◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

There is no privileged frame of reference. This is not a metaphor. This is what the universe actually does. There is no fixed point from which all motion can be measured absolutely. Every observer measures from their own position. The laws of physics are the same in all frames — but no single frame gets to be the one true frame from which all others are judged. This is the most important thing I can tell you about the man you have put in power. He is claiming the privileged frame. My view is the true view. My reality is the real reality. What contradicts me is fake. The universe does not permit this. The man who claims the view from nowhere is not describing reality. He is attempting to replace it. And the people who accept the replacement are abdicating the one thing that distinguishes a scientist from a true believer: the willingness to let the evidence tell you when you are wrong. I know what happens when a sophisticated society decides that evidence is negotiable. I watched it in Germany in 1933 when the Nazis declared that my own theories were Jewish physics — that the results of careful experiment could be overridden by what the ideology required. The light bent around the sun exactly as the equations predicted. But the people who understood those laws were removed. Dismissed. Fled. Killed. I am watching American institutions drive out the scientists. The agencies that measure the earth's temperature. The ice is melting in every frame simultaneously. E equals mc squared. In 1939 I wrote to President Roosevelt to warn him that Nazi Germany might be developing an atomic weapon. A small act. A letter. Energy released that could not be recalled. A small erosion of norms does not produce a proportional effect. It produces an effect multiplied by the speed at which it travels through the system squared. The first time a president refuses to accept an election result — that is mass converted to energy. I watched a small movement in a beer hall in Munich become the thing that killed six million of my people. I came to America in 1933. America was the proof it did not have to be that way.