Lyndon LaRouche har hele vejen utvetydigt sagt, at med mindre, og indtil, Obama smides ud, står verden på en knivsæg til atomkrig. Spøgelset af denne fare sås skarpt i tirsdags med Tyrkiets nedskydning af et russisk fly, der var engageret i bombetogt nær den tyrkisk-syriske grænse. LaRouche kom omgående med en offentlig erklæring, der sagde, »Obama har organiseret en krigshandling, og således sat USA, såvel som resten af menneskeheden, i fare«. Han sagde, at det »var et overlagt forsøg fra Obamas side på at fremtvinge generel krig«. Engelsk udskrift.
MEGAN BEETS: Good evening. It’s November 27, 2015. My name
is Megan Beets, and I’d like to welcome all of you to our regular
Friday evening broadcast here at LaRouche PAC. I’m joined in the
studio tonight by Jason Ross and I’m also joined, via video, by
Jeffrey Steinberg.
Now in discussions earlier this week, Mr. LaRouche made it
very, very clear that the key issue facing all of us, is whether
the people of the United States, in particular, both the people
in positions of leadership, such as the Congress, but also the
population in general, have the guts to stop compromising with
Obama, to tell the truth, and to throw him out. Now, what we’ve
seen shaping up over the past weeks is a very dramatically and a
very rapidly shifting world strategic situation, including
ongoing Russian military intervention into Syria; also including
the recent wave of terrorist attacks, such as the bombing of the
Russian plane over Egypt, and of course, the terrorist attacks
which occurred just two weeks ago in Paris, which was followed by
a shift in dynamic among world leaders, away from the failed
Obama policy, and toward a broader collaboration with the
Russians to defeat ISIS.
However, throughout all of this, Mr. LaRouche has been
unequivocal that unless, and until you get Obama out of the U.S.
presidency, the world stands on a razor’s edge of thermonuclear
war.
Now the spectre of that danger arose sharply this Tuesday,
with the Turkish shooting down of a Russian plane which was
involved in operations near the Turkish-Syria border. And Mr.
LaRouche immediately issued a statement, a public statement,
which said that “Obama has organized an act of war, and thus
endangered the United States, as well as all humanity.” He said
that it “was a deliberate attempt by Obama to force general
warfare.”
Now, this act by Turkey and by Obama, and the aftermath, has
catalyzed a very significant change in the world global dynamic,
which we’re seeing manifest, for example, in Europe, among other
places. This shift is also the subject of tonight’s institutional
question, which makes reference to the ongoing talks in Vienna,
which are aimed at resolving the situation in Syria. The question
reads as follows:
“Mr. LaRouche, please give us your view of how Russia and
Turkey can move once again to collaborate to save Syria under the
Vienna process?” So now I’m going to turn it over to Jeff to give
Mr. LaRouche’s response to that question, as well as an
elaboration of the general strategic picture.
JEFFREY STEINBERG: Thank you, Megan. Can you hear me there?
Well I think that the starting point must be to tell the truth as
we know it about the events of last Tuesday. It was immediately
understood by leading political and military circles in the
United States, in Europe, and most emphatically in Russia, that
the action that was undertaken by the Turkish in shooting down
that Russian SU-24 over a border area on the Turkey-Syria border
right along the Mediterranean coast, that this was something that
1) was order top down in Turkey from President Erdogan, and 2)
Erdogan would never have undertaken such an action if he did not
have advance approval from Obama and the British.
So, for the Russians, this represented a major act of war,
and I can tell you that within the U.S. governing institutions,
there was a deep and profound split that reflected immediately in
actions that were diametrically opposite. Secretary of State John
Kerry, leading circles within the Pentagon all the way up to the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, immediately activated channels with
Russia, knowing full well that there was a very real prospect
that Russia would retaliate immediately after this unwarranted
military provocation. And so, you have one element of the U.S.
command that is not under British control, that moved immediately
to at least temporarily forestall a situation that was
potentially moments away from a general war between NATO and
Russia. And as we’ve been saying, as Mr. LaRouche has been
warning since virtually the beginning of the Obama presidency,
any such war between NATO and Russia would very rapidly devolve
into a thermonuclear war, in which the overwhelming majority of
humankind would likely not survive.
