"I can assure you that the misuse of the word 'national' by our rulers has thoroughly broken me of the habit...

[NNadir]

of national feeling that was so pronounced in my case. I would now be willing to see Germany disappear as a power and merge into a pacified Europe."

- Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld writing to Albert Einstein after the accession of Hitler.

From Sommerfeld's Wikipedia biography:

...Four of Sommerfeld's doctoral students,[21] Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Peter Debye, and Hans Bethe went on to win Nobel Prizes, while others, most notably, Walter Heitler, Rudolf Peierls,[22] Karl Bechert, Hermann Brück, Paul Peter Ewald, Eugene Feenberg,[23] Herbert Fröhlich, Erwin Fues, Ernst Guillemin, Helmut Hönl, Ludwig Hopf, Adolf Kratzer, Otto Laporte, Wilhelm Lenz, Karl Meissner,[24] Rudolf Seeliger, Ernst C. Stückelberg, Heinrich Welker, Gregor Wentzel, Alfred Landé, and Léon Brillouin[25] became famous in their own right. Three of Sommerfeld's postdoctoral supervisees, Linus Pauling,[26] Isidor I. Rabi[27] and Max von Laue,[28] won Nobel Prizes, and ten others, William Allis,[29] Edward Condon,[30] Carl Eckart,[31] Edwin C. Kemble,[32] William V. Houston,[33] Karl Herzfeld,[34] Walther Kossel, Philip M. Morse,[35][36] Howard Robertson,[37] and Wojciech Rubinowicz[38] went on to become famous in their own right. Walter Rogowski, an undergraduate student of Sommerfeld at RWTH Aachen, also went on to become famous in his own right. Max Born believed Sommerfeld's abilities included the "discovery and development of talents".[39] Albert Einstein told Sommerfeld: "What I especially admire about you is that you have, as it were, pounded out of the soil such a large number of young talents."[39] Sommerfeld's style as a professor and institute director did not put distance between him and his colleagues and students. He invited collaboration from them, and their ideas often influenced his own views in physics. He entertained them in his home and met with them in cafes before and after seminars and colloquia. Sommerfeld owned an alpine ski hut to which students were often invited for discussions of physics as demanding as the sport.[40]

While at Munich, Sommerfeld came in contact with the special theory of relativity by Albert Einstein, which was not yet widely accepted. His mathematical contributions to the theory helped its acceptance by the skeptics. In 1914 he worked with Léon Brillouin on the propagation of electromagnetic waves in dispersive media...

A great threat in the rise of fascism in the US is the threat to American preeminence in science, obviously under assault, notably in molecular biology but in many other areas as well.

Another quote from the link above:

All he could do was use the friendships he had built up during a one-year stay in the United States and a one-year round-the-world trip to help place the refugees. The loss of so many of its best men in this way together with World War II, destroyed the scientific strength of Germany, and Sommerfeld felt obliged to continue teaching until 1947, long after the usual retirement age of 65. His life was ended by another tragedy. Somewhat deaf in his old age he failed to hear a warning [when out walking with his grandchildren] and was struck by a truck in the spring of 1951. He died of the injuries two months later.

There is going to be hell to pay for the coming American idiotocracy, with some of the worst men in some of the most important scientific roles. Let's be clear, putting worm brain Kennedy in a role at HHS overseeing science is as egregious as the Nazi's appointment of Wilhelm Müller as a head of theoretical physics in Germany although Müller didn't know a damned thing about theoretical physics.

Germany's scientific losses were gains for the United States, Britain and the rest of the world. I'm not sure who will be the beneficiaries of the loss of the United States' scientific preeminence, now a given, but I'm pretty damned happy that my son is fluent in French and has demonstrated capabilities in learning many new languages, including those of the Orient.

I stumbled upon this reflection while preparing for my son's visit for Christmas where I hope to be informed enough to discuss this paper with him: Solving the discretised neutron diffusion equations using neural networks, which led me through the Jacobi method, to the biography of Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, to a history of University of Königsberg, which is now in Russian territory as an outgrowth of the Potsdam agreement in 1945 (about which I happen to be reading a history), and then to the famous alumnus, Sommerfeld.

If there's any good news, over the long term, science seems to survive idiotocracies, despite its temporal suppressions. Anti-intellectual movements ultimately commit suicide because ignorance always has consequences.

[jmbar2]

1. I cringe when I hear politicians say "the American people"...

Whatever they are proposing will probably be to my detriment.

Your son sounds like another science genius. Enjoy your Christmas discussions. Brainiacs at work.

[NNadir]

3. My son is brighter, more talented, and better looking than I am. His brother is no slouch either, albeit in...

...a different way.

I'm a tiny bit better educated than either of them, but only because I've lived longer than they have.

We don't, however, use the word "genius" in our home, however. It's a bad word. Speaking only for myself, I am merely bright enough to know how intellectually insufficient I am, and merely educated enough to understand how little I know.

This, however, be it as it may, is to what a father should aspire, in my view, children better in every way than he himself is. I can certainly die happy.

Thank you though for your kind words.

[erronis]

2. And the red/white/blue, especially the US flag, have lost their significance and attraction

I just drove through some trump country in western Mass and the faded old glories are looking pretty pathetic.