GERMANS ON SCIENCE

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 83, 7 April 1936, Page 10

GERMANS ON SCIENCE

NOT PROPERTY OF MANKIND

The University of Heidelberg has long had a Physikalisches Institut, says the "New York Times." Recently it was renamed the Philipp-Lenard Institut, after Nobel Prize winner Professor Lenaird. i The renaming was celebrated by a'ceremony that lasted two days. Government officials and university professors, who ought to know better, uttered much solemn hokum and flapdoodle about Nordic science. The German Press gave a full account of the doings, which is republished in "Nature," the British scientific weekly. Dr. Wacker, representing the Kultussminister (Minister of Education), made it plain that the ideals of science cherished for 300 years by every investigator regardless ,of nationality, religion, or blood were mere twaddle. He thought it "superficial to speak of science 'as such,' as a common property -of mankind, equally accessible to all peoples and classes and offering them all an equal field of work." The Nazi ideal is utterly different. "The problems of science do not present themselves in the same way to all men. The Negro and the Jew will view the same world differently from the German." This will be startling, news to physicists and psychologists. . EINSTEIN ATTACKED. Professor J. Stark (yes, the Stark of the famous Stark effect) chimed in with an attack on Einstein, whose Weltanschauung and methods he found little short of despicable. Poor Einstein! Others took their fling at him too. There was Professor Tomaschek (Dresden), who traced the history of the ether, explained relativity (Jewish mathematical rubbish, it seems) and contrasted Einstein's limitations with "the living conception of high and holy laws of Nature, such as the Nordic researcher acquires as the result of his innate reverence for the logic and greatness of Nature." In conclusion Professor Lenard, whose anti-Semitism is equalled only by his high attainments as a physicist, voiced his hearty approval .of all the resounding nonsense that he had heard. No one took the trouble to call attention to the contributions of the Semitic Arabs to mathematics, chemistry astronomy, and medicine, or to point out ■ that while -great:. Moorish universities in Spain were cultivating science there was only a wilderness where Heidelberg nt>w stands, a wilderness in which half-naked "Nordics" hunted and warred—barbarians who were regarded by the "non-Aryans" of the Mediterranean as hopelessly inferior to themselves. All of which proves how unsafe it is in the light of history for any race to set Itself apart as the one and only possible carrier of culture