I like what David Hilbert said when the Nazis tried to get him to take credit for General Relativity (when they weren’t denouncing it as Jewish science). “In Gottingen, every school boy knows four dimensional non Euclidean geometry. Relativity belongs to Einstein.” (Also what he said to the Nazi minister of education on his the occassion of his Festschift in 1943, when asked how Mathematics in Gottingen was going, now that it was Judenrein. “There is no more mathematics in Gottingen.”
What amazed me was the simplicity he used to describe his concepts.
I did not know about David Hilbert. Thanks for that insight.
I spent 14 years in NM. When I lived there most of my friends worked at the labs. (I’m a Ham Op) I knew several “scientists” some of them were “rocket scientists”. I knew some physicists and some others who were techs but did not talk about their work. Other friends worked for the Military bases in the area.
Before I moved from NM in December 1985, I had learned that some of science is not about science but about funding. Had friends connected with the VLA site (deep space radio telescope) in Datil. Heard then a bit about National Science Foundation and the funding impact of the actual research.
It is much worse today. Many frauds in the business.
In a earlier time some of the people I knew accomplished great things with little funding. “Science”
Las Cruces & White Sands was famous for Robert Goddard and later Wernher Von Braun and his team. I lived in Las Cruces, but moved in less than 1 year to Silver City. Traveled (salesman) for a living while there.
Admired the work that Kelly Johnson did at the “skunk works”. He was brilliant about what he created.
A return to honesty and morality in our culture is the only way out of this mess.
Certainly not the Communist path that DC has us on.