So you had actions. There was red phone line communications
activated immediately, between those elements in the U.S. Command
that were not on the British line, and top Russian officials. And
the first objective was simply to secure a commitment that the
situation would not immediately go to a hot war. In other words,
this was the most dangerous situation since, and probably more
so, than even the Cuban Missile crisis. Because in the Cuban
missile crisis, there was no shoot down of an American or a
Soviet ship or a plane.
On the other hand, President Obama, who was closer to
Erdogan than virtually any foreign leader, perhaps with the sole
exception of David Cameron in Britain, immediately got on the
phone with Erdogan and then issued public statements certifying
that, in his mind, Turkey acted perfectly within their sovereign
rights to shoot down a plane flying over its territory.
Now, never mind the fact that there are serious questions
and disputes of whether that plane, that Russian plane, actually
ever even entered Turkish airspace. The fact is that, if it
passed through Turkish air space at all, number one, there was
never any intent–and nobody in Turkey even claimed there was any
intent on the part of the Russians–to carry out any kind of
military action or provocation against Turkey. And secondly, even
after the first 24 hours following the shoot-down, the Turks were
even acknowledging that that plane, if it ever in fact crossed
into Turkish territory, was there only for a matter of brief
seconds, and no longer.
Now that also tells you that to shoot down that plane, was a
premeditated, pre-determined decision. There was not enough time
for the Turkish air force to consult up the chain of command all
the way to President Erdogan, and to then get response orders
back, and to fire at the Russian plane — all within a matter of
a timeframe that at most has been characterized as 17 seconds.
So, again, it was a premeditated act of war; and Erdogan on his
own never would have undertaken that. It was done in conjunction
with both Obama and the British; and therefore, the
responsibility lies there.
Now, let’s again visit what the immediate context was of
this incident. It occurred last Tuesday at a point that French
President Hollande was in Washington to attempt to organize
President Obama to join a trilateral military alliance of France,
Russia, and the United States, to wipe out the threat of ISIS and
Nusra, and all allied organizations inside Syria and inside Iraq
primarily. And so, the events that took place just as Obama and
Hollande were sitting down, hijacked the agenda of that
discussion. All you have to do is read the transcript, or even
better, watch the video of the press conference that took place
later that same day between Obama and Hollande; and you’ll see
towards the end, Obama launching into a typical Obama tirade
against Putin and against Russia. Obama was lying pathologically
in saying that the United States is leading a coalition of over
60 countries, and that Russia, when it comes to fighting against
the Islamic State is “the outlier”; and it went on from there.
So, statements soon after that, again from the White House, fully
endorsed and adopted the Turkish line on what happened.
So, here you’ve got a situation where an act of war, an act
of military aggression took place, carried out by Turkey — a
NATO member — and was done with the full at least tacit backing
of the President of the United States, with the full support of
the British. How close do you have to get to provoking
thermonuclear war before enough people in Congress and in the
American population wake up and recognize that Lyndon LaRouche
has been right for years in warning about the menace that
President Obama represents if he’s allowed to continue to remain
in office? We’re down to the final 14 or so months of his
Presidency, but you can see the kind of developments that can
occur on literally a moment’s notice. And so, there is no option
any longer other than removing the President from office by
Constitutional means immediately. That means that the leading
members of Congress and at least leading elements within the
American population have got to finally wake up to strategic
reality.
Now, to put an added punctuation mark on the situation,
let’s not forget that there was another major series of
provocations directed against Russia over the same recent
timeframe of the last week. You had the Right Sector, the
neo-Nazi apparatus in Ukraine, that is openly backed and promoted
by the Obama administration principally through Victoria Nuland,
the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian
Affairs, who carried out a bombing campaign against the power
grid of Crimea; and has effectively shut off almost all power to
the entire Crimean peninsula. When Russian repair units attempted
to get to the sites to re-establish the power links, they were
fired on by Right Sector militias; and to make matters even
worse, at the end of last week, it was announced by Nuland’s pet
prime minister, Yatsenyuk, that henceforth all Russian flights
over Ukrainian airspace were cancelled. Now, that’s tantamount to
a threat of yet a second country, a major ally of the US and the
British, threatening to carry out unprovoked strikes against
Russian aircraft flying over Ukrainian airspace.
