Academics From Germany

"The Gītā, as it is present to us today, is a text in which the religion of a strictly personal god and of the faithful surrender to him in [the attitude of] Bhakti are peculiarly mixed and crossed with the theomonism and the ‘Advaita’ of Upanishadic speculation and which is simultaneously combined with the emergent systems of Sānkhya and Yoga. But Garbe has made it highly probable in his introduction to [his edition of] the Gītā that the present Gītā came about when an older, simpler, and more more equivocal work was defaced by insertions from Vedic priestly theology and changes in the text itself."

"These materials are found in India, in more primitive forms not merely as a late period but in the remotest pre-Christian Kausitakt Upanishad."

"In point of fact the Zind is derived from the Sanskrit, and a passage in Manu (Chapter X, slokes 43-45) makes the Persians to have descended from the Hindus of the second or Warrior caste."

"If we compare the mythology of the Hindus with that of the Greeks, It wilI have nothing to apprehend on the score of intrinsic copiousness. In point of aesthetic value, it is sometimes sup en or, at others, inferior to Greek: while in luxuriance and splendor it has the decided advantage. Olympus, wIth alI its family of gods and goddesses, must yield in pomp and majesty to the palaces of Vishnu and Indra."

"It will scarcely be possible to deny the Mahabharata to be one of the richest compositions in Epic poetry that was ever produced." "The Hindu lyric surpassed that of the Greeks in admitting both the rhyme and blank verse.""

"The gods then console even more when they come to meet man, they, who no pain touches. However, they do not console so much with what they give or promise, but rather with what they are. This is a miracle - and we can call it such - which we do not find only among the ancient Greeks , and yet among them it is among the fundamental characteristics of Hellenic religiosity and allows us to understand their entire spiritual attitude. For the high sensitivity of this type of man there is nothing more satisfying than the awareness that the eternally Blessed are, a knowledge that is already participation - human participation - in the bliss of the gods."

"In the song of the muses the truth of everything resonates as a being filled with the gods, which shines from the depths, revealing the eternal magnificence and blessed intangibility of the divine even in the darkest darkness and suffering greater. This is how the message of the divine reached the Greeks: not as a categorical request or as salvation in this and the other world, but rather as that which is eternal and blessed, which consoles and makes us happy not through promises , but since it is. The spirit of song announces to them the nature of the gods. In fact, singing is essentially their voice. By participating in singing, man can therefore participate in the divine, albeit in his own way, with humility. That which the song elevates into his sacred kingdom belongs to the eternal, that is to say: to that which is timeless and is connected to God."

"The world of Charites however completely reveals its nature only when it is understood that "grace", which is here a divine figure, does not limit itself to signifying that which fascinates with gracefulness, that which spreads happiness, but also the joy and gratitude of being blessed with gift and happiness. As is easy to understand thanks to the well-known linguistic phrases, it is the wonderful kingdom in which giving and thanking are one, lovable giving and lovable taking, where right and justice, claim and reparation, have no access: the kingdom of full grace. A world in which subject and object are truly one, included in the divine splendor of a superior being."

"Apollo depicted in the Western pediment of the Temple of Zeus in Olympia The artist of the temple of Zeus at Olympia depicted his simultaneously powerful and spiritual superiority in the most grandiose and realistic way. In the midst of the wildest tumult, the god suddenly appears, and his outstretched arm imposes calm. It is impossible to bring to expression in a more compelling way the entrance of the divine with all its illuminating clarity and his omniscient gaze."

"There is nothing [...] that can be said with greater certainty about these gods than the fact that they, indifferent to any happiness or pain in the world, live in the fullest bliss. Precisely this character brings us closest to the divinity of the Olympians. And precisely this spirit of celestial intangibility and silent bliss is what still breathes so happily and freely from the figures of the Greek gods today."

"No salvation outside of humanity! These words contain the whole of the religion of the future."

"Love of humanity … belongs undeniably to the conditions of human welfare; but if it consists in mutual assistance in the striving for happiness and wellbeing, and if this happiness and wellbeing consist above all – as is likewise undeniable – in the satisfaction of our inborn natural drives and the development of our natural powers … [then] the most fertile soil for love of humanity will evidently not be the belief that human nature is thoroughly degenerate and worthless, but rather in the view according to which we regard it [viz., human nature] as the essentially and generally acceptable foundation and condition of all our being, feeling, thinking and striving…"

"Not irreligion, not unbelief in the dogmas of the religious communities into which people happen to be born, no! lack of love and ignorance are the two main sources of all earthly calamities."

