• Opinion, plastic matter
• The ‘crisis’ of science
• Einstein’s contributions
• Philosophies and parties
• Space and time
• Mechanics and optics
• Revealing aether?
• Goodbye absolute time
• Matter and energy
• Extended relativity
• Space and matter
• Historical spacetime

The vast mechanisms and gears of global ‘information’, anxiously, skilfully keeping themselves ready for any nourishment of great opportunities favourable to peddling the news, with its countless seasonings, colourings, and stage-settings, have obviously got off to a great start after the announcement that the great scientist had been done away with by a glaring medical-surgical misdiagnosis, perhaps before the expected end.

The material to be poured out was equally first-rate and rich in resources, and it was generously dished out from all sources, in predictable tones and laying it on thick with clichés that the modern public likes to drink in endlessly. In its existential naïveté (in truth, one must congratulate poor Opinion, believed to be the queen of the modern world, if amid so much uproar it still comes to the conclusion that the only sure thing is to follow, to get by), this public of all countries that make people read, listen, and watch with standardised direction, swallows the drink of information and ‘culture’ like all the others pushed onto it by omnipotent advertising: not because it quenches its thirst, but because the orgasm to quench its thirst returns even more powerfully.

Einstein’s body had not even had time to be cremated, and already the great orchestra was beating with an infernal crescendo upon overused banalities: the highest mind of modern times had given this lost humanity the terrible gift of the atomic bomb, the sure cause of its extermination; then, meditating on such an immense responsibility, he had issued philanthropic lamentations, and in his spiritual testament (the originality of such gimmicks is truly the foundation of the modern heraldic style!) he had implored that moralistic panaceas and democratic pietisms might avert ruin.

Great architect of a scientific revolution, cast in its vulgarised version as the ‘bankruptcy of science’ and the ‘end of determinism’, and thus the purported executioner of Marxist and revolutionary historical materialism – one could well, in the quagmire of contemporary universal ideological and theoretical enfeeblement, make him, from his misanthropic isolation, move onto the political stage, as a tendential friend of the ‘Marxist’ half of the world, to recite with the world movement of the dove-loving and milk-and-honey-ising communists the hymn to the vilest and most impossible peace, one that is preached as deriving from a general sanctity of the autonomy of the individual-person.

It is not strange that the red wing of the world duel concerning the best use of this monstrous deception should seek to make use of such a resource, now that its eclecticism with respect to the principles it still pretends to believe in (especially in matters concerning the links between science and philosophy, science and politics) has led it to seek support from all sides, right up to the word of the Catholic pontiff.

Thus he whom American theatrics had pretended to measure, with its village-fair tests, as the highest functioning cerebral machine in the world, he whom racism (crushed under Hitler’s Aryan racism) had elevated to the banner of the chosen people, giver to the world of the highest Teachers (Moses, Christ, Marx, Einstein...) ended up in recent years as a peddler, in social matters, of penny-pinching ideas.

This pleases opinion. At a time when attempts are being made on all sides to claim it as the driving machine of the world, the ruler of society and of physical nature, it shows itself to be as plastic and yielding as gruel, and all the skilful fingerprints of sales talk remain in it. Nothing is more manipulable and soft-rotten than the posturing of the free world boasted of by the West, of the popular democracy ‘from below’ extolled by the East.

It fits well among the raw materials of modern production, it serves capital. It has no fibre, no innervation; it has no spines like classical construction materials, it can be made to yield or harden at will in any direction, it is ‘isotropic’, passive and unfit at all temperatures, under all latitudes. Its virtue of adaptability and its sheep-like sloth, in the turn the world is taking, have exceeded conceivable highs, and eclipsed the old rhetorical fables about the general ignorance and obscurantism of bygone eras.

As a politician, poor old Einstein could not frighten us. But as an outstanding representative of a historical phase of scientific knowledge, is he an enemy?

The modern era, what, on the historical scale, Lenin called Imperialism – a recent stage of Capitalism – i.e. the advent of the massive, ultra-centralised and ultra-antisocial form established by Marxist doctrine as the premise of its ruin, is characterised by a wave of corrosive self-criticism of official science, the ideology of the ruling class.