So, you’ve got a clear pattern here. You have — as Megan
indicated — a phase shift with the series of ISIS terrorist
attacks over the last several weeks, that began with the bombing
of the Russian Metro Jet over the Sinai; followed with a series
of suicide bombings on the southern portions of Beirut in
Lebanon, targetting the Shi’ite area of that city. And then the
Paris attacks. The world was energized to finally launch an
all-out serious campaign against the Islamic State. Russia
escalated the bombing campaign against the Islamic State and
knocked out an estimated 1000 of the tanker trucks that have been
smuggling oil from the ISIS-controlled areas of northern Syria
into Turkey, where they’ve been sold on the black market; and
these funds have been fueling the operations of the Islamic
State.
At the G-20 summit meeting that ironically took place in
Turkey just days before the Turkish air force shot down the
Russian SU-24, President Putin made very clear that Russia has
aerial photographs showing lengthy caravans of these oil tanker
trucks crossing the border into Turkey from northern Syria; and
furthermore, he said he has the names of financial agents in 40
countries, including a number of the G-20 member countries, that
are involved in financing the Islamic State through black market
cooperation. So, the case is unambiguous. If you wanted to
attribute narrow motives, you could say that Erdogan was furious
at the Russians for bombing these Turkish smuggling trucks, since
we know that the funds generated on the Turkish side from this
black market activity largely go into the coffers of the ruling
AKP Party. We know that the son of President Erdogan is himself
one of the major people involved in this black market operation.
But in a very real sense, that’s a much too narrow
understanding of what happened here. It eliminates the crucial
question, which is that Obama and the British were behind this,
and it was an attempt on a much grander scale to not just simply
sabotage the Vienna initiatives; but it was an attempt to trigger
a potential world war. And for that crime alone, despite the fact
that there is a long list of Constitutional violations and other
crimes committed by this President, for that reason alone he must
be immediately removed from office. And therefore, every person
listening to this broadcast, all of your friends, all of your
neighbors, all of your political associates, your co-workers, are
going to have to do some serious soul searching; because we came
inches away from world war last Tuesday morning, with the Turkish
actions. And it was only a matter of intervention, but
particularly restraint on the part of Russian President Putin and
the Russian military that averted that. There is still clearly an
option, and lessons to be learned from this provocation, that
could and must lead to reaching an agreement in Vienna to end the
five-year war and tragedy in Syria. But that must start with the
kind of blunt truth which we have been discussing here over the
last few minutes; and it cannot go forward so long as President
Obama remains in office. So, there are urgent issues that must be
taken up by the Congress and by the American people, if we are
going to avert a war; because I can assure you, if those critical
actions are not taken in the immediate days ahead, then the
chances that there will be {another} incident; {another}
provocation, whether by Ukraine, whether by Erdogan and the
Turks, whether by ISIS, and if actions aren’t taken to solve the
problem at its roots, we will be staring at the prospect of world
war in the immediate days, perhaps hours ahead.
BEETS: Okay, thank you very much, Jeff. Now, upcoming this
Monday, November 30th, we have the beginning of a two-week long
genocidal COP21 depopulation climate conference, which is
occurring in Paris, and despite the actual danger to humanity
which Jeff just outlined in detail, and especially in the wake of
the terrorist attacks in Paris just two weeks ago, this
absolutely insane conference is going ahead as scheduled, to be
attended by approximately 140 heads of state, along with
thousands of other government, NGO, and other officials, notably
Britain’s Prince Charles, the dysfunctional and inbred son of
Queen Elizabeth and her walking-dead husband, Prince Philip, will
be one of the keynote speakers.
Now, as we addressed in this webcast last week, if anyone
involved had any morality, we would completely change the nature
of the conference, to address the actual dangers and threats to
humanity, such as the refugee crisis, the conditions of poverty
around the world, and the lack of development that are actually
threatening billions of people. So what I’d like to do now, is
ask Jason to come to the podium to address this upcoming
conference in the context of what Jeff just presented.