"Where and under what form life first appeared, whether at the bottom of the deep sea, as bathybius , or whether with the co-operation of the still excessive ultra-violet solar rays, with still higher pressure of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, who can tell?"

"Hardly anyone can now be found to advocate the doctrine of periods of creation by which the Almighty was supposed to have repeatedly destroyed his work to do it over again for better or worse, in the face of geological facts and the theory of descent. The believer in a final cause must admit that such a proceeding is little worthy of a creative Almighty. It is most highly becoming to him once by supernatural interference with the world's mechanism to call the simplest germ of life into being, and let further organic creation proceed from that. If this is conceded, it is permissible to ask if it is not still more worthy of the creative Almighty to avoid even that single intervention by means of established laws, and to endow matter from the beginning with the power of originating life under suitable conditions. There is no reason for denying this view, but with its acceptance the possibility of a mechanical origin of life is conceded, and we have only to consider whether the matter which can thus mechanically compose itself into a living condition always existed, or whether, as Leibnitz thought, it was created by God."

"demonstrated that an injury current, the "demarcation current," flowed between the cut and intact surface of a muscle or nerve, that this current momentarily disappeared when the muscle contracted, and that a cut nerve could be excited when an underlying muscle twitched (the "induced twitch phenomenon"). Du Bois-Reymond recognized that Matteucci's findings could be explained by an action current, the "negative Schwankung," which was an oscillation of the demarcation current and which reflects the excitation of the nerve fibers. It was the first intimation of the nerve impulse and it was from this observation of du Bois-Reymond that the all subsquent work on the nerve impulse evolved. The understanding of the nerve impulse would become the most important task—a holy grail, as it were—for later neuroscientists."

"Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) abandoned his professorship in Theology when he realized that his uncompromisingly secularist reading of the Bible was incompatible with the job of preparing students for a career as Christian ministers. He shifted to Oriental Philology in order to have the freedom to go where his scholarly insights into scripture took him. His great legacy is a candid demythologizing approach to the Bible as a piece of human literature rather than the Word of God. Among other things, his contribution was decisive in establishing the distinction between four editorial traditions that together constitute the Biblical text."

"Though he was opposed mostly by traditional Christians, later detractors have tried to overrule the German professor's findings with the imputation of anti-Jewish motives. I have not seen any evidence for that all too predictable allegation. It would in any case make no difference: the truth of a scholarly hypothesis is not dependent on the motives of its proponents. Sometimes people say the truth for the wrong reasons, just as untruths are sometimes believed and propagated by people with the nicest of motives. So, I salute Wellhausen as a pioneering Orientalist, an explorer and map-maker of religion as a human construct rather than a divine revelation."

"The total weight of taxation, progressive personal taxes hostile to the accumulation of wealth, the "negative saving" of hire purchase, and, above all, the constant expansion of the Welfare State, which undermines both the will and the power of the individual to practise thrift, are the principal forces militating against savings, and accordingly the immediate causes of constant inflationary pressure."

"It is impossible indeed not to look with considerable uneasiness at the type of the "modern economist" as he developed after Keynes' revolutionary book, whom Keynes himself regarded with alarm at the end of his days. It is the type of man who is obsessed by one thing, i.e. "effective demand," which he thinks must be kept up at whatever cost, while he forgets the working of the mechanism of prices, wages, interest and exchange rates."

"Consider, in this connection, the case of the ardent socialist. He finds that there is very much wrong with our world, and we all probably agree with him. His enthusiastic conclusion will be that "Capitalism" must be replaced by "Socialism." But it is safe to say that, in most cases, the socialist will find it very hard to define the one as well as the other. The idea uppermost in his mind will be that now there is "anarchy" and "jungle" and that afterwards there will be order, justice, and planning. His opponent, defending not "Capitalism" but the market economy, will explain that both theory and ample experience prove that socialism is most likely to be a bitter disappointment. All the time it is quite probable that they will talk at cross purposes because the socialist has in mind quite different problems to be solved whereas his opponent never meant the market economy to be the answer to all these problems but only to one of them, i.e., our special problem of economic order. He will say with Shaw that "no sane person refuses to wear spectacles because they do not cure a tooth-ache.""

