Japanese history books call it "The Nanking Incident". The US was dragged into this war, although it was trying to get dragged in at that point so it's irrelevant. Its goal was to stop the Japanese from further conquest, restore conquered nations and prevent a similar act in the future.

Also, learn to make better analogies.

Re:Other than

[lgw]

The WTC was different in two clear ways. The attack on the WTC, like the attack on Pear Harbor, was an attack designed to start a war. The only rational way to fight a war is ruthlessly. Choosing to start a war is therefore a moral abomination, but at least a war between nations will end once one side loses it's ability to fight.

Secondly, the WTC attack was far worse than Pearl Harbor because the attackers were not uniformed warfighters acting on behalf of a government willing to take responsibility for their actions. When war is an extension of politics, it's at least possible to reach a political conclusion. When war is merely an act of vandalism, it fails to serve even a political purpose, and therefore can never end short of the complee destruction of one side.

Attacking enemy civilians is normal in war, but hiding amoung your own civilians is about the only thing that makes war even more of a moral outrage. There is considerable difference between guerilla fighters and terrorists, which some choose to ignore because of their hatred for a political party.

Re:Other than

[lgw]

This way of thinking was initiated somewhere in the late 19th century

Good points, but it's worth noting that this way of thinking has never been taken further than the Spartans did 2500 years before the 19th century. It's not a new idea. The interesting thing history teaches us is that complete political committment to the war is just as effective as urning every aspect of society on its head. The political committment (what Clausewitz called moral strength) is incredibly important, however, and is America's greatest weakness today.

Re:Other than

[Rakishi]

240000 at Hiroshima? Most I can find is 140k including those who died of radiation afterwards. Dresden claims go up to something like 250k but those are probably not reliable.

Re:Other than

[brettlbecker]

I'm sure Bush would be very proud of you for using the term "Enemy Combatant"... considering it was Alberto Gonzales who came up with it so the US didn't have to deal with international POW laws.

It's also interesting that you support the outright killing of civilians if 1) as a one-time option, it will lead to the quicker resolution of the war 2) if said civilians had any part to play in the military-industrial infrastructure of the enemy country (to which I'd point out that even the most strident pacifist's tax dollars go to Halliburton and Lockheed - there isn't anything you can do about it) 3) if it's just plain easier than mounting an invasion.

Are you in the "let's just nuke the Middle East and get it over with!" camp? With arguments like the ones you are making, it seems the slaughter of a few more million people as a means to an end wouldn't terribly bother you. And hey! Then we'd have the oil!

When you say that Japan wasn't provoked in the slightest by the US, you do realize that the US had imposed a scrap metal boycott, followed by an oil boycott, a freeze of assets and the closing of the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping due to Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1937.

Have a read here.

You might not consider than justification for attack, but it's patently obvious that someone in the higher echelons of the Japanese government did.

You also seem to not realize just how close the Japanese came to decimating our entire Pacific fleet. If the carriers hadn't been out on maneuvers, they would've been seriously damaged. And the jury remains out on whether or not the US had some foreknowledge of the attack, so there's at least the suspicicion of US governmental involvement.

Things are, as you say, not as black and white as they may first seem.

B

Re:Other than

[lgw]

As it turns out, Truman's message to Stalin was more important than a few thousand lives. The stakes in the Cold War were the human species (and propbably most land animals). Using one "unneccesary" nuke was a small price to pay if it meant even a 1% lower change of using the 25,000 nukes stockpiled at the height of the Cold War. Heck, even if it meant a 0.01% lower chance, it was easily worth it.

Everything horrible thing the US did, from Nagasaki to every little puppet dictator the CIA put in place, is all peanuts compared to the horror that would have resulted from either side perceiving the other as too weak. It's great that an entire generation grew up not having to Fear the Bomb, but learn enough history to put things in perspective. After all, we still have 2,500 nukes ready and waiting for someone to go too far.

Re:Other than

[drgonzo59]

Yes, it is the people who can and should choose the goverment they want. I never implied that it would be easy. The sacrifices are made for the generations to come, once and for a very long time (hopefully). I just don't think that many Japanese were against the war. They just blindly followed some crazy dude that decided to attack a giant and powerful country.

I didn't have a choice were I was born (my parents might have).Instead I chose the nation to live in (American) and in which nation my kids will be born (American). Regime change is hard to implement but once in place it lasts. The Americans had to fight for Independence from Britain once and for all, now we have a free country. Would you say that the sacrifice was worth it? Or should the collonists have said "a regime change is pretty hard, we'll never do anything, let's not start a war"?

How about living under Communists? Did you live in a Comunist country that had an almost totalitarial regime? I did, so what happened, people got sick of it and went into the streets, got shot and killed and then more people went into the streets and were trampled by tanks but in the end it is the people who won not the goverment. Sacrifices were made once and now the country is free.

You have to understand that in order for goverment and its offices to exists it has to have a majority approval. If all of a sudden everyone in US decided that killing and pillaging is "alright" then there wouldn't be enough army, police or other government force to stop them. It so happens that most people agree that would not be acceptable and agree that the current goverment model (parhaps not the ruling party though).

Re:Other than

[drgonzo59]

I was presenting what the American view might have been. Heck, I am not even American (nor Japanese). To me both sides were brutal. I was just trying to present what would have been the American point of view in all of that.

Have you ever considered joining Al-Qaeda ? Your views about deaths of civilians seem remarkably similar to theirs.

No, I didn't consider joining Al-Qaeda, but I also didn't consider joining the US Army. So take it for whatever its worth.

So didn't you rather meant to say that "Al Qaeda also knows very well about the effectiveness and shock value of civilian deaths, since they probably learned from the American actions in WWII"

Re:Other than

[Hercynium]

> Fighting a half assed war gets you Vietnam.

Heard and seconded. Victory in war requires two absolute things:

  1. A clear definition of victory (usually the un-conditional surrender of the enemy)
  2. The willingness to do *whatever* it takes to achieve that goal.

A nation that can not support, muster, and maintain both of these should not be fighting... even if they started out with them.

Re:Other than

[drgonzo59]

The key phrase is "...due to Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1937". Japan deserved the embargo. It should have suckit it up and stay nicely on its island. They chose to be expansionistic, they chose to attack, they chose to be brutal, so in fact they chose to either conquer America or have many of its citizens killed. The later happened. It is like they sentences themselves to death and Americans just picked the execution method.

Re:Other than

[mqduck]

Jesus, man. Read the fucking post. Four of those quotes said that Japan was ready to surrender. When we ignored them, Japan was talking to the Russians asking them to get the message to us that they wanted to surrender.

Further, our loss in Vietnam had nothing to do with fighting it "half assed." It was due to the fact that you simply can't occupy a country in which which the people are against you and they have nothing to lose and a long history of colonialism they'll sacrifice anything to shake off. It's similar to why we'll never win in Iraq, no matter how many insurgents we kill. Even if we used the atomic bomb it's impossible to win in either case.

Re:Other than

[Echnin]

Whoops, you're right. Must have read it wrong. My apologies. 250000 sounds very unlikely, considering only 650000 people actually lived there at the time...

Re:Other than

[Alomex]

But they couldn't have fought on forever.

The VC had fought for 28 years until Tet, so they could have fought another 28.

the fact is they couldn't have launched another Tet Offensive even if they wanted to.

You are making the same mistakes of classically trained soldiers (are you an officer by any chance?). Yes, the VC might have not been able to launch another traditional offensive, as Tet was (even this is debatable but lets concede the point for argument's sake). Instead the VC would have gone back to the guerilla tactics for a few years until they had time to lick their wounds and replenish their forces. Iraq today is a good example of the large amount of damage that a very small but determined guerrilla force can inflict, until a point that is not worth hanging on (see also Algeria).

