Skip to main content

Michael Gordin - Five Way Interview

Michael D. Gordin is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and Dean of the College at Princeton University. A specialist in the history of modern science, he has published books on nuclear weapons, Albert Einstein, and debates over pseudoscience. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, and is a member of the Leopoldina, the National Academy of Sciences of Germany. Along with Diana Buchwald he is co-author of Free Creations of the Human Mind.

Why science?

Science is one of humanity’s most impressive activities, and like all human activities it has a history. Both Diana and I entered the field of the history of science through sustained fascination with physical sciences.

Why this book?

Einstein is the subject of so many studies that one might reasonably ask why there needs to be another book on him. There were two main features we found lacking in the extant biographical literature. First, they are mostly composed by scientists, many of whom are terrific writers. They do not, however, as a rule approach the material with a full integration into the social and political (and personal!) context that is characteristic of trained historians of science and is especially useful for someone as richly documented as Albert Einstein. We wanted to add this perspective, which means we also made very thorough use of Einstein’s archival materials, which Diana and her team are editing into the ongoing Collected Papers project. The second feature is that most Einstein biographies are long. He lived a full, active life, and every corner of it is fascinating. We felt there was a need for a book that would serve as an entry point, one which could show the range of Einstein’s science and life and guide those interested in learning more.

Why do think 70 years after his death there is still such a fascination with Einstein?

Honestly, this remains a mystery. Historians have developed a reasonable set of explanations for why Einstein became so famous in 1919, but the persistence of that fame after his death is a complex problem and resists a single account. Surely the range of his commitments in the political and philosophical sphere, alongside the truly exceptional import of his contributions to almost every area of fundamental physics, plays a role. It seems hard to deny that Einstein’s charisma — he was photogenic and a master of the quotable line — continues to exert a strong appeal.

What’s next?

There are so many areas of Einstein scholarship that remain to be deepened or explored for the first time. Just to pick one such topic, understanding Einstein’s time in the United States (from the early 1930s to his death in 1955) remains very open. We are each continuing our own research projects. For example, Diana is continuing to edit volume 18 of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, which takes the scientist into the early 1930s.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

Personally, I am working on a number of research projects alongside my day job as Dean of the College at Princeton. Primary among those is a history of what happened to Soviet science after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero Degrees of Empathy [The Science of Evil] – Simon Baron-Cohen ***

I’ve been a real fan of previous books by Simon Baron-Cohen like  The Essential Difference , so opening this was one was a pleasant prospect. What I found was a book that wasn’t  bad … but that could have been a lot better. I got the impression of a book that had been rushed out without a lot of work going into it. The thesis at the heart of the book – that one of the important ‘circuits’ of the brain is the one dealing with empathy, and that individuals sit on an empathy spectrum, with some residing at zero degrees of empathy – is an interesting one. Baron-Cohen introduces us to three key personality types he defines as ‘zero-negative’ including psychopaths, plus types that are ‘zero-positive’ like those with Asperger’s. In a way both of these definitions are odd, in that his zero-negatives can actually have a lot of the kind of empathy that involves being able to read another person’s emotional state, and his zero-negatives can have a lot of the kind of empathy i...
Post a Comment
Read more