Classmates and friends, I write to you today to share this link to an article in the New York times with the headline How Trump is Undoing 80 Years of American Greatness.
Here's a key sentence from the article: "What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project — which, in the end, wasn’t the bomb but a new way of looking at how science and government can work together."
In email that I sent to you in April I said, "The current administration is aggressively neutralizing any independent source of knowledge, authority or power. Targets include the legal profession, the medical profession, journalism, universities, the Federal Reserve, the Civil Service, the Foreign Service, and science." While my sentence ended with science in lower case, in my mind and experience it is "SCIENCE!" because it's been the focus of not only my professional life, but much of my social and personal life.
So that's the short version of what I have to say. Here is a longer version.
In 1905 Albert Einstein published four papers in Annalen der Physik. Aside from the scientific significance of those papers, note that Einstein was a German secular Jew, and he wrote the papers in German which was his native language and (until 1933 see below) the language of science (or SCIENCE!).
Again from Wikipedia I get:
On 3 October 1933, Einstein delivered a speech on the importance of academic freedom before a packed audience at the Royal Albert Hall in London, with The Times reporting he was wildly cheered throughout. Four days later he returned to the US and took up a position at the Institute for Advanced Study, noted for having become a refuge for scientists fleeing Nazi Germany. At the time, most American universities, including Harvard, Princeton and Yale, had minimal or no Jewish faculty or students, as a result of their Jewish quotas, which lasted until the late 1940s.
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Einstein's affiliation with the Institute for Advanced Study would last until his death in 1955. He was one of the four first selected (along with John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel and Hermann Weyl) at the new Institute.
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In 1939, a group of Hungarian scientists that included émigré physicist Leó Szilárd attempted to alert Washington, D.C. to ongoing Nazi atomic bomb research. The group's warnings were discounted. Einstein and Szilárd, along with other refugees such as Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, "regarded it as their responsibility to alert Americans to the possibility that German scientists might win the race to build an atomic bomb, and to warn that Hitler would be more than willing to resort to such a weapon." To make certain the US was aware of the danger, in July 1939, a few months before the beginning of World War II in Europe, Szilárd and Wigner visited Einstein to explain the possibility of atomic bombs, which Einstein, a pacifist, said he had never considered. He was asked to lend his support by writing a letter, with Szilárd, to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, recommending the US pay attention and engage in its own nuclear weapons research.
The Institute for Advanced Study was founded by German Jewish immigrant families at a time of overt antisemitism in the Ivy League. Although located in Princeton New Jersey, it has never been officially part of the university there. On the other hand, for the first six years, it was housed in Fine Hall with the university's math department. Many of the great mathematicians and physicists of the 20th century had appointments at either Princeton University or the Institute for Advanced Study, and many others visited. The list includes Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, and Alan Turing. That community provided technologies that aided the Allies during WWII; among them, were code breaking, radar, and nuclear weapons.
In the fall of 1941, my father was a freshman at Princeton. While his grandfather had advocated for accepting Jewish lawyers, I think my father's family was fairly antisemitic. He told me that going to math classes in Fine Hall, he could hear those guys talking about the frontiers of math and physics. They were either speaking German or Yiddish. I think my father kind of disapproved.
In December of the same year, Japan and then Germany declared war on the US, and the US Congress returned the compliment. In January of 1943 my father was drafted into the army and sent to Burma. He had a very few things to say about his time in Burma, but to the end of his life he believed that when the war ended 80 years ago this week those Jews in Fine Hall had saved his life.
As the article I linked to at the beginning says, in subsequent years America has built a scientific empire on that experience. The language of science became English as Einstein, et al. moved from Europe to the US and our government began investing in science. For more than 80 years, aspiring and established scientists from the rest of the world have continued to come here and contribute to building that empire.
When I was a freshman at Princeton in 1971, Wigner was still there. In a small seminar, I heard him mock an interpretation of quantum mechanics. As part of building that empire the US government funded most of my education and career in science (and now my retirement).
My son, Adrian, has been pursuing a career in science since 2010. After research institutions paused or stopped hiring in response to dramatic cuts in federal funding, like other aspiring scientists, Adrian is pursuing career opportunities abroad.
Let me conclude by saying that while the MAGA attacks on the constitutional structure of our society may be more damaging than the particular attacks on science, the attacks on science are part of the package, and because of my family's connections to science, I feel those attacks personally. I also believe that the attacks on science will damage all Americans for a long time.