Einstein's Birthday

I know very little about physics — but what I do know is that much of what is the foundation of physics, such as the theory of relativity, we owe to the brilliance of Albert Einstein.

And a letter that bore his signature, along with that of Hungarian Leó Szilárd, urged President Roosevelt to develop nuclear weaponry before the Nazis did.

I suppose it is a subject for debate whether that letter changed anything — with the exception of encouraging the United States to let the nuclear genie out of the bottle before Germany did.

From what I've read, there were others in the world who were involved in the race to develop atomic weapons first. Einstein did not run the Manhattan Project. He promoted it, and Roosevelt made the commitment to it. With or without Einstein's involvement, somebody would be the first to use nuclear weapons.

Perhaps we should be grateful that someone of Einstein's intellectual stature made such an appeal to FDR. I have no doubt that nuclear weapons were destined to dominate global politics when I was growing up, but I'm glad it was the United States that developed them first. Things could have been quite different if the Germans or the Russians had been the winners in the nuclear race.

Today would be Einstein's 130th birthday. That would be quite a ripe old age — if Einstein were still alive. Fact is, he died more than half a century ago, but he still lived a long life, dying at the age of 76.