Einstein visits California

Einstein visits California
A response to "Three Winters in the Sun"

I found Einstein’s three year stay in California to be of particular interest. Going through the multimedia you realize just how brilliant the guy was. Of course you know about the mathematics and the physics, though having never really studied Einstein I never realized how diverse and well rounded his full intellect truly was. What I found most interesting was how he was able to use the many different facets of his life to promote and intertwine the goals and the motives he sought to achieve. He used his fame and his friendship with Charlie Chaplin to promote himself in the glamour of Hollywood. With the spotlight then on him he was able to raise social issues important to him including fighting discrimination, raising awareness of the Nazi party and supporting Zionism. He utilized his connections in LA’s Jewish community to help take in other immigrants who suffered similar oppression though were not as fortunate as Einstein to support themselves.

While Einstein may have ultimately regretted the decision to support the building of the atomic bomb, hindsight is of course 20/20 as the saying goes. When we look back now it is easy to say what could or could not have been done to save lives, and we can more carefully and accurately make the decision with more and more information than was ever available to the commanders during the war. I find it hard to say with any certainty what would have been the best outcome, but instead choose to accept history and look at what could be done the next time to prevent similar circumstances from occurring again. With that said, you laugh at the fact that an ongoing FBI investigation locked Einstein out of the Manhattan Project, arguably one of the most important scientific panels of the 20th century, though at the same time you overlook the fact that hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese-American citizens were locked up in internment camps during the same period. In other words, sure it may seem ridiculous to not let someone help you build a new piece of equipment though if you are completely cutting off a ton of other peoples lives for years on end, not letting one person work on a team is no biggie. In the end one may still question the judgement of the government, though during the war ones allegiances were of most importance and nearly impossible to sort out. While only years after the war the US welcomed ex-Nazi scientists to help them build a vehicle to land on the moon, the fear a foreign agent might leak plans to build and harvest the awesome power of atomic energy were certainly real during the time period.

As far as the CD itself is concerned I found the amount of material available to be very impressive, while the ease with which it was present to be more cumbersome. I liked being able to do so many things at once, like watching a video while panning across photographs, though I missed having some sort of timeline and was regularly confused as I tried to keep dates of trips, events and investigations straight. I found the clippings and text to be a wide array of Einstein’s routine happenings though sometimes I couldn’t read them because of the transparent backgrounds. Overall the information was presented in the way to give the average viewer a quick snapshot of Einstein’s time spent in California and a more in depth look into his extensive life outside numbers and science.