"In Economics as almost everywhere else, with all our cleverness, we have become decidedly less wise, while knowing more and more about less and less. We have lost the sense of proportion—so indispensable for every economist—while analysing the curiosities of hypothetical economic situations and forgetting what has a bearing on real economic life. In spinning out the fine threads of the New Economics, we forget the most elementary principles of economics, and while stressing what might at best in highly exceptional circumstances we overlook what are almost perennial truths. While proudly parading our elaborate equations we unlearnt that simple common sense which consists in reckoning with human reactions and institutions as they really are."

"This brings me to the very center of my convictions, which, I hope, I share with many others. I have always been reluctant to talk about it because I am not one to air my religious views in public, but let me say it here quite plainly: the ultimate source of our civilization's disease is the spiritual and religious crisis which has overtaken all of us and which each must master for himself. Above all, man is Homo religiosus, and yet we have, for the past century, made the desperate attempt to get along without God, and in the place of God we have set up the cult of man, his profane or even ungodly science and art, his technical achievements, and his State. We may be certain that some day the whole world will come to see, in a blinding flash, what is now clear to only a few, namely, that this desperate attempt has created a situation in which man can have no spiritual and moral life, and this means that he cannot live at all for any length of time, in spite of television and speedways and holiday trips and comfortable apartments. We seem to have proved the existence of God in yet another way: by the practical consequences of His assumed non-existence."

"It is economism to allow material gain to obscure the danger that we may forfeit liberty, variety, and justice and that the concentration of power may grow, and it is also economism to forget that people do not live by cheaper vacuum cleaners alone but by other and higher things which may wither in the shadows of giant industries and monopolies."

"It is a poor species of human being which this grim vision conjures up before our eyes: “fragmentary and disintegrated” man, the end product of growing mechanization, specialization, and functionalization, which decompose the unity of human personality and dissolve it in the mass, an aborted form of Homo sapiens created by a largely technical civilization, a race of spiritual and moral pygmies lending itself willingly—indeed gladly, because that way lies redemption—to use as raw material for the modern collectivist and totalitarian mass state."

"However, and here we return again to our main theme, we would merely be deluding ourselves if we drew such a sharp dividing line between the realm of the spirit and the conditions of man's existence."

"The market economy is not everything. It must find its place in a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition. It must be firmly contained within an all-embracing order of society in which the imperfections of and harshness of economic freedom are corrected by law and in which man is not denied conditions of life appropriate to his nature."

"It is no use seeking salvation in institutions, programs, and projects. We shall save ourselves only if more and more of us have the unfashionable courage to take counsel with our own souls and, in the midst of all this modern hustle and bustle, to bethink ourselves of the firm, enduring, and proved truths of life."

"All these peculiarities of the structure of modern tyranny, whose ugliest and extremest form was Nazism, are marked by the entire dissolution of the values and standards without which our society, or any other, cannot exist in the long run: a pernicious anaemia of morality, a cynical unconcern in the choice of means, which in the absence of firm principles become ends in themselves; a nihilistic lack of principle, and, in a word, what may be described literally as Satanism and Nihilism. Everything rots away, and finally there remains only one fixed aim of the tyranny, to which all moral principles, all promises, treaties, guarantees, and ideologies are ruthlessly sacrificed—the naked lust for domination, for the preservation of the continually threatened power, a power held on to for no other purpose than the continued enjoyment of all its fruits. […] All the ideals and emotions blatantly appealed to—social justice, national community, peace, religion, family life, welfare of the masses, claims in the international field, the return to simpler and more natural forms of life, and so forth—prove as a rule to be nothing more than crudely-painted inter-changeable boards for the staging of mass propaganda."

"The more we gained knowledge of these new totalitarian systems of mass-rule, the more we realized not only their similarity of structure, but also the fact that we had to do with a type of dominance that had been known in earlier epochs. We discovered that what the ancients called “tyrannis,” or ”cheirokratia,” what Sulla or the tyrants of the Italian Renaissance had practised, and what finally alarmed the world in the French Revolution and under Napoleon, had surprisingly many similarities with modern totalitarianism, although this latter had elements with which they cannot be compared, and although it possessed means of domination unknown in past ages."

"We need a combination of supreme moral sensitivity and economic knowledge. Economically ignorant moralism is as objectionable as morally callous economism. Ethics and economics are two equally difficult subjects, and while the former needs discerning and expert reason, the latter cannot do without humane values."

"The processes peculiar to economic life in a free society make evident the fundamental superiority of the spontaneous order over the commanded order."

