From Letters to the Editors

ON AMERICAN EFFORTS TO PROPAGATE IDEALISM IN THE USSR

At the end of 1948, Lincoln Barnett’s book The Universe and Dr. Einstein was published in New York. Under the banner of science, under the banner of popularizing the works of A. Einstein, the author preaches the most blatant idealism. He asserts that the electron and the photon are merely symbols that are convenient to use for the mathematical relations of the microcosm; that our knowledge of nature, of the universe, is not true, since it is “the result of impressions, clouded by the imperfection of our senses.”

Barnett’s efforts are especially great in his striving to refute the principle of causality—the cornerstone of science and of dialectical-materialist philosophy. Like a faithful lackey of the bourgeoisie seeking to prop up the tottering edifice of idealism, he tries to give his conclusions a science-like character—he refers to quantum mechanics and declares: “Quantum physics has destroyed two pillars of the former science: causality and determinism. For, operating with the terms of statistics and probability theory, it completely rejects the idea that all of nature represents an unbroken chain of causes and effects.” Such conclusions, however, are a genuine falsification of science, for they do not follow from quantum mechanics.

The absurdities generously scattered throughout the book sometimes become simply astonishing; thus, denying the real existence of space and time, Barnett comes to the conclusion that a moment will come when chance will “completely triumph in the universe, when every connection between cause and effect will cease, and time will lose its content—there simply will be no time.”

Barnett, like all his confrères who seek to refute dialectical materialism, is characterized by a baseless substitution of concepts, extending to outright falsification. “Matter is energy and energy is matter”; “matter and energy pass into one another,” he writes, seeking to abolish matter, to replace it with energy. Here, however, as in other places, he is not original, for he has not devised a single objection against dialectical materialism that had not already figured fifty years ago. As early as 1902, W. Ostwald tried “to abolish the old difficulty: how to unite the concepts of matter and spirit” by “subsuming both these concepts under the concept of energy,” but this attempt was brilliantly exposed by Lenin in the book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as idealistic.

Like every idealist, Barnett inevitably arrives at the idea of a god who governs the universe. “Modern physicists state (those who profess an idealistic philosophy. M. K.),” writes Barnett, “that nature acts mysteriously on the basis of mathemati-”

…“principles.” But this mysterious action on the basis of mathematical principles is merely another name for God, on whom the harmonious development of the universe depends.

Unable to contribute anything new to the refutation of materialism, Barnett repeats the conjectures of de Sitter, Jeans, and Einstein about the finite dimensions of the universe, about its creation and end. “Matter and energy of the universe volatilize, like vapor, into all-absorbing emptiness… Throughout the universe heat is transformed into cold; matter is wasted in radiation; energy is dissipated in empty space… the universe is approaching its end in the form of a ‘heat death’.” This nonsense, which justifies the clerical dogma of the end of the world, is presented to the reader under the guise of scientific data. All these idealistic fabrications about the creation and end of the world reflect the historical doom of the social rule of the bourgeoisie. It is precisely the social conditions of imperialism that have engendered and continue to engender anti-scientific idealistic conclusions. Especially revealing in this respect is the general conclusion the author, who seeks to inspire the American reader, makes: “Thus, little by little, philosophers and scientists have arrived at the astonishing conclusion that the entire objective universe, consisting of matter and energy, atoms and stars, exists only as a construction of our consciousness, as a system of conventional signs created by human feelings.”

Lenin wrote in 1908 in the book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism that “there is scarcely a single modern professor of philosophy who is not engaged, directly or indirectly, in refuting materialism. They have declared materialism refuted hundreds and thousands of times, and continue to refute it for the hundred-and-first and thousand-and-first time.” Barnett is one of these modern soulless refuters. Lenin also indicated why professors were engaged in refuting materialism. “In our time, when everything has advanced so far… to obtain official recognition for one’s works… means throwing overboard all scientific laws in order to clear the way for the laws of religion; it means piling up mountains of high-sounding trash and rubbish to stuff the heads of students” (Lenin, Works, vol. 20, p. 188). It is precisely in order to earn the approval of his masters that Barnett, the lackey of imperialism, took up his pen and piles up “mountains of high-sounding trash and rubbish,” stuffing readers’ heads with idealistic nonsense.

Barnett has made no discoveries either in physics or in astronomy, but belongs to the numerous American journalists who, for dollars, are ready to write any absurdity.

His scribbling, in itself, would not deserve to be written about in the pages of the Soviet press, were it not for the following two piquant circumstances.

The book is supplied with a foreword by A. Einstein himself, in which he recommends it and asserts that “it gives a correct picture of our contemporary knowledge in the field of physics.” Thus A. Einstein blesses the author’s idealistic fabrications. This shows that his philosophical views are evolving more and more toward idealism. The Soviet reader should know about this.

The United States Information Bureau, striving under the banner of science to impose its ideology on the Soviet reader, reprinted the book in the pages of the magazine America, which it publishes in the USSR. However, Acheson’s servants clearly miscalculated in their attempts to make use of A. Einstein’s name. In this matter, as in the affairs of big politics, they have a poor sense of reality. Soviet readers are armed with the Marxist-Leninist worldview and turn away in disgust from scribbling that falsifies science to serve the rulers of the dollar.

M. Karpov