Re:Other than

[Anonymous Cowpat]

Actually, Admiral Yamamoto predicted only 6 months of victory if Japan started a war with the US. 6 months later, Japan was on the back foot.
Unfortunately, Admiral Yamamoto wasn't the one making the decision to go to war.

Re:Other than

[Cadallin]

Off topic, but about your sig, you do know that shortages of skilled personel are a GOOD thing for a Profession don't you?

Personel Shortages mean the opportunity to say to an asshole employer, "Fuck You" and leave, no worries. It means job security generally, better pay, better benefits, more professional respect, etc.

Pharmacy, in the USA, currently is enjoying such a situation, has been for many years, and should continue to do so, given current growth trends.

My Grandfather, before he retired, could get an over 100K/year+benefits job, anywhere in the 'States, within 24 hours, if he so chose. Offers from people trying to hire him were a weekly thing, and he wasn't even looking! Fresh 'grads today can do the same thing.

Isn't this a situation you should WANT? To possess immense bargaining power with your potential employers, because of your very real market value?

Re:Other than

[Alomex]

Actually compared to the previous wars America had fought, Vietnam Casualities were no where near as high.

Not so, Vietnam deaths were almost double than those from the Korean War and about the same as the First World War. Only the Civil War and WWII reported a higher number of deaths.

  Militarily America was superior to the Vietnamese,

That goes without saying, as we had atomic bombs and they didn't.

But the Vietnamese beat the U.S. government in the propaganda war, and not only that, they won the propaganda war over the american people!

I'd like to think that Americans would have never fully and wholeheartedly backed a war half a world away against a people holding a strategically insignificant territory and whose primary demand had always been independence. But hey, maybe you are right and all that was needed was more and better propaganda and the VC could have killed another 50K young Americans.

Re:Other than

[Anonymous Cowpat]

Actually Germany was one of the few countries (if not the only country) that didn't properly use it's available female workforce - everyone else did.
Children-Kitchen-Church. There's no 'War Factory' in there and that's how it was kept. Certainly married women were kept out of the factories.

Re:Other than

[Alomex]

you do know that shortages of skilled personel are a GOOD thing for a Profession don't you?

Good point, and I'm aware of it since for the last n years I've benefited from it. However if the shortages get too large, we run the risk of all of our jobs being shipped abroad.

Re:Other than

[marx]

You're avoiding the question. Was 9/11 morally justified? With your argument, it was. Whether I want to spend the time to make up good analogies or not is irrelevant. You clearly understood what I meant.

You're defending bombing civilians, which makes you a supporter of terrorism. Basically your viewpoint is this: terrorism is bad when Americans are victims, terrorism is acceptable when Japanese or Muslims are victims.

Re:Other than

[multiplexo]

Why the Hell is this modded Flamebait? Truman was Commander in Chief of the US forces. If dropping the bomb on Japan saved the life of one American serviceman then he was obliged to do it. I suggest that all of the bleeding heart dickheads out there read Paul Fussell's wonderful "Thank God for the Atom Bomb", after they've pulled their heads out of their asses that is.

Re:Other than

[Raul654]

Um, no, you're flat out wrong, and the ignorance of your statement is scary.

The grandparent post wasn't joking when he said the Vietcong was demolished. The war went on for 7 years after Tet, but the VC never again played a significant role. Nor, for the record, were they given teh support to. The NVA simply did not trust the Vietcong and did not encourage them to rebuild.

Thus, after Tet, the conflict went from being a guerilla insurgency in the south back by an organized military in the north to an almost classical organized military conflict.

I suggest you read Vietnam At War, by Phillip Davidson (the Chief of US intelligence during the war).

Re:Other than

[Cyberax]

As far as I remember, Osama bin Laden proclaimed Jihad long before 9/11. So technically they were at the state of war with USA, and they even had the courtesy to warn you about it.

For instance, your press persistantly writes about Chechen "rebels" and "combatants" (almost never calling them "terrorists"), even during http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostag e_crisis , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beslan_school_hostage _crisis and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budyonnovsk_hospital_ hostage_crisis

So why do you call 9/11 a _terrorist_ attack?

Re:Other than

[Rakishi]

You're avoiding the question. Was 9/11 morally justified? With your argument, it was. Whether I want to spend the time to make up good analogies or not is irrelevant. You clearly understood what I meant.

I simply claim that in the instance at question I find the bombings to be justifiable in the sense of causing less loss of life. I never claim any such bombing is justifiable, only that given the circumstances the bombings in question seem justifiable to me. If you cannot distinguish two events, even identical, happening under different circumstances as being two different events then I'm sorry however arguing with you is pointless as you lack grasp of reality.

I really didn't understand what you mean as your question seemed pointless and worthless to me, and utilized flawed logic.

There is no such thing as universal morality, trying to justify things as moral or immoral is very-society centric. In ww2, the overall goal was by almost everyone found to be morally justifiable, including the enemy after the war, so I considered the bombing within that context. I lack a sense of large scale morality so I try to work with what other people use for their claims. As such I used the metric of how many people died, civilians included, on both sides instead of some fuzzy "moral" compass.

Anyway, I don't find Al-Queda's reasoning for 9/11 particularly convincing nor have I seen it actually achieve much besides bolster Al-Queda's ranks (which I wouldn't consider a justification for such an act). I nonetheless I understand their actions on some level despite seeing them as flawed so I cannot simply wave a stick and say "bad Al-Queda, bad, blowing up buildings is not good." I for example don't find the attacks on Madrid or England so be as unjustifiable as by then Iraq could be used as a reason. Nonetheless I don't find the overall reasons for the attacks to hold much water so I can't say they were really justified imho. At this point it either becomes a society-centric thing or you can try to somehow find what the best social system is, and I don't have time for the later. As result I can't really agree with a group which says "Western society and democracy is bad and immoral, only a Muslim theocracy is good."

You're defending bombing civilians, which makes you a supporter of terrorism.

And you basically would have preferred the Allies to do nothing during ww2? I mean, millions of civilians were killed and many died from bombings, some in factories making materials for the war effort. If you claim that killing civilians is morally wrong in all circumstances then you claim that the Allies should have given up as they had no feasible method of fighting which did not involve killing civilians.

Killing civilians alone is not terrorism nor is terrorism killing civilians, one can commit terrorism by attacking military installations for example. Go look up the definition and stop reading whatever crap the media spouts out. A large part of any war is in essence terrorism, you intimidate the enemy by attacking his country, army, industry and civilians in an attempt to cause them to surrender.

Basically your viewpoint is this: terrorism is bad when Americans are victims, terrorism is acceptable when Japanese or Muslims are victims.

Now you're putting words in my mouth, I asked why 9/11 is pertinent to the discussion at hand. I pointed out that there analogy does not hold and my opinions on 9/11 are irrelevant to the questions at hand.

I do have to say that I love being a moderate and coming to my own decisions on topics. Just a few weeks ago I was basically called a spineless anti-war liberal hippie; I think some anti-American jargon was thrown my way as well. Now I'm basically being called some kind of pro-war pro-us right wing psychopath, which is so darn cool.

Re:Other than

[Rakishi]

And you were right about Dresden not killing more people than the a-bombs, thanks for that. And they say Slashdot comments don't teach you anything.

Re:Other than

[Shaper_pmp]

"there are no innocent people in the country you go to war with."

What about conscientious objectors? Or protesters? Or kids? Or ordinary subjects of non-democratic regimes? Or military personnel (subject to court-martial and possible imprisonment or death for refusing an order) who joined up before the current conflict with your country?