The opposition between the confidence, pride, and triumphant stride of secular science in the post-revolutionary period of the bourgeoisie, founded on the sumptuous basis of the philosophical demolition of medieval, ecclesiastical, and authoritarian thought, conducted even before the liberal revolutions by Enlightenment thinkers, sensualists, criticists, in all the advanced nations of Europe, and the more recent hesitancy, doubtfulness, ruthlessness of revision, and yearning to restore broken idols, of the ‘thinkers’ of the early twentieth century, is quite evident.

For us Marxists, this coincides with the social fact that at the advent of liberalism, appearing to the world as an intellectual phenomenon in the philosophical, legal, and political fields, the great revolutions open the way for the great rhythms of the bourgeois mode of production, which, when it arises, combines class interest with a social interest. It, relative to the old, guarantees more services for less social labour torment; it increases the productivity of social labour, and raises, in great leaps, the general standard of activity and satisfaction. But it will exhaust its fertile phase in a short cycle, growing parasitic.

Furthermore, there is the side of the class struggle, the counter-revolutionary defence and resistance to the theory of the new protagonist: the proletariat. It seems to the bourgeoisie that it has given such weapons to its enemy – and it is true – insofar as the new doctrine turns out to be founded on a development of the excessive boldness of early bourgeois thought. For a century, we revolutionaries of the proletariat have claimed determinism in history, and on that we base the laws of the decline of that system, which the bourgeoisie dreamed to be eternal, and we anticipate for it the funeral that it danced and sang over the ruins of thrones and altars.

A century after the First Napoleon, the bourgeoisie repudiates the blasphemous, audacious Laplace, who had written the foundational theorem of determinism in the field of nature: given all the positions and motions of the particles of matter at a given instant, we will be able to mathematically calculate their positions and movements at any future instant in the life of the cosmos.

The new ruling class saw with terror a paraphrase of the cosmic prophecy in the social one of Marx: once the economic and social relations between the classes are known, and once their contradictions are known, the movements that led from feudal to capitalist power, we are able to establish the laws of the future transition of power from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat and the destruction of the economic form of capitalism.

Modern privilege, and modern thought, whose investigations the former nourishes, now that they have largely exhausted the impulse towards the conquests of the future, and that it seems to them that they have destroyed too much, have wanted to give everything so that the nightmare of the new palingenesis may pass from them.

Nineteenth-century bourgeois materialism and positivism, not in the field of philosophy, whose importance that trend gradually diminished, but precisely in that of natural science, a critique was launched (certainly not lacking deep insight), calling into question the soundness of the experimental method and the validity of scientific research, re-proposing in updated forms all the ancient doubts on the relations between object and subject, reality and experience, nature and human knowledge.

Does this vast movement of multiple schools, from Mach to Bergson, from James to Poincaré, from Avenarius to Le Roy, etc., rely on Einstein as a teacher, have him as a follower, receive contributions from his physical-mathematical conception? None of these theses are correct, neither chronologically nor theoretically. Einstein is not the standard-bearer of anti-determinism, of anti-causalism, the champion of the philosophical theory of uncertainty, or even of the impossibility of scientific knowledge, or even of the probabilistic method, known, moreover, to the classical theorists and studied in its laws since Laplace himself, who would not have been content – had he dabbled in politics – to say: it is only very likely that the bourgeoisie and its ideology will go to hell.

The work of Einstein the physicist is very complex. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about him was that he did not close himself off in one field, but worked in all of them with the power of a record-holder of the brain-muscle. Even as an old man, he does not rehash a narrow field, does not get lost in the details, does not parade himself as a scholar and does not publish monumental works. As a young man, he deals with the various fields of physics, he masters, with exceptional selective ability, the essential results amid stifling modern university literature (admittedly less disreputable than it is now, half a century later) then he develops brief expositions where the problem is reduced to the essential and its solution always decisive and new. He has always kept himself aloof and distant from the dissemination, popularisation, translation into philosophical and, worse still, vulgarising and half-cultured language, barely tolerating some of the works that sprang up like mushrooms and were full of innumerable digressions, having a horror of every ‘extrapolation’ (what the man of science who is not a charlatan detests most, what professors of 1950 like most) with a literary, rhetorical, ‘detective’ and ‘science fiction’ background.

His great and brilliant construction on special relativity, which is in the field of mechanics, places him among the great milestones of the classical path, with Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, whose methods and great insights he continues.

Although the traditional problems are posed even more radically there, the doctrine, more demanding as a mathematical apparatus, and far less suited to ‘chattering’ formulations, of general relativity is no different in a history of science.

