Making Much of Borrowed Talent, and Nothing

WE AMERICANS EASILY FORGET the extent to which we owe much of what we have to the rest of the world. This is particularly true in the field of science. Einstein, for instance, became an American citizen, but we all know he was really a German, nurtured on European education and culture, not American. When I was a child in the nineteen sixties I paid close attention to the American space program, and watched each flight of astronauts into Earth orbit. It always seemed strange to me that the top man at NASA had such a strong German accent. Ja, Werner von Braun, our national leader into outer space; and a former NAZI for whom the Americans were willing to overlook his development of rockets used for attacking England during World War Two. During the same time frame, Rich Feynman, whose grandparents and parents were immigrants from Russia, helped developed the atomic bomb for teh United States. Einstein recommended developing it, and Fynman helped get it up and running. Like Einstein, Feynman won a Nobel prize for physics, and like Einstein, Feynman thought the whole business of giving our awards for scienece was superflous and silly. Feyman once said that Alfre Nobel gave the human race two bad inventions: dynamite, and the Nobel prizes. Nobel, we know, invented the latter in an attempt to compensate for and to assuage his guilt for the former. For a fact, the Nobel prizes have engendered more controversy , bitterness, and resentment among self absorbed intellectuals than any other known force of nature. And its all much ado about nothing, because, like the Heisman trophy, like the Acadamy awards, the NBobel prizes are, after all, nothing more than somebody's personal opinion.