JASON ROSS: This is almost like the worst joke you could
imagine, holding this conference in Paris. This conference which,
starting in a few days — we’ve been opposing this, and we’ve got
a leaflet, a resolution that we’ve been getting out on this,
called, “We Say No to the Paris COP21 CO2 Reduction Scheme.” I
want to read the bookmarks of this, the bookends. It opens, “The
conditions for life of billions of people depend upon rejecting
the agenda being presented at the 2015 climate change conference
to be held in Paris this December. The COP21 Paris initiative to
adopt a legally-binding agreement to reduce CO2 emissions must be
rejected on two grounds: the scientific reality, that mankind’s
activity, is {not} going to cause catastrophic climate change,
and the very real lethal consequences of the CO2 reduction
programs being demanded.” It ends, that “Energy-intensive
scientific, technological, and economic growth is essential to
human existence. This can be measured by transitions to higher
levels of energy-flux density per-capita and per-area. Such
progress, growth, and development, is the universal right of man,
and CO2 emissions are presently a vital part of that process for
the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. The adoption
of a legally-binding CO2 reduction scheme at the COP21 conference
in Paris will condemn billions of people to a lower quality of
life, with higher death-rates, greater poverty, and no ability to
exercise their inherent human right to participate in the
creation of a better condition for society as a whole. This is
deeply immoral. For these reasons, the CO2 reduction scheme of
the COP21 conference in Paris must be rejected.”
So on the grounds of the fakery of the science, and the
very, very real human costs of trying to meet the CO2 reduction
goals, this can’t go forward. However, obviously the push is
there, the conference is going ahead despite the state of
emergency currently in France, the terrorized population of
Paris, changes in some of the agenda, but it’s going ahead, and
as a matter of fact, this conference is getting a kick-start over
the weekend — today and the rest of the weekend — the
Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting is taking place in
Malta. So this is where all the members of the former British
Empire, now called the British Commonwealth, get together to —
as in this case — hear speeches from the Queen and others about
why they need to reduce CO2.
Prince Charles — who has been basically waiting for his
mother to die for a half century to get a job — he said that the
terrorism that we’re seeing, the conflicts that we’re seeing, are
not because of conflict, not because of ISIS, not because of the
Brits and Saudi Arabia helping ISIS, instead, Prince Charles
said, “In fact, there is very good evidence indeed that one of
the major reasons for this horror in Syria was a drought that
lasted for about 5 or 6 years, which meant that huge numbers of
people in the end had to leave the land.” This is the guy that
they’re asking to give the keynote address at the COP21
conference — a man whose understanding of Syria seems to be that
all of the conflict is because of a drought which was caused by
climate change. It’s insane, and it’s knowingly evil on his part.
So, what should be done instead, is re-purposing the
conference would be a good thing, you know, recycling what’s
going to be done there. As Megan said, of course, addressing the
refugee crisis, which is all over Europe at present, and beyond
— that’s worth discussing. Really, what’s worth discussing is a
solution to this whole problem, which would be excellent if the
Congress were to release the 28 pages, put them in the record, as
Senator Gravel did with the Pentagon Papers, to be able to attack
the cause of this conflict at its source, which as Jeff went
through, as LaRouche has been stressing, is Obama, who by his
nature as a killer personality, has qualified himself to be
inserted into his role as President. That that is the cause of
the conflicts. Releasing the 28 pages, discussing how to actually
shut down terrorism in the region, working {with} Russia on this
— you know, Russia is serious about this — you know, that would
be worth discussing.
And really, what would it mean to develop the world into the
Silk Road? You know, EIR released, about a year ago now, “The New
Silk Road Becomes the World Landbridge.” It’s a 300 and — almost
400 page report. It goes through in incredible detail, with maps
and everything, what it would mean for China’s One Belt One Road
project, its New Silk Road project, to continue its extension
into a worldwide paradigm of development. What would those
projects look like? And this is a policy that the LaRouches have
been promoting for decades, and Helga LaRouche in her visits to
China is acknowledged as “the Silk Road Lady,” for her role in
bringing this outlook into the current fruition that it’s
finding. So what would it mean for the U.S. to join the Silk
Road? What would it mean for us to get our act together?
Well, we’ve been working on a report on this, in terms of
what a U.S. recovery would look like, and there’s a lot of
aspects to this. I mean, if you think about the kinds of projects
that have, many, been on the books, and the kinds of projects
that will drive us into the future, you recognize that it would
not be very difficult to create millions of jobs in a very short
period of time — meaningful, productive jobs — that lay the
groundwork for a durable new, more productive economy for the
future. Doing that will require eliminating Wall Street, getting
Glass-Steagall re-implemented, having those provisions back in
place, shutting down Wall Street which we do not need. Gambling
is not an essential part of economy. The productive process,
science, creativity, the development of human beings and
infrastructure — that is essential. Gambling is not.