"The place of any good in this scale of values is determined ultimately by the strength of the subjective demand for it."

"Whether in Bolshevism, Fascism, or Nazism, we meet continually with the forcible and ruthless usurpation of the power of the State by a minority drawn from the masses, resting on their support, flattering them and threatening them at the same time; a minority led by a charismatic leader and brazenly identifying itself with the State. It is a tyranny that does away with all the guarantees of the constitutional State, constituting as the only party the minority that has created it, furnishing that party with far-reaching judicial and administrative functions, and permitting within the whole life of the nation no groups, no activities, no opinions, no associations or religions, no publications, no educational institutions, no business transactions, that are not dependent on the will of the Government."

"The questionable things of this world come to grief on their nature, the good ones on their own excesses."

"Since men obviously cannot live in a religious vacuum, they cling to surrogate religions of all kinds, to political passions, ideologies, and pipe dreams—unless, of course, they prefer to drug themselves with the sheer mechanics of producing and consuming, with sport and betting, with sexuality, with rowdiness and crime and the thousand other things which fill our daily newspapers."

"It is Rudi's genius to show the reader in concrete terms how to do the predicting after some organized thinking."

"After the war, Bethe went back to Cornell, where he helped build an outstanding research center in high-energy physics. Peierls returned to Birmingham, where he created the outstanding school of theoretical physics in Western Europe. The two physicists established a pipeline between the two institutions and offered their generous evaluations of the young postdocs and colleagues—Hugh McManus, Edwin Salpeter, Stuart Butler, Richard Dalitz, Freeman Dyson, and others—that they sent to one another. Their correspondence likewise gives perceptive overviews of advances in high-energy physics, especially of the progress made after 1955 in the nuclear many-body problem on which Bethe was concentrating. Their letters also concern policy challenges posed by, for example, the cold war, nuclear weaponry, nuclear test ban treaties, and antiballistic missiles."

"The atoms which constitute a solid consist of nuclei and electrons. For a description of the state of the solid it is not, however, necessary to specify the state of all the Z electrons of each atom, since we can eliminate most or all of them by a principle that is familiar from the theory of molecules. ... Since the atomic nuclei are much heavier than the electrons, they move much more slowly, and it is therefore reasonable to start from the approximation in which they are taken to be taken to be at rest, though not necessarily in the regular positions."

"Any theoretical physicist has met, in his introduction to the subject, the simplest examples of Schrödinger's equation, including the harmonic oscillator. In demonstrating its solution, it is usually shown that for energies satisfying the usual quantum condition, E = (n + ½)ħω (1.1.1) where n is a non-negative integer and ω the frequency, the equation has a solution satisfying the correct boundary conditions. It is equally important to know that these are the only solutions, i.e., that for an energy not equal to (1.1.1) no admissible solution exists. This negative statement is not usually proved in elementary treatments, or else it is deduced from quite elaborate discussions of the convergence and behavior of a certain infinite series. It is therefore surprising to find that the result can be seen without any complicated algebra."

"1.4 Types of binding ... The most important types of force are as follows: (a) Electrostatic forces. In an ionic crystal the attraction is mainly due to the Coulomb interaction between point charges. This is particularly amenable to calculation, and a great deal of work has been done on it. The force is a 'two-body' force, i.e. the interaction between two given ions is independent of the positions of any other ions that may be present. ... (b) Van der Waals forces. This name describes the effect that a neutral and isotropic atom can acquire a polarization under the influence of an electric field, and even two neutral isotropic atoms will induce small dipole moments in each other, due to the fluctuating moments which they possess because of the existence of virtual excited states. ... (c) Homopolar binding. These are forces like those effective in homopolar molecules, and we know they are due to the exchange of electrons between the atoms. In molecular crystals (H2, Cl2, etc.) these bonds can easily be localized and we can start from a description of the molecular by the methods of quantum chemistry and then add the relatively weak forces between different molecules. In other cases, however, such as diamond or graphite, each atom shares some valence electrons with each of its neighbors, and it is therefore not possible to single out any given groups of atoms that may be regarded as chemically saturated. The quantitative discussion of such forces is not easy. ... (d) Overlap. If two atoms approach so closely that their electron shells overlap, then there is a strong repulsive force between them. ... (e) Metallic bond. ... it is worth noting that in the case of a metal the presence and motion of the conduction electrons is an important factor in holding the crystal together and in determining its structure."