He is as relativist in this as modern anti-theological classical thought is: breaking old absolutes that are too narrow in order to construct new and more valid true absolutes. But these are no longer absolutes from which one starts, as if from a sentence premised on every conquest, they are absolutes that one earns, at which one arrives, through which one passes. This is the path of Einstein’s work, which did not walk, so long as that was possible, in the vein of the reactionary scepticism of today’s so-called ‘thinkers’. Precisely, he did not go from the absolute to the relative, but from the particular to the general.

Before sketching, certainly not thoroughly demonstrating, all this, it is necessary to backtrack, at least in the biographical chronicle, which is indeed also scientific history. It is before giving the framework of his geometrical-mechanical construction that Einstein enters the field of optics, the domain of an ancient classical dualism of theories ranging from the Greek atomists to Newton, and here too he first traces the mathematical expression of the new conception, later developed by other physicists, such as Planck and Bohr, of photons, or ‘grains of light’. It will be these physicists who will apply this ‘granular’ theory to every form of energy, they will be the ones who want to celebrate this triumph of the ‘discontinuous’ in all fields of physics as the philosophical proof of the unattainability of truth: Einstein, meanwhile, followed, whatever may be of this difficult ‘high-level’ debate, a quite different direction.

This dualistic struggle in optics followed, as it were, on its own between the corpuscular and the wave conception, and after the former seemed to triumph the great physicist de Broglie (rather far from the idealist band) arranged them into an organic conception, while it was other physicists such as Schrödinger and especially Heisenberg who radicalised them in an indeterministic direction. Einstein, let us just say, stayed out of this fray, but he devoted the last decades of his work to achieving a synthesis between two seemingly irreconcilable groups of phenomena, laws, and equations: those that govern optics and electromagnetism, thus the radiant forms of energy, including atomic and nuclear, and those of his general mechanics. He announced that he had achieved his goal, which he summarised in a bare table of formulae: we shall refrain from dealing with them, as a de Broglie reserves the right to do, but we will say that Einstein died after having written them down not in the indeterministic language of the concretum but in the classical language of the continuum.

If the infinitesimal calculus founded by Newton and Leibniz, applying it to the geometric representation of Descartes, is, with all three centuries of mathematical physics, abolished by law, and one were to return to the simple arithmetic counting of the mystical Pythagoras, it will not be, to put it mildly, Albert Einstein who will have wanted it.

Having established this, and certainly not in order to claim to give a new prose exposition of relativity, we can perhaps explain ourselves better on the terrain of determinism.

Within the heart of the Marxist movement, the battle for ‘our’ philosophy has always been considered vital. As a philosophy, Marxism is not only a conception of economic society and history, but also of the world and of social and cosmic life in the broadest sense. Marx made fundamental contributions to this by putting in their place the great currents of bourgeois philosophy: France, Germany, England, Italy (of Vico, Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, a greater ‘party’ study should be made, if the parties had not given themselves over to Loyola and Aquinas, nevertheless remarkable thinkers in their own right) Engels devoted to it his famous work against Dühring, a classic example of plugging holes opened clumsily in political economy and therefore in philosophy.

Plekhanov in Russia introduced Marxist economics and the Marxist conception of history, but devoted an important work on the defence of Monistic Philosophy (Materialist, in that it reduces the dualism of matter and spirit to the material element alone) to the philosophical part. Such a work, on which Lenin was also educated, was a necessary barrier against the inevitable bourgeois and petty-bourgeois tendencies of Russian oppositional thought under the tsars.

When in later times, as is well known, quite a few Russian Marxists, even of the left, fell into the sin of idealism, of voluntarism (which is anti-determinism) and relied on the ‘new’ empirio-criticist philosophy that re-established speculation ‘in the head’ giving it priority over material experience, in a re-presentation of old ideas freshly varnished, it was Lenin who rolled up his sleeves and gave us the work ‘Materialism and Empirio-criticism’. Is the completion of such a work definitive? If we read the official History of the Bolshevik Party, this is given for certain, and likewise in many Stalinist declarations, which reconfirmed historical materialism, theory of human society, and dialectical materialism, theory of the science of the cosmos. This orthodoxy reduced to the hortus conclusus of the philosophical agon, after the fact that, in matters of economic science and historical-political doctrine there is not a page of Marx’s, Engels’, and Lenin’s that has not passed through dark chambers, cannot but make one smile. What nonsense would our dialectical materialism be if, sacrosanct in philosophy, it allowed itself to be juxtaposed with the most indeterminate and indeterminable conclusions in the economic, legal, political, and tactical fields, and tolerated the most exaggerated tributes to the most blatant bourgeois ideologies: far beyond Mach, far beyond Berkeley, here we philosophise in a more vulgar manner than the beggars of San Gennaro! or the tertiaries of St Francis!