What a fucking retarded statement of position.

Re:Other than

[indiechild]

That's exactly what I was thinking. The crew of the Enola Gay sound just like Al Qaida terrorists when they justify blowing up civilians.

Just goes to show... people are scumbags, no matter where in the world you go.

Re:Other than

[BenEnglishAtHome]

if japan won, most americans would have become slaves...

Unlikely. The Japanese never really considered occupying the continental U.S. They had this picture in their minds of a cowboy behind every rock with a rifle, just waiting to pick 'em off. They wanted to take the Pacific by destroying the fleet and our ability to project military power westward. They were looking for a sort of victory through marginalization - if the U.S. were rendered impotent, they could take over Asia and the Pacific without worries. Obviously, they miscalculated. But invade and enslave? I don't think so.

Re:Other than

[lgw]

A terrorist is a guerilla who doesn't wear a uniform and isn't openly associated with a government (actual or wannabe). The uniform is the greatest device ever created by the military to protect civilians. Those who fight without a uniform or without a chain of command to a government have been regarded with great contempt for centuries. The word "terrorist" is new, but the the concept isn't, and the laws and traditions of warfare look very poorly on terrorists and brigands. The Geneva convention, for example, allows such unlawful combatants to be executed at a whim if taken prisoner, as they aren't due the respect of a soldier.

The press in general is totally soft about calling any group "terrorists" for fear of hurting revenues or some other wierd political correctness. Heck, the BBC edited their own archived coverage of the recent London bombings to replace the word "terrorist" with "bomber". I can't explain it at all.

Re:Other than

[Cyberax]

Well, 9/11 terrorists were associated with Afghanistan's government (Osama bin Laden and other talibs) and certainly had a chain of command. So I still can't see why destruction of WTC is not a valid military action.

However, it all becomes clear if we just assume that deliberately killing civilians (like in Hiroshima, Gulf War economic bombings and 9/11) is NOT a valid military act.

Re:Other than

[lgw]

Nah, deliberately killing civilians has been part of almost every war in mankind's history, nothing special there. The enemy civilians are part of the enmy war machine, and are useful targets in any extended war.

The 9/11 terrorists, again, didn't wear uniforms and kept their chain of command a secret as best they could. This is frowned upon, not because of the death of enemy civilians, but because of the death of *friendly* civilians and neutral civilians. Uniforms allow your opponent to limit civilian casualties to some extent. Taking public responsibility for attacks allows the response to be directed at the correct organization. Having public leaders allows for wars to be concluded earlier, through negitiation or assassination.

Wars are always unpleasant, always immoral, but that's no excuse to go out of your way to inflict civilian casualties just for the sake of doing do, when it doesn't help your war effort, or even hinders it! War is a necessary extension of politics, but vandalism isn't. I know it's harder to understand when it's not just black and white, but terrorism really is worse than other forms of war.

Amazing

[Sv-Manowar]

Its amazing that something like this can have lain undiscovered for so long, and a good thing that we can use modern technology to archive it and preserve it for future generations. It's all very well knowing what Einstein theorized, but to see the actual work is something different and humanises the achievement.

Re:amazing

[wasted time]

everything's relative, I guess.

corrections

[maxwellboltzmann]

I'd like to closely look at the corrections on the manuscript...

Re:corrections

[DigiShaman]

Speaking of corrections, one of those equations is missing a bracket...over there on the lower right. Even if it doesn't, you can never have too many brackets. :P

And yes, I'm just joking at the fact that I have no f-ing clue what I'm even remotely looking at. I'm curious to know if others on slashdot can make heads or tails out of it.

Handwriting

[jthayden]

I know German, but I'm still having trouble reading the manuscripts. His n, u, r and m all look very similar. I do like the way the entire page has a slant to the right though. Maybe some student of Freud could read something into that?

Re:Handwriting

[Will2k_is_here]

On the subject of handwriting, it's cool how these manuscripts match the handwriting on my Einstein poster.

Re:Handwriting

[Zxsw85]

You bring forward a very intresting point.
 
Surely the patterns that develop throughout his writting can tell us a lot not only about him but more importantly about the way his brain worked. The value of discovering something such as this might lead us to better understand what differentiates geniuses from us mere mortals.
 
I can't help but wonder what a handwritting expert might be able to say about this.

Re:Handwriting

[sl8r]

I wish people would stop furthering this "looking at the handwriting will tell me more about a person's soul/mind/whatever".

Case in point: Here in Switzerland (bastion of psycho-analysts and -therapists that it is), applying for a job sometimes requires the applicant to submit a hand-written test. Not quite sure but must've been in the early 90's when the head of the Swiss Psychologist's Association went on to say in an interview that the whole handwriting analysis is a hoax and is mainly used by dumb-ass PHBs to appear smarter than they are.

Please stop furthering this meme. It's a hoax. Kthxbye!

Re:Handwriting

[abulafia]

It isn't that hard, really. Or maybe I spent too much time reading my prof's attacks on me... Really, it isn't that hard to read.

Now, understaning it, that's different. I don't have a don't have a degree that would help. (I did calc in a German school, and won awards for various Stupid Math Tricks while there. But I'm over 30 now, and I don't pretend I'm going to do anything interesting.)

I'm going to be reading this for a while. Some of it is hard to translate, some is hard to transliterate, and some of just hard. Fucking cool stuff.

Re:Handwriting

[onekanobe]

It's Sütterlin, the old German style of hand-writing. See here: http://www.peter-doerling.de/Englisch/Sutterlin.ht m

Re:Handwriting

[odin53]

When I was a child, we were taught in school to write script with a slant to the right, which I still do to this day. YMMV -- e.g., I'm American -- but I doubt you can read anything much into it. Incidentally, I wonder if kids today even have penmanship class anymore?

Re:Handwriting

[op12]

I do like the way the entire page has a slant to the right though. Maybe some student of Freud could read something into that?

The table he wrote on was slanted.

Re:Handwriting

[nfarrell]

Modern handwritten German is just as bad. it's particularly annoying when you're trying to decipher love letters - and unlike scientific papers, you can't bluff your way through and pretend you read it all.

Re:Handwriting

[hankwang]

It's Sütterlin, the old German style of hand-writing.

Interesting theory, but no. The web page explains that it was taught at school between 1915 and 1941, while Einstein probably learnt writing between 1885 and 1890. Moreover the letters in Einstein's manuscript don't look anywhere close to those in the Sütterlin script. The only thing that can be said is that Einstein didn't make clear arcade curves (the ones in n, m) which makes it hard to read if you don't know German.

Re:Handwriting

[Entouchable]

Yeah ditto, what is the person, a 16 year old girl?

Re:Handwriting

[hexed_2050]

It's not slanted to the right. It's slanted to the left - he wrote upside-down.

Re:Handwriting

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

I do like the way the entire page has a slant to the right though.

Just like the US government.

It's in German...

[aurb]

The manuscripts are in German. Can someone post a translation? :-)

Re:It's in German...

[Anonymous Coward]

E=MC2

Re:It's in German...

[Tablizer]

No, it's Farfegnugen.

Re:It's in German...

[Mozk]

E=MC2 can be interpreted very differently than the actual equation, E=mc. I realize you're trying to be funny, but yeah...

Re:It's in German...

[Mozk]

Well it looks like Slashdot cannot handle a superscript two, so forget about that.

Re:It's in German...

[C0llegeSTUDent]

How about E = MCC
Nevermind, that sounds terrible!

Re:It's in German...

[Erno_Rubaiyat]

the replies are clever, but can what "important" theory is this?

