Michael Gove is no Einstein

Is anyone any longer in any serious doubt that the leaders of the Brexit campaign feel they can just come out with whatever fact-free, delirious twaddle jumps into their head and expect us to swallow it?

It’s getting quite surreal now. Michael Gove, faced with a question on LBC Radio about what to make of all the top economists who have warned of the dire consequences of the UK leaving the European Union, decided that there was a parallel here with the way Einstein was treated in Germany in the 1930s.

“We have to be careful about historical comparisons”, said Gove, “but Albert Einstein during the 1930s was denounced by the German authorities for being wrong and his theories were denounced and one of the reasons of course he was denounced was because he was Jewish. They got 100 German scientists in the pay of the government to say that he was wrong and Einstein said, ‘Look, if was wrong, one would have been enough’.”

So, did you get that? Michael Gove is Einstein, and the economists who have decided that Brexit would be economically bad are like Nazis in the pay of the government.

Except that he is simply peddling half-truths and fictions. Gove clearly thinks these “100 scientists” were put up to it by the Nazi authorities. But the infamous book A Hundred Authors Against Einstein was published in 1931, before the Nazis came to power and while Germany was still ruled by the Weimar government - who Einstein supported.

And as the title suggests, they weren’t “100 scientists”. They were a ragbag of academics and other “intellectuals” of various stamps, among which there was only one real physicist, an insignificant (and retired) figure called Karl Strehl. They had no expertise, and evidently had not the faintest idea what to make of relativity. The book wasn’t taken in the slightest bit seriously by the German scientific community, and the vast majority of leading physicists in Germany supported Einstein’s ideas. Of course A Hundred Authors (most of them were present in name only in the book – only a few expressed their views) was motivated in considerable part by anti-Semitism, as well as objections to Einstein’s internationalism. How that is supposed, in Gove’s mind, to bear on the reasons for the economists’ position on Brexit is anyone’s guess. Do they reach conclusions different to his because they are similarly bigoted in some fashion? The parallel is as meaningless as it is fatuous. Gove faced a very serious question here and he had nothing to say behind falsehoods and bluster. If Brexit wins, we can expect a lot more of the same.