The question that can be posed: has ‘Materialism and Empirio-criticism’ been able to respond to Einstein? would not trouble us too much. But the question of whether it has been able to respond to other physico-cosmological theories in which spirit and transcendence reappear with flags unfurled, having claimed to have bound physical science and, a hundred times more, that of social man to irrevocable condemnation, to narrowness, and to error, this is a question that remains open, that cannot be resolved by a circular to activists, and to which the movement will dedicate further work beyond these occasional notes.

The anti-materialists did not cease to be a nuisance in the other European parties. The whole of Bernstein, the father of revisionism, is voluntarism and pragmatism; in France, the orthodox Lafargue had to fight with the historical idealist Jaurès; of the English Webbs we shall not speak; and in Italy, while there always remain a few philosophical husks to be re-examined in dear Antonio Labriola, we have run, as you well know, the unspeakable danger of having as a teacher of Marxism even Don Benedetto Croce, whose school had no small influence, in the name of the common béguin for national unity, upon subalpine ordinovism.

Not having, therefore, critical wings for great cosmic flights, and not being able to envy those who, putting on a serious face, squawk at them with duckling wings, we shall limit ourselves to wielding the modest yardstick of the partisan militant, in order to assert that the great path of the Marxist conception finds no contradiction in the results of the Einsteinian doctrines, for whoever comes to read in them a little beyond the banded covers displayed in shop windows.

Kant is regarded as, and is, the founder of modern thought. Between Aristotle and him, they had placed the cloak of Revelation upon the shoulders of the sage. He wished to tear it off himself in order to reexamine every arbitrary datum under the scalpel of criticism, rediscovering and rewriting everything. No longer disputing that the data of human experience had to be utilised, he added to it the work of a workshop-mind of not a few horsepower and sought to eliminate everything that was reducible to an antecedent datum. Assuming that the efficacy of knowing was no longer in the grace of god bestowing a part of his infinite patrimony of thought, he concluded that something always had to be accepted from outside, always as an a priori given, that is, found there ready-made. Let the good god no longer be the donor (more a matter of language than anything else: in Einstein’s language god has returned) but in any case this something is found there at the bottom of his head by its own virtue: hence they said at school immanence not transcendence. Kant stopped at two givens of all knowing, that is, of all experiencing in the external world and speculating within the internal world (cranium): the primary notions, the ‘categories’ of space and time.

Everyone knows that with special relativity, Einstein reduced the two forms to only one, and with this he necessitated a new and different language, first in mathematical formulas, then, which is certainly not easy, in ordinary speech.

It is necessary, however, to understand that Einstein was not led to this result from a gnoseological need, i.e. from a study of the theory of human knowing, but from a physical investigation, from the quite different need to give satisfactory form to results drawn from real phenomena, which previous doctrines, laws, formulas, and equations were unable to reconcile.

Let us give, in the simplest way, an idea of the difficulty that arose: what interests us is that it, along with various others, arose on the ground of the experimental method and the definition of causal laws, that is, laws such that, once found, they allow one to predict with certainty given groups of future facts, of events. Already in Laplace’s time, everything is settled, or solved, for celestial mechanics, the science that studies the movements of the stars, and this on the basis of Newton’s law of gravitation.

This form of energy that is gravity, the attraction between distant material bodies, has first allowed itself to be reduced to a law, which does not take away its intimate ‘mystery’. What communicates the reciprocal attraction between two immensely distant bodies? Do they exchange messages? Do waves travel from one to the other? In common parlance, this actio in distans, influence on a distant body, asks for presence alone, wastes no time in establishing itself.

But modern times have discovered other forms of energy, the electric and the magnetic, and the dream of physics is to reduce them under the same rule with gravitation. A dream that seemed ready to be realised when Coulomb gave the law by which charges of opposite poles attract, identical to Newton’s law.

However, things became complicated when Hertz and others found that such energies are transmitted through space as electromagnetic waves (which Marconi later used for wireless telegraphy). This discovery allowed light to be assimilated to this group of facts, it being proved that electromagnetic and optical waves had in a vacuum the same well-known speed, of three hundred thousand kilometres a second.