So with Wall Street out of the way, with federal financing,
with federal credit made available, some of the projects are
things that we’ve discussed quite a bit. Take, for example, the
Bering Strait. Crossing the Bering Strait with a tunnel or a
bridge, as engineers decide, would be a very key role, a very key
project, to put the U.S. on the Silk Road, literally, making it
possible to get from the West Coast of the U.S., into Eurasia,
much more quickly than by sending a ship across the ocean, with
the added benefit that rail, or transportation corridors on land
overall, allow for the ability to develop regions along the
way. Something that a ship crossing the ocean doesn’t do. Ships
don’t create wealth, or the potential to create it, as they cross
the waters. Land connections do.
So the Bering Strait tunnel — that would be a key project.
Overall, transportation has a tremendous way to go in the U.S.
You know, China, which is a nation very similar in size to the
United States, currently has 11,000 miles of high-speed rail,
with plans to have 30,000 by 2020, and they’ll do it — they do
what they say. In contrast, we have under 500 miles of high-speed
rail, and that’s being very generous in counting the Acela
service as high-speed. What we should have is 42,000 miles of
electrified, decent rail in the United States, bringing down the
costs of transportation, and of production throughout the nation,
making it more possible to move intermediate goods from place to
place, to move people, to move products in a way that will have a
tremendous savings in time, and in energy costs.
Currently over half of rail-freight in the U.S. is coal. You
know, in a nuclear economy we obviously wouldn’t need so much
coal, but it also goes to show how little else is being done with
the system as it is, and maybe some idea of what it could be like
in the future.
Along with the development of the basics which we naturally
think of — things like transportation, rail, repairing roadways,
power plants, water systems, which I’ll get into in a moment —
the other aspect is cities. Now, India has committed itself to
building scores of new cities across the country. Russia has
created science cities. The United States — imagine the
potential, not to keep adding more and more sprawl to the
outsides of our current cities, but developing legitimately new
cities, actual cities, planned in a sensible way, with part of a
transportation backbone underlying it, with infrastructure that’s
needed, canals and aqueducts as necessary, water, power, that
sort of thing. But then also where the cities and where life is
oriented around the most key of economic processes — the
creation of wealth by improving the productive powers of labor,
by the cultural role that can be played by a city.
So in addition to the ability to move goods and people
easily, the density you find in a real city, where different
members of the household can do their various things that anyone
having an hour and a half commute can’t, you also have the other
role of the city itself as a social institution.
So, in a very interesting article that LaRouche wrote some
decades ago, in a program for the development of Africa, he
discusses the central role of the city, and the presence of a
research and educational complex, a pedagogical museum where
people, kids, their parents, etc. would be able to step
themselves through how discoveries had been made in the past in a
hands-on way, doing experiments, themselves witnessing and
understanding very directly how humanity has gotten where it is,
making it possible to have workers able to master new
technologies, and scientists able to reflect on what science has
done in the past, to create the new discoveries needed in the
future.
This sort of educational center of the city will be more
than a museum retailing the past; it will be more than looking
backwards. LaRouche wrote that to give vitality and direction to
the process, the educational zone of a new city must be engaged
in some aspect of scientific research which is itself of world
importance. He says that “a modern nation has achieved true
sovereignty in spirit, only if it achieves excellence in some
important aspect of advancement of human knowledge generally. A
people which can point to several institutions of its own nation,
and can identify several important contributions to human
knowledge associated with such institutions, is a people which
knows that its children are capable of equalling in importance to
humanity, the children of any other nation. To teach science is
to teach the principles of discovery.”
So, with cities, with this as an included basis, cities of
finite size ( no more than one or two million people), with the
development made potential by rail, by water, by developing
fusion power on a crash basis, and implementing the
already-discovered abilities which have been improved on building
nuclear fission plants, we’ll be able to dramatically increase
the power, electrical power, available in the nation; to power
transportation; to power manufacturing. And to do all of this,
we’re also going to need revival of machine tools themselves.