Re:It's in German...

[maxwell demon]

Never dared to RTFA, did you? From the page linking to the photographs:

Page 2 of the manuscript reports the last scientific discovery of Einstein's career: the prediction of the new state of matter now called the Bose-Einstein condensate. (The 2001 Nobel prize went to its experimental observation in a cold dilute gas.)

Actually the referred-to part in the manuscript is the second paragraph on the second page, which I'd translate as follows:

I claim that in this case a number of molecules growing with the overall density goes into the first quantum state (state without kinetic energy), while the other molecules ditribute according to the parameter value lambda=1. The claim is therefore that something similar occurs as with isothermal compression of steam across the saturation volume. There appears a separation: One part "condenses", the rest remains a "saturated ideal gas" (A=0, lambda=1)

The text after it explains why this happens (i.e. it contains the calculations leading to that conclusion).

High Resolution???

[Anonymous Coward]

Hrm... The words "High" and "Resolution" appearing in a link from a Slashdot article. Certainly this will not need a mirror...

Slashdot

[Vapebait]

News for Quantum Physicists, Stuff that matters

Coral Cache Link

[Dubpal]

Because we all know "High-resolution photographs of the 16-page manuscript are posted on the institute's web site" usually means said website is about to become very uncooperative.

http://www.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl.nyud.net:8090/his tory/Einstein_archive/

Re:Coral Cache Link

[gardyloo]

[...] usually means said website is about to become very uncooperative.

      Yes, well, they're Germans.

      (I kid! I kid!)

Re:Coral Cache Link

[Mahler]

You are also wrong...
'.nl' look it up.

Re:Amazing

[Usquebaugh]

If it's so frigging easy and obvious. When can we expect you to deliver a link to the OCR document?

Yea...Um mmmm....yea Quantum..theory of the monat

[bigbinc]

Am I the only one that read this and didn't cry in amazement??! To be quite honest, I just sat there
and raised a brow in confusion.

Bah, if the Physics ever becomes popular like warping through space using some space/time/contiuum theory, we will just throw billions of dollars at
the problem and everything will be solved.

I don't know, did anybody find ATI putting 200 million transistors on interesting? I thought that was pretty cool.

Re:Amazing

[PsychicX]

When I can get to the site. It won't respond to me.

Re:Bring up average...

[Tablizer]

Actually it would probably be graded "F- for sloppy writing". Had that happen to me (but it um wasn't a breakthru paper, I should point out.)

Re:amazing

[treff89]

Yes. My .sig is clearly no exception.

Re:Amazing

[EvanED]

Um, you're missing the point. The text of the paper has been available for some time. They didn't discover a NEW paper, just the original of one of them.

And as such, an image of what Einstien actually wrote is the ONLY way to present it in a way that hasn't been available before.

Translation of an important footnote

[paiute]

In the margin, he had scribbled:

Und so investieren die Schüler nicht selten mehrere Monate, um einem Problem auf die Spur zu kommen. Von der Literaturrecherche bis zur Slashdotten durchlaufen sie in kleinen Gruppen alle Phasen einer Forschungsarbeit

which can be translated as:

I have elucidated the necessary relationships that describe the General and the Special Theories of Relativity. Now I must add to those the third and last: the Slashdot Theory of Relativity, namely that a URL posted to Slashdot will result in the associated server being relatively quickly removed from our frame of reference.

Re:Translation of an important footnote

[sharky611aol.com]

Slashdot + "High resolution photgraphs" = Tastes like burning.

Re:Translation of an important footnote

[DarkHelmet]

No, you read that wrong... it should instead be:

I have found out a breakthrough on how to unify theories of Gravity and Electromagnetism. Unfortunately, the formulas are too large to write in the footnote here.

Re:Translation of an important footnote

[rob_squared]

The sad thing is, even if it managed that feat, he decided to ignore the strong and weak nuclear forces.

Re:Translation of an important footnote

[Sarlacc83]

P.S. encoded on this document is a map that will lead to the greatest treasures the world has ever known.

P.P.S. Use Lemon Juice

High resolution?

[HorsePunchKid]

This is pretty nifty, but the submitter and I apparently have very different thresholds for considering something "high resolution". These are less than 150dpi, unless these were originally printed on 3×4" sheets of paper or something. If you wanted to print one of these out as a poster or something (hey, don't judge me!), they wouldn't be very attractive. Maybe if you tiled them all together, though.

Am I possibly missing the links to some even-higher-resolution versions?

Re:High resolution?

[Mikey-San]

This is pretty nifty, but the submitter and I apparently have very different thresholds for considering something "high resolution".

To the submitter, it's actually huge.

It's all about your frame of reference.

Re:Article in full

[Night Goat]

This article repost was modified. Mod down. I can't believe I even need to bring this up.

Handwriting...

[doormat]

I'm surprised to see his handwriting is a little bit messy, but doesnt look too bad. I figured it would have been all over the place.

Re:Amazing

[JabberWokky]

I'm not sure any OCR software would work on it. It's typed on a manual typewriter, but a good chunk of it is handwritten symbols in what looks like a fountain pen with an italic nib. Then there are many handwritten notes scrawled in several colors in the margins and in between lines. Not to mention a couple places where the typewritten text has been crossed out and corrected with a pen. Oh, and the stains, rustmarks from paperclip, the folding marks. And of course, the first part is all in handwritten german script with a thick fountain pen with underlines, overlines and various annotation marks.

Looks like a job for academic slave labor - i.e., grad students.

--
Evan

Re:amazing

[hackwrench]

Quantum is the future and it always will be. http://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+future+and+i t+always+will+be

Re:Article in full

[jeronimoe]

Ha! You're right. At first I thought it was fine, but then I finally got through to the real article -- there are quite a few modifications. Unfair for those who can't compare with the real one. Here's the real article in full.

Original Einstein Manuscript Discovered

By TOBY STERLING
Associated Press Writer

The original manuscript of a paper Albert Einstein published in 1926 has been found in the archives of Leiden University's Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics, scholars said Saturday.

The handwritten manuscript titled "Quantum theory of the diatomic ideal gas" was dated December 1925. Considered one of Einstein's last great breakthroughs, it was published in the proceedings of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow in January 1926.

High-resolution photographs of the 160-page, German-language manuscript and an account of its discovery were posted on the institute's Web site.

"It was quite amazing" when a student working on his master's thesis uncovered the delicate manuscript written in Einstein's distinctive scrawl, said professor Carlos Beenakker. "You can even see Einstein's thumbprints in some places, and it's full of notes in the margins and underlining from his editor."

"We're going to keep it as a reminder of his work here, which is quite a pleasurable memory for us," Beenakker said.

The German-born physicist, who was Jewish and part Gypsy, taught in Berlin between 1910 and 1933, fleeing to the United States after Adolf Hitler came to power.

Einstein, whose name is now synonymous with science, was a frequent guest lecturer at Laden in the 1920s due to his friendship with physicist Paul Oppenheimer, among whose papers the manuscript was found.

The paper predicted that at temperatures near absolute zero - around 560 degrees below zero - particles in a gas can reach a state of such low energy that they clump together in one larger pair, a "di-atom."

The idea was developed in collaboration with Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Boshe and the then-theoretical state of matter was dubbed a Bose-Einstein condensation.

In 1985, University of Colorado at Boulder scientists Eric Cornell and Carlos Wiemann created such a condensation using a gas of the element rubidium and were awarded the Nobel peace prize for physics in 2000, together with Wolfgang Amadeus Ketterle of the Californian Institute of Technology.