The word wave (in our feeble mind) requires a medium that oscillates, like sea water or air in which a sound is transmitted, entirely mechanical and known facts. The medium does not travel, but quivers, trembles, and it is the wave that is transmitted from one point to another. But light and electromagnetism are also transmitted in a vacuum, by its nature deaf, silent. Physicists called aether the unknown medium in which all bodies would be ‘immersed’ and which would remain fixed with respect to the fixed stars.

With this, Fresnel was right with the wave theory of light, and not those who, from Democritus to Newton, assimilated the ray to a series of minute corpuscles that come to strike the eye (emission theory).

This motionless aether was a step backwards compared to the giant thought of Galileo. They told him, using the language of common sense to which the human species had arrived: but we feel that the earth stands still: what kind of experimentalist are you, that you want to persuade us it moves with incredible speed? This was the obstacle that the Pisan broke down, with his principle of relativity, a principle that remains true in Einstein’s particular and general doctrine yet invades into further and immense fields.

Much less worrying was the objection of official scholasticism that, since Joshua stopped the Sun, this proves that, according to scripture, the Sun does not stand still but moves. The Church itself has abandoned the argument; Galileo did not hold that the Sun stood still at all; Galileo based his thesis (on which Engels will rely on for philosophical and materialist purposes): immobility is a meaningless word, only movement exists. The crystal-clear formula with which Engels shuts the gossiping mouth of Dühring links Galileo’s relativity and, if you have the patience, Einstein’s general relativity: motion is the mode of being of matter.

The principle of relativity is simple, let us state it without going looking for proofs in the classic Galilean works, having you walk on the deck of the ship that runs along the shore, having you throw your hat in the river...: ‘Whoever, together with everything surrounding him (reference system) moves, does not notice the movement, indeed he cannot have any experience that reveals the movement to him’.

Rest and motion are not absolute concepts, but relative. Absolute rest does not exist, absolute motion is indefinable.

With this concept, which is now disputed by no side, the creationist hypothesis received the death blow; for the primordial chaos, the motionless deposit of matter amidst the darkness, is inconceivable. The cosmos has no ‘start-up throttle’ because the cosmos is nothing but motion.

But Galileo posits the principle and demonstrates it with a limiting condition. The indefinability of the direction and speed of motion only holds for rectilinear and uniform motions. I sleep peacefully in a bus travelling in a straight line, but at a braking or sharp turn of the vehicle I feel myself shift and wake up. A fact of common sense that seems as certain as that of feeling the earth with one’s foot and saying it is still (they say that Galileo, coming out of his imposed abjuration, stamped his foot exclaiming: fools, it moves!). Einstein will open the eyes of the sleeper in the trolleybus: relativity holds for any motion.

Therefore, it is not possible through internal mechanical experiments to prove that the reader and the newspaper and the room are in motion, and to know at what speed, since speeds are only relative to a given other reference body (system), which we see moving relative to us.

But having found the aether, it was possible to say: wait a moment, if the Aether is immobile, then it is possible to find, through experiments that are no longer mechanical, but optical or electromagnetic, the speed of our system (room, earth) relative to the aether. If that is the speed of light in the aether, and if the aether is stationary, if the earth turns from Turin to Milan, an optical signal, or radio signal, takes longer from Turin to Milan than in the opposite direction; knowing the difference between the two times and the distance I can find the speed of the earth.

But all this came to nothing. Once the experiment had been carried out (Michelson: not from Milan to Turin but between groups of mirrors and using interference of the rays...) it was seen that the speed of light is always the same and from this one can establish what the motion of the system in which one is experimenting may be. Galileo, the father of relativity, was right.

Maxwell had meanwhile studied the theory of radiant energy in depth. Lorentz resolved with what he perhaps believed to be an artifice of formulae the point at which Maxwell stopped: his laws did not remain the same if instead of being satisfied with a single system, i.e. one relatively stationary with respect to the observer, measurements were taken in another (from another) system, in motion relative to the first. Lorentz found that it all added up by complicating Galileo’s ‘transformation’ a little.

Galileo goes from one system to the other, the two in uniform motion relative to one another, by adding or subtracting from the distances one and the same length given by time and relative speed. It is not a puzzle: the passenger travels twenty metres on the deck while the ship travels forty with respect to the shore: he will have traveled sixty with respect to the tree planted on the shore, with triple speed.