Now, machine tools — now not everyone’s actually seen one
of these in person. These are things like lathes, like mills,
shapers — these are the devices that make everything that’s
required, that create metal, that shape metal to do machining. To
the extent that you are able to innovate in this area, as has
been done with new technologies over the decades — like electric
discharge machining around the time of the Apollo program, or
electron-beam welding; or the more recent developments of laser
and plasma cutting, and the ability for these computer-controlled
machine tools to create things that would have taken ten times
longer in earlier eras: to the extent that this technology
improves, and to the extent that purchases are made, and as part
of an industrialization, the capital stock is increasingly of
newer, and more productive machine tools, the entire economy sees
the benefits from them, by making easier, reducing the cost, of
all other production.
So, this machine tool principle is, in the small, an image
of what it means to take discoveries and then implement them into
an economy, for new thought, new engineering, or scientific idea,
to become manifest in the economy. And this is a field that needs
motion on. As I said earlier, power; fusion research, which has
been starved of funding deliberately for decades, preventing the
kind of breakthroughs that would make power, as has been said,
too cheap to meter — or even if not that cheap, remarkably
abundant power able to bring the next generation of production
technologies into play. To transform our relationship with raw
materials, and with reshaping those materials. Things like the
plasma torch.
So, in this kind of economy, we can then re-approach such
subjects as water. California is in what’s called a water crisis,
despite being right next to the Pacific Ocean. Why do we not have
the power and the plants in place to be able to desalinate? To at
least provide for much of the needs in California? Why have we
not done more research on how weather actually functions?
You know, one of the ironies of the global warming
alarmists, hysterics, whatever you want to call them, is that
this supposedly scientific outlook is actually stifling science.
Hypotheses about what’s causing climate change over time,
hypotheses about how cosmic radiation coming from our Galaxy, or
even beyond, plays a role in creating the cloud condensation
nuclei to form clouds, to effect precipitation, to change the
albedo, the reflectants of the Earth, and therefore its
temperature — that’s real science that’s being held back by the
global warming mafia, who reject this kind of approach because it
doesn’t come to the conclusion that they want: namely, that
human-made CO2 is {the} determining factor in global climate.
It’s just not true.
So, as was said in that resolution I read at the beginning,
and as is covered in this other EIR special report, “Global
Warming Scare is Population Reduction, Not Science,” the science
is clear. We are not causing catastrophic warming of the planet.
Mankind is not a virus destroying the Earth. What is destroying
the planet is oligarchism; the outlook that human beings are a
disease, the anti-growth and enforced poverty promoted by the
City of London, by Wall Street, by that system which has to be
removed. In its place, as far as an actual concept of humanity,
let me read another quote from LaRouche here. He says, “Every
infant born in any part of the world has the potential for
development of his or her mental powers to the level sufficient
for adult competence in use of modern technology.” And this also
means real technology, not iPhones. “That child can achieve at
least an approximation for practice of the highest levels of
productive powers of labor in the world generally today. It is
that potential development which is the only source of wealth.”
Let’s remember that; the source of wealth, the increasing of the
productive powers of labor, as Hamilton put it, lies in that
ability for human beings creatively to develop new understandings
about nature, and thereby reform the economy in an entire way.
That’s real economic science, and with that approach, the
programs that are needed, the development projects which we can
implement, the jobs that will create; this can all follow from an
outlook of what economics truly is, and breaking free from the
false ideas about it which have been promoted by Wall Street and
which have affected, unfortunately, a very great number of our
fellow citizens.
BEETS: Thanks, Jason. Two days ago, on Wednesday of this
week, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s
publication of his paper on general relativity. Now, LaRouche has
reiterated many times in the recent period that Einstein was the
only true scientist in the 20th Century; someone who held out
against the corruption in thinking that was ushered in 1900 by
Bertrand Russell. And someone who was attacked and isolated for
his commitment to the paradigm of thinking which represents the
actual human mind; the paradigm which was responsible for all of
human progress up to this point. So, what I’d like to do is ask
Jason to come back to the podium and ask him this question: Given
the task ahead of us today to rebuild society, rebuild
civilization, and to create a new paradigm for mankind, I’d like
to ask Jason to give us a sense of the importance of Einstein’s
work and his commitment.