Beenakker said the student who found the manuscript, Rowdy Boeyink, was painfully reviewing documents in the archive for a thesis on Oppenheimer when he came across the Einstein paper and immediately recognized its importance.

He said Boeyink had found other interesting documents during his search, including a letter from Dutch physicist Niels Bohr, and was all but certain to receive top marks on his thesis.

Re:Article in full -- MOD PARENT UP!

[onekanobe]

Ah, finally, the real deal. Now everyone can read it. Thanks, jeronimoe!

Hey dude

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's what happened:

Japanese plead for a conditional surrender, to leave the emperor as the head of state.

US finds this unacceptable, nukes them twice.

US settles for a conditional surrender, leaving the emperor as the head of state.

Re:Hey dude

[Rakishi]

*sigh*
We had an unconditional surrender, although the emperor was kept as a non-divine figurehead. This was not required although the US probably decided it would lead to the best post-war atmosphere. In addition, I'm rather sure that the Japanese terms involved no occupation of Japan, letting the Japanese prosecute their own war criminals and at least some powers still left to the emperor.

Re:Hey dude

[MightyMartian]

Good grief, have you ever bothered to read history? The Empire of Japan surrendered unconditionally. The decision was made to retain the Emperor as a figurehead, to allow the smoother transition of Japanese society from an essentially militaristic, fascist government to a peaceful one. Considering the success of Japan in the post-war years, I'd have to say that of all the American foreign policy initiatives (such idiotic things Cuba and the Phillipines) the fashioning of modern Japan surely must stand out as an enormous success that turned a determined enemy into an industrious ally. I wish the Americans could do that more often.

Re:Hey dude

[hitmark]

what helped japan back on its feet after WWII was the korean war. japan basicly became a staging ground for the troops and equipment going to south korea.

if it was not for this then god knows how long it would have taken to get japan up and running...

Re:Hey dude

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Good grief, have you ever bothered to read history?

Nah, I figure I might as well help it repeat itself. More fun that way.

Not exactly

[mnemonic_]

Later in his life, Einstein was rather divided over violent and non-violent resistance. For example, in a 1941 letter to a pacifist he said:

If all the young people in America were to act as you intend to act, the country would be defenseless and easily delivered into slavery.

The issue became progressively more cloudy as Einstein aged. A Guardian article details Einstein's conversations with a Japanese pen-pal after World War II:

I didn't write that I was an absolute pacifist but that I have always been a convinced pacifist. That means there are circumstances in which in my opinion it is necessary to use force.

Einstein likely changed his views because of the plight of the Jews in Nazi-ruled Germany and elsewhere. Though he was not a practicing Jew, he still felt connected to the Semite people and served the Technion Institute in Israel. By the circumstances of his time, Einstein accepted war as a necessity to combat extraordinary evils.

Re:Not exactly

[Concerned Onlooker]

It seems a reasonable, if weird, position. You can feel in your core a disgust of violence, yet if you completely reject the use of force only the pricks and sociopaths will win in the end because they will always happily resort to violence.

Re:Not exactly

[zootm]

Your parent post was referring to atomic warfare, however, which I think was less of a contentious subject for him.

Re:Not exactly

[LuSiDe]

You can feel in your core a disgust of violence, yet if you completely reject the use of force only the pricks and sociopaths will win in the end because they will always happily resort to violence.

...except the theory applied doesn't work well in practice: We really need law X and war Y. Its necessary! Its again commu^H^H^H^H^Hterrorism! One can always say: I really did my best, but we have to do Z. And the people eat it for breakfast. Because the secret service has some evidence about alie^H^H^H^Hterrorists they are not allowed to disclose. But its real! Trust us! Its similar for national laws...

Although not entirely related i just got reminded to a very good movie: Paths of Glory, by Stanley Kubrick. It deals with the selfishness/self-interest of people, who'd use that to act lying, having enormous consequences when these people are to decide over (e.g. the lives of) others. And the others acting in good faith, not knowing the story behind it, or getting threatened by force to do A or B.

Re:Not exactly

[TheBracket]

Einstein's position is actually quite a common one in Liberal (not the capital L, Liberalism rather than the wierd modern-American meaning) circles. It is very consistent with a laissez-faire society to say that in general you oppose the use of force, but when something as major as your way of life is threatened you will resort to it (assuming there is no other way). It is a realistic approach, really - while you'd love to have a peaceful world, you accept that sometimes not everybody plays the same ball-game.

Re:Not exactly

[Ironsides]

Einstein's position is actually quite a common one in Liberal (not the capital L, Liberalism rather than the wierd modern-American meaning) circles. It is very consistent with a laissez-faire society to say that in general you oppose the use of force, but when something as major as your way of life is threatened you will resort to it (assuming there is no other way). It is a realistic approach, really - while you'd love to have a peaceful world, you accept that sometimes not everybody plays the same ball-game.

should that be "note the capital L"?

I think most people feel the way, that force is sometimes necessary. I'm pretty sure most people in the US military feel this way too (i've known a pretty good sample of officers, and they all feel this way).

"The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war." - Douglas MacArthur

Re:Not exactly

[TheBracket]

should that be "note the capital L"?

Oops - yes it should!

You are absolutely right about most military types, and their attitude towards the use of force. It isn't just the US military - I've known people from militaries ranging from the US to Turkey (via the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Greece!) who would agree with the sentiment. Very few civilized people actually like war, sometimes you're stuck with it.

Re:Not exactly

[mqduck]

Allow me to quote the summary from a relevant book, on Einstein's large FBI file:
http://www.leftbooks.com/cgi-local/SoftCart.exe/on line-store/scstore/p-bsmp2002ef.html?E+scstore

Using material newly obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Fred Jerome weaves information from Albert Einstein's almost two-thousand-page FBI file with the history of the period to create a spy-story-like narrative that also explores Einstein's political dimension.

From the moment Albert Einstein arrived in the United States in 1933, the year of the Nazis' ascent to power in Germany, until his death in 1955, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, assisted by several other federal agencies, began feverishly collecting "derogatory information" in an effort to undermine the renowned physicist's influence and destroy his reputation. For the first time, Fred Jerome tells the in depth of that anti-Einstein campaign, explains why and how the campaign originated, and provides the first detailed picture of Einstein's little-known political activism.

Unlike the popular image of Einstein as an absentminded, head-in-the-clouds genius, he was in fact intensely interested in the larger society and felt it was his duty to use his worldwide fame to help advance the cause of social justice. Einstein was a fervent pacifist, socialist, internationalist, and an outspoken critic of racism (he considered racism America's "worst disease"), as well as a friend of celebrated African Americans Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois. Einstein dared to use his immense prestige to denounce Joseph McCarthy at the height of the feared senator's power, and publicly urged witnesses to refuse to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The story that emerges not only reveals a little-known aspect of Einstein's considerable social and humanitarian concerns, but underscores the dangers that can arise to the American republic and the rule of law in times of obsession with national security.

Re:Not exactly

[demachina]

Another interesting letter to add to the mix was one to the New York Times, to which he was a prominent signatory, which condemns the massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin in 1948 and is especially critical of a future Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, refering to him and his Freedom party as Fascists.

The massacre at Deir Yassin helped propel many Palestinians in to abandoning their homes and home lands for refugee camps.

Re:amazing

[Rhinobird]

I want some quantum quantums. I that would be smurfy.

One more manuscript to a pool of many scans

[schestowitz]

If it took them 80 years to find his manuscript, one wonders how much of his privacy is in jeopardy.

For the curious, I think it's been 2 or 3 years since Albert's manuscripts were put in:

http://alberteinstein.info/

I remember the announcement from Reuters at the time.