Lorentz made the calculation come out right by slightly reducing the distance that I, standing under the tree, attribute to the sailor’s walk, and, what is stranger, also the time that I read on my watch.

This result, first of all, removed one of the obstacles to the unification of the various ‘physics’; on the other hand, to a mind like Einstein’s it posed a deeper problem. Given that calculation is no longer done with Galileo’s little formulas but rather with Lorentz’s, which in most cases give me different numbers, very slightly but different, must I not then begin to write differently not only the formulae but also their enunciation in words, must I not then begin to think differently, ready to abandon some of the hitherto prevailing rules of thought, its laws, its famous categories? He, if he posed this problem, perhaps for the first time, did not proceed as a metaphysician (the categories of thought are eternal and immutable!) but as a dialectician, not as a spiritualist or idealist (in the beginning was divine thought, was the immanent idea) but as a materialist.

Above all, he proceeded as a physical experimentalist in that, if Michelson’s experience had given the opposite outcome, he would not have bothered to fantasise. And he then fantasised as one who is convinced that he will find causal and universal laws, only written somewhat differently from how Galileo wrote them, but, like his, covariant. Covariant means that they have the same form, construction, for different observers (better, we would say for different observers endowed with different movements relative to each other). And he went in the direction, which he seems ultimately to have followed entirely, of the single formula that encompasses mechanical and optical causality. His work may be rejected, but it cannot be disputed that it is firmly anchored to an anti-subjectivist and strictly determinist formula.

In Galileo, the transformation of time is very simple: t is equal to t prime. Clocks register the same times between two events, or occurrences, whether they are in the pocket of the helmsman sitting at the stern, the walking passenger, or in the man at the foot of the tree on the shore. In Lorentz-Einstein, this is the case if the ship drops anchor and the passenger reclines in an armchair. From Galileo, Kant could deduce the a priori temporal intuition; the definition of the simultaneity of events throughout the universe, taking cosmic time in the good Lord’s pocket, or in the intuition to be accepted without argument.

Albert Einstein disputed. Not counter-revolutionary with respect to modern critical scientific thought, but more revolutionary (relativist) than Galileo, and more revolutionary (criticist) than Kant.

If we bring down the absoluteness of Time, we destroy what mankind has always sworn by: the mysterious chime that, by marking the present, raises a rigid barrier, as self-moving as it is impassable, between the Past and the Future. With this memorable battle, Einstein does not place himself among the two contemporary degenerations of bourgeois thought, which undermine both the theory of nature and that of society. One is positivism, understood in a sloppy sense, whereby science records what is in the Past, and wants no other responsibility, nor does it know how to build anything in the Future. The other is trivial indecent existentialism, to which a rotten society, long since ripe for the purifying Revolution, has further slipped, which knows only the Present and denies laws and constructive backbone to not only the Future, but to the Past itself, of which the intoxicated drifter equally gives no damn.

Having replaced universal time with local time, mechanics can be rewritten with new formulas, but on the same principles as Galileo, Newton, and d’Alembert, with the same canonical equations. They mark the turn that natural philosophy took with respect to Aristotle and Thomas. The principle of inertia, which is another way of destroying the distinction between matter at rest and matter in motion (between inanimate and animate matter) – the principle of the quantity of motion, which says that a body on which no forces intervene does not change its motion – the principle of the living force which says that only when a new force intervenes does a body accelerate, slow, or deviate, has a historical and social and ‘Marxist’ meaning if we remember that, in Peripatetic philosophy and in Scholasticism, a body left to itself stops, and if a force is expended on it and energy is ‘consumed’ by pushing it, only then does it retain its motion and speed.

The shift in the conception of the various ‘quantities’ of mass, velocity, momentum, and energy remains the same in the particular and general Einstein, and contains the shift that occurred between the Middle Ages and modern times.

What in physics is energy, in sociology is human labour. In ancient static societies, it was believed that labour was but an atavistic condemnation, that it was inescapable in order to keep the speed of historical movement, the tonality, the ‘potential’ of the social course constant. With the Marxist doctrine of the production of capital, we apply the energetic principle to labour, see in it the source of value, the accumulator of social energy reserves, and we deduce from it revolutionary consequences.

