Even as children in Stalin’s Russia we knew about Edison what was known in his native USA. At 12, he became a railroad newsboy and at 15 a telegraph operator. As of 1928, that is, three years before his death (in 1931, at the age of 84), he had taken out 1,033 patents for his inventions, creating today’s environment in a “modern country.” During WWI he worked on naval technology for the government. Yet his genius did not make the US military might as superior to that of the Imperial Germany as his incandescent electric lamp was superior to its kerosene or oil predecessor.

While Edison was accepted in Soviet Russia, Einstein was not even mentioned in our school textbooks of physics. In 1914, at the age of 35, Einstein, a Jew who did not conceal his pro-Jewish sentiments, left Switzerland for Germany, adopted German citizenship, and became — the Director (!) of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physics Institute in Berlin!

Why this devotion of his to the German Empire of Wilhelm II?

Emperors patronized elitist culture, whether in art or in science, accessible only to the few. Even today, in its “Biography of Albert Einstein,” Yahoo! says:

At the time of the publication on the theory of relativity, the people that read the papers [by Einstein] met them with skepticism and ridicule. As the other papers were published, they were viewed the same way.

Let us recall that Einstein received in 1905 his Ph.D. in order to get a “university position” and thus make a living, but got none and had to work as a clerk in a patent office in Berne, Switzerland.

Universities are “collectives” (the noun originated in English in 1655). Every member depends on his colleagues for recognition, appreciation, promotion. Now, members of imperial institutions of culture did not depend on their colleagues. Today’s composers, performers, arrangers, etc., in the West must please as many listeners as possible. Hence “mass culture” and in particular, “pop music.” Great composers of the past wrote “classical music,” in which only the musical elite was (and is) interested. But those composers did not depend financially on mass audiences.

Wilhelm II decided (correctly) that Einstein was not understood by many physicists because he was too great and hence sounded ridiculous if not insane to learned mediocrities.

The other day I saw a television program on the origin of the Earth. Flushed all over the screen was the photograph of Einstein. But what is amazing about Einstein that the program did not mention? He said that there is no single time for the universe, but each point of it has its own space-time. The producers of the U.S. television program I saw did not say (in 2007!) a word about such thoughts of Einstein in 1905 or 1912. Possibly they found those thoughts insane or did not want their audience to suppose that they (the producers) were insane.

Einstein would not have been able to exist in a US university in 1914, for he would be ousted from it by learned mediocrities who fill any university collective as its majority. But as the Director of an Imperial institution, Einstein throve, and in 1921, he received a Nobel Prize. Not for his “insane discoveries,” but the prize helped him to thrive and publish his insane thoughts in Germany before Hitler came to power, and the “Aryan” physicists declared his physics to be a Jewish degeneracy.

The irony is that Germany had been nurturing Einstein since 1914, and in 1933 chased him out as a Jew, along with other Jewish physicists, into the United States where in 1939 he wrote (at the request of Jewish émigrés) his famous letter of Aug. 2 to President Roosevelt about the possibility of development of nuclear weapons ahead of Nazi Germany, that is, ensuring its defeat.

In 1986, the Chinese dictatorship created (like the Emperor!) Project 863 to consider what a “normal” research institution would find ridiculous or insane. The dictatorship of China has been trying to net in this way an Einstein and other minds of genius, in the post-nuclear fields, for in the last analysis, superior military might depends on minds of genius, and not on 10,000 “normal” universities, considering these minds of genius ridiculous or insane.

In 1986, a born and bred American named Eric Drexler published a book, subtitled “Coming Era of Nanotechnology,” and founded “The Foresight Institute.” No one can deny that it was Drexler who coined the very word “nanotechnology” and that the era of nanotechnology has come. But Drexler’s theory has been proclaimed (by American savants, not by Project 863 in China!) ridiculous or insane.