Einstein and Elvis

[cortex]

So much has made of Einstein's (admittedly great) discoveries for so long I am beginning to place him in the same mental catagory as Elvis...

"Yet another Einstein sighting, nothing to see here, move along."

Anyone else feel the same?

Re:Einstein and Elvis

[ta_council]

er...no.

back at ya

[larry bagina]

Einstein divorced Mileva on February 14, 1919, and married his cousin Elsa Löwenthal (née Einstein: Löwenthal was the surname of her first husband, Max) on June 2, 1919. Elsa was Albert's first cousin (maternally) and his second cousin (paternally). She was three years older than Albert, and had nursed him to health after he had suffered a partial nervous breakdown combined with a severe stomach ailment.

Re:Amazing

[MavEtJu]

The dailytimes article didn't mention that it was found in a private archive instead of the universities main archive.

absolute zero, or below zero? (dept nitpicking)

[MavEtJu]

Don't you love if when they use figures without giving the units?

The paper predicted that at temperatures near absolute zero - around 460 degrees below zero -

So absolute zero is 460 degrees below zero, but I have been tought that it was 273 degrees below zero.

So if Toby Sterling is reading: The absolute zero is:

- zero Kelvin
- minus 273.15 degrees Celcius
- minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit

Feel free to properly describe it next time!

Re:absolute zero, or below zero? (dept nitpicking)

[hexed_2050]

minus 273.15 degrees Celcius Sigh.. winter in Canada will be here sooner than later :(

Table?

[lullabud]

Table? Oh, right. I thought we were talking about politics.

Original?

[Tablizer]

How do we know it is original? Maybe he copied it from something else that is now lost. Maybe he slowly formed it up over time from napkin scribbles into a neater document each re-write generation. Originality may be relative :-)

Perhaps by "original", they mean in Einstein's own writing, not necessarily the first draft.

Re:Plagiarism

[Mazem]

A lot of the "plagarism" that the paper accuses Einstein of is not actually plagarism, but rather misattributions by other people.

Further, the article lost all credibility when I got to this quote:

It turns out that Einstein mixed kinematics and mechanics, and out popped the neutrino. The neutrino may be a mythical particle accidentally created by Einstein (Carezani, 1999). We have two choices with respect to neutrinos: there are at least 40 different types or there are zero types. Occam's razor rules here.

:rolleyes:
The author obviously has no clue about the underlying science he is talking about.

How dare they!!!!

[Bob Gelumph]

He hasn't been dead for 50 years, let alone 75!

Aren't they violating copyright by posting images of his work?

Or is this another one of those wacky European loopholes?

Re:How dare they!!!!

[rev_karol]

Violating copyright? He's dead, you gimp. What does he give a fuck?

Re:How dare they!!!!

[Bob Gelumph]

Because, in the US anyway, copyright lasts for 75 years past the death of the author. This was recently upgraded from 50 year, which was upgraded from 20 or 25 years past the death of the asuthor which was, I think upgraded from a fixed 20 years, independent of any particular death.
My first comment was intended to be a joke because I took it for granted that people on slashdot knew, from birth what the current term of copyrights were and that chips implanted by the Department of Homeland Security were automatically updated to inform them of new extensions to the length of copyright

Re:How dare they!!!!

[Bob Gelumph]

Actually, it varies in different countries.
In some, you must put a copyright note on the work, i.e © 2005 Bob Gelumph, whereas other countries require you to register the work for copyright protection, while some countries require you to do nothing, but prove it is your work if there is any contention.
So technically, depending on the country, I might be able to sue you for posting my grade 2 story.
Actually, I will. Who is your ISP? I need to send them a takedown notice and a request for your personal details. (In case you people can't tell (which from the replies to my last response, you couldn't) I am JOKING).

Re:How dare they!!!!

[digitalunity]

Hi, I know you were probably just joking, but just as an FYI...

In most countries, anything pre-Berne convention should be deemed as having NOT been copyrighted unless such notice is included in the work. Copyright laws now dictate that copyright is automatic, and in some countries such as the Netherlands, there are even rights that cannot be signed away.

I didn't see any copyright notices on Einstein's papers, and judging by the date they were authored, it is reasonable to conclude that the text of the documents are not protected in any way.

Re:How dare they!!!!

[tepples]

In most countries, anything pre-Berne convention should be deemed as having NOT been copyrighted unless such notice is included in the work.

Except for one thing: Most countries of "Western" Europe signed on to Berne a lot earlier than the United States did. Therefore, almost anything first published before Berne is subject to the rule that any work whose last surviving author died in 1934 or earlier is in the public domain.

Re:How dare they!!!!

[/dev/trash]

Then why is Mickey Mouse still copyrighted?

Re:How dare they!!!!

[__aabwba5127]

"Or is this another one of those wacky European loopholes?"

Geez man patent & trademark law is MUCH better in Europe. For one, they don't have software patents (yet?). In America works are protected for 105 years after the death of the author, which kinda *sux* compared to canadian or european legislations. Now if you had been talking about the wacky loopholes in asian countries, then I woul've concurred :-)

Mileva Maric

[tereensio]

Any mention of her in the manuscript?

Superman, where are you?

[Yeechang Lee]

Superman, we need your help! Lex Luthor just stole the Einstein document just after its discovery! Fortunately, your friend Jimmy Olsen of the Daily Planet was one of the witnesses; he can tell you what happened.

Re:For Japanese attrocities in China ...

[benna]

The evil of the government is no excuse for us not to do everything we possibly could to avoid killing civilians. As I'm sure you learned in kindergarden, "two wrongs don't make a right." We did not have to sink to their level. What some japanese did does not reflect on all of them. Many Americans have done evil things, but that does not make all Americans evil.

Re:amazing

[fishmasta]

I want some Quantum Leap. "Al! Why havent' I leaped!?" Now that's smurfy.

wife did the writing

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember seeing a documentary in Italy about Einstein and that his first wife did most of the grunt work and writing and copying. So I would say he had bad writing skills because he let others do most of it for him.

Many theories abound about her real input because she wasnt just a secretary but a mathematician in her own right.

It probably means nothing but seems to me when you live and work with someone who is a mathematician, there MUST have been some input.

Then again, many of his bios dont even mention her existence which again probably means nothing but makes you wonder how it can be overlooked.

daniel

Re:Nuclear vs. conventional death

[Decessus]

I see your point that dead is dead. However, don't nuclear weapons have a very adverse effect on the enviornment? If so, then perhaps it would be more beneficial (relatively speaking of course) to use conventional bombs instead of nuclear ones.

Re:For Japanese attrocities in China ...

[shmlco]

"...ask the question "what in the hell was Japan thinking when it attacked U.S.?"

What, no one studied during history class? The Japanese believed that they were being pushed into a corner by Roosevelt and felt that they had to act to protect the Empire. They were thinking that the US was going to slap them with a trade embargo, which we did, in retaliation for Japan's expansionist efforts in China.

They were thinking that, if they eliminated the threat posed by the 7th fleet, strictly a military target, the US would be unable to enforce the embargo, and they'd have an additonal 6 months to a year in which to continue their expansion and seize the resource areas they thought they needed. After which, they'd present us with a fait accompli, and at the worst, sue for peace with their new borders intact.

In short, they did what quite a few people do. They went after what they wanted, and rationalized that no one would be in a position to stop them.

Unfortunately, the American people were outraged by the sneak attack and loss of life, made worse by the mistiming of the diplomatic note announcing the state of war between Japan and the US, which arrived well AFTER the attack took place.

Re:Plagiarism

[someone1234]

LOL, this is why established physicians and engineers build larger and larger neutrino traps from billions of dollars :) To catch a non-existant particle?

