Letter to a Physics Teacher

Thanks for writing. I always enjoy getting your views.

I understand passions may run high around questions of nomenclature. I’ve seen how the Catholics fight hard to keep a foot in the door when it comes to naming celestial bodies (demoting Pluto and so on). They used to enjoy a near monopoly on such matters until Galileo made them eat crow for a few centuries. Just yesterday a skilled craftsman was bemoaning when everyone felt compelled to stop speaking of kilo-cycles and speak of kilo-hertz instead.

In many schools, the current practice in literature (say in some small private Quaker college, a Haverford or Swarthmore) is to continue reading Mein Kampf and tracing it to Eugenics on Long Island, Cold Spring Harbor, among other places. Social Darwinism did not begin with German nationalism. My own curriculum assigns writings of H.G. Wells, of The Time Machine fame, on assignment in New York between the two wars… we get to War of the Worlds later (and the Orson Welles CBS radio episode).

War Against The Weak by Edwin Black is a respected history, going deeply into all this stuff. What was that about Henry Ford Sr. being anti-Semitic? How did that go again? More assigned readings. He wised up, much to Hitler’s disappointment.

In geek world (which I frequent), I’ve been lately sitting through tutorials on blockchain etc. at OSCON, even while reviewing Triumph of the Will (a classic Third Reich puff piece) — not to spread Nazi propaganda but to remind people (including myself) how…