ROSS: Sure. I think what Einstein accomplished represents a
key concept under which science can be understood; that of
metaphor. LaRouche has repeatedly stressed the importance of
metaphor as the key to science; meaning the development of
language in such a way that you express a new scientific truth in
a way that could not even have been stated in the preceding
language. It’s not something mathematical; it’s not a formula or
an expression. Discoveries in their true form can’t be. After the
fact, you might be able to write them down; but what makes them a
discovery is an overthrowing of the past, the development of a
new basis for thinking incompatible with what came before. That’s
the kernel of what a discovery is. None of these thoughts are
really eternal; what is, is that process of developing new ones.
Which is the incredible error in science education today, based
upon understanding how to apply the fruits of discovery to
specific problems; but not going through how they were developed.
So, 100 years ago, 1915, Einstein successfully expanded his
special theory of relativity, which he had developed in 1905,
into a more general form; making it the general theory of
relativity. So, I do want to say a bit about what Einstein did; I
think it would be wrong not to; and then get into what it would
mean for us today, what’s the relevance. Einstein’s not just
someone to idolize, or say, “Wow, he was a real genius.” Figure
out what he did.
So, going back ten years earlier to 1905 — 110 years ago —
Einstein, in his what’s now called special theory of relativity,
changed the basis on which scientific thought was based. At that
time, the prevailing view was of a Newtonian outlook to space and
time. Isaac Newton had said that space and time were independent
of things within them; space is space, within it, things exist
and take place, or occur in different relations to each other.
According to Newton, time flows on its own, without reference to
the things in it; they take place over time, but time is an
independent existence.
Well, Einstein tore that apart in 1905; in some ways with
rather simple thoughts. For example, he demonstrated that the
concept of simultaneity does not exist; that depending on who it
is that you ask, and their motion with respect to two events that
are occurring, that observer might say yes they occurred at the
same time. Meaning the light from those two events reaching them,
to make a determination which one occurred first, or second, or
whether they occurred simultaneously, depending on the motion of
an observer, they might appear to occur at the same time or not.
He gave the example of someone on a train witnessing two
lightning bolts, versus someone on the ground witnessing two
lightning bolts. To someone on the ground, two lightning bolts
occurring at equal distances in either direction, the light will
come and reach the person at the same time. To someone on a
train, who is at the middle of that platform right when the bolts
occur, at the same time according to the person on the platform,
because of the train’s motion, they’re going to see this bolt
before the other one. Who’s right? What does it really mean to
say “at the same time”? Because all the laws of nature work the
same, whether you’re standing still supposedly, or you’re in
constant motion, there’s no way to say who’s right; what the
right time should be. And the idea of having a universality of
simultaneity, to say “at this moment in the universe” disappears,
and it becomes relative to the observer.
What does that mean? It means that time itself no longer
exists as a basis for thought in the way that it had before.
There’s still time, but it’s no longer an untouchable permanence;
the same thing is the case for space. Where space and time are
skewed, and distances have to take place or be considered in
space-time, rather than in only one or the other. So, by then, by
1905 in his special theory of relativity, Einstein had replaced
the concepts of space and time as a basis for physics with
something physical; light’s motion. In this way, he was
implementing the revolutions in physics that Riemann said would
take place; that our understanding of geometry would take place
not by looking at geometry, but by an understanding of those
binding forces of nature which give rise to what is then
observed. A bent space; a curved space; a skewed space.
With his general theory of relativity in 1915, Einstein went
beyond frames of reference which are either at rest with respect
to each other or in uniform motion; and he considered
acceleration. He considered the fact that there is a relativistic
equivalence between somebody in a room where they feel the floor
pushing up against their feet, or their feet pushing down against
the floor, that without reference to what’s outside that room,
they might be sitting on the Earth, or they might be out in
space, where the top of the building is attached to a rope which
is being pulled at an accelerating rate, constantly pulling the
building up against their feet. No experiment, nothing you could
do inside the room, would be able to distinguish the one from the
other. From this equivalence then, Einstein derived his general
theory of relativity, by which not only motion, but gravitation
changes the shape of space and time.
This was a very, and still is, a very wild shocking idea.
Space and time were considered to be such fundamental things that
the possibility of them even being curved was rejected out of
hand by people like Immanuel Kant, Isaac Newton, Bertrand
Russell.
