Monthly Archives: April 2025

By Michael F. Duggan

If he had only done his work to explain Brownian motion (which won him a Nobel Prize), or discovered special relativity, or general relativity, or had made his contributions to quantum mechanics, Albert Einstein would have been considered one of the greatest physicist of the 20th century. As it happened, he did all of these things.

Darwin changed how we saw ourselves as natural beings. Freud changed how we saw ourselves as conscious beings. Einstein changed how we saw everything. If Darwin had never lived, several other people (e.g. Alfred Wallace) would have described natural selection by the late 1850s (and in fact independently did). Likewise, modern psychology would have proceeded with or without Freud. But without Einstein, it would have likely taken numerous great physicists and additional decades to have accomplish what he did.

Sure he was wrong about quantum entanglement–non-locality/”spooky action at a distance”–and quantum mechanics in general. But this was likely a case of temperamental delusion rather than an intellectual error or failure of imagination. Einstein’s cosmology theorizes a simple, elegant, classical model–Relativity–that was based on an assumption of how he would have desired the universe if he were God. Thus he could not abide the probability, randomness, and disorder of the quantum world (“God does not play dice with the universe,” although one may certainly play dice in a deterministic world as well).

Einstein considered his greatest mistake to be his cosmological constant–a theoretical bandaid he devised to make relativity work at a time when the universe was generally assumed to be static. After he died, this “fudging” theory to make another theory work, turned out to be true, and is useful in formulations describing a universe we now know to be expanding.

Albert Einstein died 70 years ago today at 76.

By Michael F. Duggan

[Originally posted on Facebook on April 12, 2025]

Eighty years ago today, the greatest modern U.S. president, Franklin Roosevelt, died at Warm Springs, Georgia, at the age of 63. His death, coming so close to victory in WWII, struck many Americans as not only as shocking and tragic, but ironic.

Roosevelt had shepherd the nation through the Great Depression, his policies regulated the economy toward the public’s interest (Social Security, the FDIC, the NLRB, just to name a few things), resulting in a quarter-century of unparalleled prosperity. It is striking that the period of greatest government intervention in the economy and taxation of the rich–1945-early 1970s–was also our period of greatest prosperity.

As a second act, he quietly put the country on a war footing that allowed for the mobilization of industry. With the help of George C. Marshall, he expanded the US Army 48-fold to win WWII. Like a number of others in his administration, he likely worked himself to death during the war.

The dismantling of the New Deal social democracy in favor of an economy of efficiency beginning in the 1970s, and taking off under Reagan, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama, has been nothing short of catastrophic for our nation. It undercut organized labor, off-shored jobs, embraced the efficient flow of wealth from the many to the few, and gave rise to the populist right. By the 1980s, even Democrats had pretty much abandoned the New Deal.

I wish we had people like him today.

By Michael F. Duggan

It makes sense, but it sounds odd to say it: most of the popular music listened to by baby boomers in the 1960s was not written or performed by boomers (the postwar baby boom began in ’46), but by war babies born between 1939 and 1945: Dylan, The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, Hendrix, Simon and Garfunkel, The Kinks, Yardbirds, Eric Burton/Animals, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, CCR, the Doors (Ray Manczarek was born in ’39), Lou Reed/Velvet Underground (Nico was born in ’38), Jefferson Airplane (Grace Slick was born in ’39), most of Buffalo Springfield, and all of the Beach Boys, except for Carl Wilson (b. Dec. 1946). Quite a list.

When you throw in others outside of music (Stephen Hawking, Leonard Susskind, Kip Thorne, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and the entire Monty Python crew, to name a few), the sub-generation wedged between the “silent” generation of the 1930s and the baby boom of the late 1940s, appears to have had a pan-spectrum constellation of talent and ability. It seems likely that human gifts are more or less evenly distributed over the generations, but this truncated cohort seems even more gifted on balance than most full-scale generations.