Re:Nuclear vs. conventional death

[kbranch]

In fact, in WW2, far more people were killed in single nightly raids over cities than any single nuclear strike.

Only because there have only been two nukes dropped on an actual target. The bombs we dropped on Japan were a tiny fraction of the size of modern bombs (well under 30 kilotons vs. up to about 100 megatons).

Also, think about what would happen when you started carpet bombing with nukes.

Re:For Japanese attrocities in China ...

[benna]

I agree with most of this, but I get the sense from the end of your post that you are passing your own moral responsiblity to the Japanese. There may be every reason in the world the US DID nuke Japan. You've listed some good ones. It does not follow, though, that the US did the right thing.

Re:For Japanese attrocities in China ...

[drgonzo59]

Well, the more exact question, should have been "Didn't they really have any intelligence to estimate that US is many times more powerfull than they are?" It was a huge country that was not crippled by Nazis and that was ready to strike.

The reasonable answer to being pushed into a corner is to appologize for the attrocities commited in China, to return all the conquered territory and to turn against Hitler and become as neutral as possible and perhaps even a US ally. That is what generally Romania did. It was first allied with Germany, as Germany really wanted Romania's energy resourses. But after they saw that it all was going to hell, they switched sides. They lost territory and became a province of the Soviets, but it perhaps spared the lives of its people. Nothing prevented Japan from stopping its expansion and just staying peacefully on its island, minding its own business.

In short, they did what quite a few people do. They went after what they wanted, and rationalized that no one would be in a position to stop them.

While in general it is good to be assertive and try to get what you want, in their case it is like me wanting a Ferrari and then going and stealing one.

Under absolutely no condition

[jd]

Should word of this leak out to the authors of the DMCA or the Sony Bono Copyright Act. I'm not even sure if I'm joking, here. SOMEone is going to try and squeeze money out of this.

I wouldn't go around telling the Department of Homeland Security, either - the idea of someone publishing a guide on how to supercollapse matter would scare them witless.

Re:Under absolutely no condition

[grazzy]

And the guy that came up with the idea isn't even american!! Teh terrorists are coming!

Re:For Japanese attrocities in China ...

[drgonzo59]

I agree. It might not have been the right thing. It is me who thinks it is a right thing, but that doesn't mean much, just my oppinion.

Post fact reasonement ?

[aepervius]

As far as I can remmember the first discovery were done by the russian at the very end of january the other ally a bit of one month later. So retaliation is a bit "doubtful". At that point in time the bombardement of Dresden was only a military goal. If it was really retaliation as you purport this would make it even LESS justifiable and a true warcrime.

Re:Post fact reasonement ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many people either don't know or don't accept that Allied forces were as surprised as anyone to see Dresden destroyed by a firestorm. They realised only after viewing recon photos that the damage was much more extensive than would be explained by the normal effect of incendiaries.

The objective was to destroy Dresden's manufacturing capability, and to that end the death of civilians was inevitable but not an actual goal. It was a delicate decision, but one many said they'd have taken again in the same circumstances.

In different wind conditions the Dresden raid would have killed far fewer civilians, it would have shut down industrial production for a shorter period and we'd not be discussing it now. Just another German city damaged by area bombardment in the European theater, no different from a British city like Southampton, where German bombs fell on houses and schools.

It wasn't until the war was nearly over that Allied commanders realised their precision bombing techniques had improved so much that area bombing was no longer necessary. The lesson early in the 1940s that precision bombing "doesn't work" was hard to shake off even in the light of improved technique. Long after specialist units trained on new navigation techniques had hit individual German military facilities (e.g. a radar control center, or a V1 test site) the main bomber force continued to waste resources on hitting large towns and cities.

Re:Post fact reasonement ?

[Itanshi]

mm dresden yes, but the topic also mentioned the firebombing which is something i know about. the firefighters who fought the blazes had anti perssonelle weapons dropped on them...eh? do some research, this was nearly as bad or worse than the big bombs.

oh yeh, pearl harbor? do we not know that we let them attack us? Again, do some research

Re:For Japanese attrocities in China ...

[shmlco]

To answer your question, no, at that point in time our vast industrial capabilities were not obvious. And to continue the analogy, yes, stealing the Ferrari might be stupid... but then again, if you took out the only cop stationed within 4,500 miles, you might just get away with it.

You're entirely right that they could have backed down -- but really. .. how many nation states (or people, for that matter) are going to back down and admit they were wrong? After all, from their perspective, we were the ones sticking our nose into THEIR business...

Re:Amazing

[Teun]

yet lacked the ability to OCR it.

Was to be expected, this is one of the oldest surviving Universities in the world (8th. Feb. 1575), all these centuries they have done fine with just a quil and inkwell.

Re:For Japanese attrocities in China ...

[shmlco]

Actually, upon reflection, I take back the part about our idustrial capacity not being somewhat obvious.

However, there was still a real question as to whether or not we would mobilize that capacity, as it was apparent that our country was firmly in the grip of an isolationist stance. And even if we DID mobilize at some point in time, we were sure to become entangled in Europe with our Allies first.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Obvious!

[zonix]

His n, u, r and m all look very similar. I do like the way the entire page has a slant to the right though. Maybe some student of Freud could read something into that?

Ah yes, I see now! Without doubt, this shows he subconsciously desired his mother! Desires developed during the Phallic Phase, yadda yadda. :-)

Sorry. Einstein.

z

It's all relative

[Teun]

Fahrenheit/Rankin or Celcius/Kelvin, it's relatively absolutele for this temperature.

Re:Nuclear vs. conventional death

[cheesybagel]

No country has 100 megaton warheads in use.

The US Peacekeeper missile has 10 warheads with 300 kilotons each. Trident II could have 8 warheads with 300 kilotons.

The Russian Topol-M has like 1 warhead with 550 kilotons. Their old R36-M Satan missile can carry a single 25 megaton warhead, but I don't know how many of those they have left.

Except

[zonix]

everything's relative, I guess.

Except the speed of light, I believe.

z

Re:amazing

[vandoravp]

Hmm I don't know about you but I get results for horses on ESPN and Hungarian

Re:For Japanese attrocities in China ...

[eyeye]

Sorry, but the fact they (Japanese) used live humans as petri dishes for deadly bacteria then jumped on them to squeeze out all the blood so they can infect more people and breed more bacteria, somehow, even today, doesn't help at all the cause of those who go around saying "oh the poor Japanese, we shouldn't have bombed them, they are so innocent"

You seem to have difficulty in distinguishing between individual people and entire races. Cant you imagine in that small brain of yours that *just maybe* not the entire japanese race were evil murderers and didnt deserve to die horrible deaths.

By your own logic al qaeda should attack civilians for the military acts of some US soldiers.

Try to think about that for a second.

Look in the margin....

[ch-chuck]

T'would be neat if there was something penciled in like, "I have just devised a simple and elegant methode of implementing a controlled fusion reaction, with ordinary laboratory equipment, which this margin is too small to contain"

Re:One of his last breakthroughs

[hey]

Yeah, what a lazy slacker.

Retrospect

[Anonymous Coward]

Generals (and admirals) are often fighting the last war. In WWI they sent tens of thousands "over the top" to be slaughtered by machine guns. When WWII began they sat behind fixed fortifications assuming they were protected. Why should we believe that they had a clue as to the value of nuclear weapons in ending a war that they were quite ill prepared to win at its start?

Ignoring that question, generals and admirals (and all other officers) gain status through the number of "men at arms" that they command. One nuclear weapon and one plane delivering it equaled an entire bomb wing and many sorties. Of course many officers will be against weapons such as nuclear ones. It lessens their prestige.