"Born approximation is a familiar and convenient approximation in handling scattering problems. It is adequate, or at least informative, in so many cases that we tend to develop the habit of using its first-order term without always checking the conditions for its applicability."

"An important episode for my understanding of conduction problems arose from a paper by Kretschmann, ... who attacked the then accepted theory of conductivity and claimed that the basis of the papers by Bloch and others was quite wrong. He had a number of objections which were mostly not very well conceived, but he claimed, in particular, that in the usual derivation of the Boltzmann equation one had made unjustified use of perturbation theory. In trying to defend the theory I therefore set out to prove that perturbation theory was in order, and to my amazement I found that this was very questionable, if not exactly for the reasons given by Kretschmann. It appeared that the usual application of Fermi's 'golden rule' depended on the inequality ħ/τ ≪ kT, where τ is the collision time. This was not satisfied for many metals. Indeed Landau's dimensional analysis made them comparable. ..."

"With both light and electrons, one was faced with the so-called "wave-particle duality"; both could be regarded as waves for some purposes and as particles for others. An important step in resolving this paradox was a paper by Max Born in July 1926, in which he suggested that the waves determine the probability of finding the particle in a particular place. This idea was already considered much earlier by Einstein, but it was rejected by him. This interpretation of the theory was further developed in the spring of 1927 by Heisenberg, who formulated his "uncertainty principle" ..."

"At about this same time Dirac wrote a paper that proposed a general theory of how measurements should be described in quantum mechanics. Similar work was also done by P. Jordan in Göttingen. These two papers constitute what is called transformation theory, because they show how one can transform information gained by measuring one quantity into predicting information about another."

"When I arrived in Leipzig, Heisenberg was working on the theory of ferromagnetism. It was known the magnetism of such substances as iron was due to the "spin" of the electrons inside the substance. Each electron spins like a little top, and in the iron there is a "molecular field", a force that tends to align the spin of each electron with that of its neighbors. But the nature of this field was unknown. It could not be a magnetic effect because magnetic forces are much too weak to account for the observed behaviour. Heisenberg saw that the answer lay in the Pauli exclusion principle, which says that no two electrons can be in exactly the same state. Thus two electrons with the same spin orientation keep out of each other's way; while this repulsion may increase their energy of motion, it diminishes their mutual repulsion, and can therefore lead to a decrease in total energy, making the parallel alignment of the electron spins energetically favourable. He had encountered this mechanism in the theory of atomic spectra and concluded that it was also responsible for ferromagnetism."

"His contributions to condensed matter physics were largely on fundamental questions, establishing the principles of this subject. Most of this work was done during the years 1928–37, but much of it could not be tested until the experimental techniques needed for this had become sufficiently developed. ... Rudolf Peierls's work in nuclear physics began in 1933, when James Chadwick challenged him and Hans Bethe to explain his first measurements of the cross-section for photo-disintegration of the deuteron. Peierls's experience in this field developed rapidly within the next few years, on both practical questions and academic research, to the point where he and Otto Frisch could confidently conclude that the construction of an atomic bomb would be quite possible using 235U, which could be obtained obtained from natural uranium by a feasible separation process, and they pointed this out in the famous Frisch-Peierls Memorandum of 1940 which they sent to the British government. This led to the Atomic Bomb Project, at first in Britain under the name "Tube Alloys Project" and later in USA as the "Manhattan District Project", which many of the UK scientists, including both Peierls and Frisch, were sent to join at the end of 1943."

"Richard Dalitz, in: (quote from page v)"

"Better than life in the ideal state is complete tranquillity and deliverance, which comes only with death. Why, though, bother with creating the ideal state if we can have death now? Mainländer answers: though he personally can find redemption in all political conditions, so that he does not need to bother with the ideal state, the same is not true for the masses, who need to live in the ideal state before they find redemption. Why, though, must they first live in such a state? To that question Mainländer responds somewhat cryptically: before we turn against life, we must learn to enjoy all that it has to offer. Only he who attempts to enjoy all the rotten fruits of this earth will see through its emptiness and discover for himself the true value of death."

"The plant grows, reproduces (in some way) and dies (after living for some time). Disregarding any particularity, the great and actual fact of death, which could not appear on the scene anywhere in the inorganic realm, comes to light first and clearly. Could the plant die if it did not want to die in the depths of its essence? It follows only its fundamental impulse, which drew all its desire from God's longing for non-being."