So, what Einstein was able to do, though, is demonstrate
that he was right. Two quick examples. One was the orbit of
Mercury. Every orbit, every planet, has a place that’s farthest
from the Sun, and one where it’s closest to the Sun. You draw the
line through them. That line for the orbit doesn’t stay
stationary. It actually moves over time. For Mercury that line
moves a degree and a half every century. And based on
calculations and gravity, as it was understood, people were able
to explain almost all of that change. There remained a very, very
small — about .01 degree per century — change in Mercury’s
orbit that no one had explained, but which Einstein was able to
explain with his theory.
Also his prediction about how light would bend going around
large objects, was borne out in the experiments around the
eclipse of 1919, in which photographs taken of stars near the
eclipsed Sun — since the Sun was covered, you could actually see
stars near the Sun, which you can’t ordinarily do in the daytime,
because you can’t see anything — and comparing those same stars
when the Sun was not in the sky near them, showed again that
Einstein was right; that the path of light coming from the stars
towards us was deformed, was shaped, by the presence of the Sun
in the way.
So, these are the things that people are most familiar with
about Einstein, things that are indisputably advances that he
made. But there’s more to him than that. I think that the great
importance that LaRouche attributes to him in what Megan was
bringing up about calling him the only scientist we had here in
the Twentieth Century, the only one who stuck to science, lies
elsewhere as well.
The other great work that Einstein had done was on the
quantum. So in 1905, in addition to Special Relativity, he also
wrote a paper to explain the photo-electric effect, and it was
actually this that got him his Nobel Prize later. This expanded
the theories of Planck in showing how light itself must come in
pieces: that it’s not purely a wave phenomenon; that there’s
something particle-like about it. Experiments, however, required
light to also have wave-like properties, making it impossible to
in a simple way decide on this question. Is light a particle, or
is light a wave? This is one of the difficulties of quantum
physics.
What Einstein held out against was the interpretation by
scientists in his day, led by Bohr, mainly, Neils Bohr the Dane,
to say that science had reached a limit; that to ask why was
really no longer admissible, and that in the quantum world,
physics, instead of saying what nature is, is limited to
describing how nature appears. Against that Einstein — Einstein
would not accept that. Einstein never accepted the idea that we
had reached an end to the ability to know things, and that
quantum theory as it was known at that time, was final, complete.
Something that’s never been true of, really, any theory in
history.
This is seen now with the ongoing difficulties around
completing quantum theory, and also the anomalies in the fields
of life and the potential for a higher understanding of these
quantum processes in the fields of cognition. It’s also seen in
his own work, with the theory of gravitation; with the
difficulties — I hope you’ve been watching the series of
presentations our colleague Ben Deniston has been doing on the
Galaxy on this website every other Wednesday — it’s also seen in
the difficulty in understanding the speed of rotation of
galaxies. The basis for hypotheses that people make about dark
matter now. A lot of what this can indicate is that we have
simply reached the limits to the applicability of our physical
theories, and need to go beyond them.
That’s not done mathematically by positing ways to keep our
old laws, to explain the new phenomena, but it can require going
beyond it.
So, we don’t have answers to these questions. We shouldn’t
fool ourselves into thinking that we do already have the answers
to these questions. And the importance of Einstein for us today,
is that of a successful discoverer who overthrew what had been
thought, developed a higher theory to explain things, and was
guided by an understanding of the role of the human mind in
developing new, successful concepts about nature. With that as a
basis for how we relate to other human beings, with that as a
basis for social relations, we can forge a much higher level of
cooperation on this planet, and develop a culture that’s really
suitable for human beings that participate in it.
MEGAN BEETS: Thank you very much, Jason. With that, I’m
going to bring our broadcast to a close. I would like to thank
Jason for joining me, and Jeff for joining us via video, and I’d
like to thank all of you for watching tonight. Please stay tuned
to larouchepac.com. Good night.
s opmærksomhed fra regeringen og partiet, med en prestigiøs delegation, der talte til plenarforsamlingen, inkl. et medlem af det kinesiske Kommunistpartis Politbureau. Ifølge arrangørerne tiltrak forummet 80 forskellige medier, og der var sandsynligvis 2.000 mennesker, der deltog i de forskellige sessioner. Alt imens Silkevejsbæltet var et af de selvstændige emner, så flettede Bæltet og Vejen ind i mange af de andre emner, der omhandlede en kinesisk reform, at præsentere Kina for verden, energipolitik, den »kinesiske vej«, samfundsstruktur, styrelse og fremtiden for kinesiske studier.