Background check

[tepples]

Here in Switzerland (bastion of psycho-analysts and -therapists that it is), applying for a job sometimes requires the applicant to submit a hand-written test.

I'd see the point of that kind of test not as much as a test of one's intelligence but more as a test of one's identity as part of a background check.

Last will and testament

[tepples]

He's dead, you gimp. What does he give a fuck?

If he cared when writing his last will and testament, then the police will care, and a judge will care, at least until the standard life-plus-70 jail sentence is over.

Copyright?

[tepples]

But will the relatives sue over this possible infringement of the Einstein estate's copyright?

Re:Amazing

[orkysoft]

It's the site's lameness filter.

Berlin after the war

[bezuwork's friend]

Stalin got Berlin anyway

Actually, each of the four allies got a section of Berlin. After the Berlin wall, in effect there was the western part and the Russian part. The military of all the allies were able to pass freely into each other's zones at will. Though, not without occasional pot shots at each other.

Oh, Stalin got about 1/2 of Berlin which always confused me.

Lived in Berlin before the wall came down. Was weird riding the subway through the abandoned subway stops (actually inoperative but staffed with Soviet soldiers).

Re:Plagiarism

[jpflip]

Sigh... OK, so this article is complete crap, as a cursory read will show (another poster has pointed out a nonsense passage about neutrinos, for example).

It is true, however, that a lot of the ideas we commonly attribute to Einstein were thought of by others. Poincare and Lorentz, for example, did think a lot about the synchronization of moving clocks and come up with ideas later used in relativity (e.g. Lorentz transforms). Einstein did not attribute all of these sources in his paper, and I believe there was some debate over to what extent he was aware of that work (or of the result of the Michelson-Morley experiment which cast doubt on the idea of the ether). Einstein might even be in some trouble today if he published a paper without references to such things.

Einstein's original contribution was to some extent his way of looking at these problems. Earlier thinkers had noticed practical problems of clock synchronization, but by and large they believed that these were just experimental issues (due to the wind of the ether, for example) that you needed to correct for to obtain the true, absolute time. It was Einstein who declared that different people's clocks actually run differently, and that there is no absolute time (or ether)! His radical idea was that space and time were not absolutes that every observer could agree upon, not that clock synchronization was hard.

I recommend Galison's book "Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps" for a discussion of the lead-up to these sorts of ideas.

Take-out, possibly pizza

[Imposter_of_myself]

Heck, did anyone look at those pics.? It looks like they have grease stains all over them. Was Einstein eating pizza when he was writing these pages ;-)

Title?

[slavemowgli]

The German-language manuscript is titled "Quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas,"

Huh? No, it's not. It's titled "Quantentheorie des einatomigen idealen Gases", and considering that it's written in German, that shouldn't be much of a surprise, either. What you gave above is the translation of the title, not the title itself.

Sheesh. Slashdot editors. :)

Mix of both

[henni16]

I think it is a mix of both: most letters are Latin (script) but some are Sütterlin.
For example, his small type 'z' and the capital 'E' look like Sütterlin.

I think it was quite common to use a mix of both at that time;
I looked into an inherited "Poesiealbum"(*) from that time and it contained very different writing styles:
Completely Sütterlin, completly Latin and very often mixtures of both - some very similar to Einstein's (using Sütterlin 'z' and 'E').

(*autograph book with little poems/remembrances by your friends and relatives)

Re:Confessions of a pacifist

[Concerned Onlooker]

Please go back and read my post. But first, grab a pencil and paper so you can make a few notes for the things that you seem to have forgotten between reading my post and making your own post. Here, I'll help you. These are the notes you should be taking:

1. Poster does not claim to be a pacifist.
2. Poster never claims that all wars are unjustifiable.
3. Poster never stated anything about honoring those who are willing to be killed for (by?) their country.
4. Bravery is not limited to those who volunteer to be cannon fodder.

I think that about wraps it up. Now go ahead, give another shot at a post!

What kind of paper is that?

[Lady_Neil]

I want to buy some!

Nice fascist philosophy.

[expro]

Total victory, no matter the costs, no matter the war crimes committed in pursuing it, relying on the ability of the victors to rewrite history, are what make many of the actions of our own leaders indistinguishable from those they love to demonize.

Become the enemy to beat them. Yet those who pursue these goals can't figure out why some Americans might oppose them.

Re:{proof}

[pdabbadabba]

Er...no. It comes out September 16, 2005. :)

Re:Article in full

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Ha! You're right. At first I thought it was fine, but then I finally got through to the real article

You had to wait until you saw the real article? The fourth and sixth paragraphs didn't tip you off!!??

Re:Article in full

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

there are quite a few modifications. Unfair for those who can't compare with the real one. Here's the real article in full.

Hypocrite.

You: a paper Albert Einstein published in 1926...titled "Quantum theory of the diatomic ideal gas" was dated December 1925...High-resolution photographs of the 160-page, German-language manuscript

The Slashdot summary (!): vinlud writes "The original manuscript of a paper Albert Einstein published in 1925 has been found in the archives of Leiden University's Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics. The German-language manuscript is titled "Quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas," and is dated December 1924. It is considered one of Einstein's last great breakthroughs. High-resolution photographs of the 16-page manuscript are posted on the institute's web site."

You: who was Jewish and part Gypsy and near absolute zero - around 560 degrees below zero

Yeah. Considering -459.67 F is absolute zero.

I would post my own copy here, but a) it's not Slashdotted yet, as far as I see, and b) I wouldn't be able to resist putting my own errors.

Japan was looking to surrender

[xmod2]

In his 1965 study, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (pp. 107, 108), historian Gar Alperovitz writes:

Although Japanese peace feelers had been sent out as early as September 1944 (and [China's] Chiang Kai-shek had been approached regarding surrender possibilities in December 1944), the real effort to end the war began in the spring of 1945. This effort stressed the role of the Soviet Union ...

In mid-April [1945] the [US] Joint Intelligence Committee reported that Japanese leaders were looking for a way to modify the surrender terms to end the war. The State Department was convinced the Emperor was actively seeking a way to stop the fighting.

-

I figured this was pretty common knowledge today. Google will bring up plenty of information on it. Even the history channel has had shows which mention it. /shrug

It was known by American decision makers that the Japanese were looking to arrange terms of surrender. I think it's pretty easy to speculate why they would go ahead regardless...

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html

Nice troll philosophy

[Hercynium]

I won't go into a long boring defense or discussion of ethics or history, but I stand by my statement, especially in the context of the thread.

If a nation *must* go to war, they must intend to win, and decisively. Assuming that war is of necessity to said nation's survival, it is safe to assume that circumstances may become such that victory by 'ethical' means becomes at worst, impossible, or at best, empty.

Try these three statements out:

  1. We've lost and my family is being sent to the prison camps, but at least we fought fair.
  2. We've won but everyone on both sides is dead and our resources are totally spent, but at least we fought fair.
  3. We've just used the most terrible weapon built by man to kill 100,000 civilians, but at least the war is over now and *my* family will live in peace.

You may feel free to interpolate my commentary into some pre-concieved world view applied to current events and political positions. People like you have that luxury in America.

...but it was written in Italian

[infoterror]

...in Olinto de Pretto's handwriting. Or maybe David Hilbert's. Either way, the "original" probably is second-generation from something else.

Re:Confessions of a pacifist

[Concerned Onlooker]

I was just going to let you have the last word, but I decided that you deserved a reply to your well considered post. Basically, I think we're on the same side, but your seemingly at-odds-with-itself reply to my first post was confusing.

So yes, give peace a chance. :-)