Under the pencil (before it is in the mind?) of Einstein, who rewrites classical mechanics within his relativity, still special, with the canons of impulse and energy, a new relationship, a new truth, blooms. Just as, in motion, the intervals of space and time described by the moving body, as seen from the various systems, are no longer constant, so too, between the various reference systems, its mass and energy are no longer constant.

Are the two classical principles of causalistic science concerning the constancy of the totals of mass and energy then collapsing? Old news. Instead, it is the theoretical clarification of other enigmas that have arisen since radioactive bodies were discovered: first radium, around the turn of the century, by the Curie couple. These bodies emit energy that ‘costs nothing’ in electrical, thermal, etc., form. But they slowly lose matter, they decrease in weight. This agrees with the idea that the radiation coming from them are eruptions of minute particles, of that ever better explored edifice that is the atom complex, previously considered homogeneous and point-like.

The relationship between energy released and matter expended is that of the ‘magical’ little formulas of mechanics in special relativity, derived from elementary derivations: each body holds latent as much energy as the product of its mass times the square of the speed of light.

By enucleating this dazzling result from cold symbols, Einstein has only contributed, if we want to find philosophical meanings, to erecting the monument of monism. Either leave the scientist to the difficult ‘technical’ elaboration of his results, in the search for laboratory instruments and in patient mathematical calculation, or attempt to give a universal meaning to the new form he has given to natural laws. If the smallest piece of matter, very cold, inert, and indifferent to transformations contains such torrents of energy, it is a dualism that has been abolished between the passive and the active, the agent and the resistant, a dualism that has been obscured ever since Galileo wrote about the equality of action and reaction. Having gone beyond the dualism of matter and energy; of death and life, who will save the dualism of matter and spirit, who will be able to uphold, once ruthlessly removed from the inquiry of a science, impersonal and not enslaved to limits self-imposed by ancient influences, the mystery of self-secreting from cells and nerve fibres and from the convulsing of the atoms that constitute them, thought-energy?

We certainly cannot follow the arduous transition from special to general relativity, but merely continue on the theme that it preserves the objectivist orientation of Galilean relativity. The philosophers who have skimmed Einstein’s system in order to derive from it the denial of the truth of the external world, the ‘relativism’ to the observing, and thinking, subject of any reproductive view of the world, the arbitrariness of any attempted description of nature (such as Tilgher and others) have only made a giant blunder.

Galileo says: since the laws of the new mechanics, in which ‘motion is not life and value, but acceleration’, occur in force in all systems, we find such a ‘transformation’ from system to system that the law is resolved in itself. It will therefore be indifferent to constructing mechanical science, to place oneself in this or that system, and point of view.

In order to be able to extend this universality of the law, which links masses, accelerations, and energies, in a double sense: first by including the optical phenomenon and then by making it indifferent to the placing of oneself in systems moving with any motion, Einstein writes new transformation formulas.

He leaves intact the hypothesis of Descartes and Leibniz, that is, he measures everything with gradually varying, hence continuous quantities, thus applying infinitesimal calculus and coordinate systems.

He nevertheless requires new apparatuses from mathematics that can be mentioned here, apparatuses more general than those of Euclid: the geometries of Gauss and Riemann, in which the Pythagorean theorem no longer holds, but rather a theorem formally similar and with practical results not far removed in the sensible realm; the absolute differential calculus of the Italian Ricci.

Since we are not to see here whether Einstein was wrong or not, but only to say where he has arrived, and on which side of the barricade he stands, only the conclusions matter to us.

He has found the general formulas of the mechanics of the universe valid for the observer, however in motion, but had to express them in a four-coordinate system. He thus revolutionised space with time, he did not content himself with the three dimensions inherent in our accustomed concept of spatial intuition but assimilated variable time to them. The quantity time, previously a constant, was made variable from point to point (just as the distance between me who is watching and the ship that is moving away is variable). Then it was fused with the other three, writing and calculating according to what mathematicians call a four-dimensional manifold.

Is a four-dimensional manifold truly unthinkable? Let us not be frightened and let us try to show that it is not so. We are in a large meteorological office that tracks the temperature of the atmosphere across the earth. For each report we write in the logs: First, latitude. Second, longitude. Third, altitude. Fourth, temperature. Then we make tables, diagrams, find calculable relationships between those four quantities. We can also imagine being on a planet where the temperature, over time, for the sake of argument, never changes. Let us say: at such latitude and longitude, at what height above the ground is a given temperature observed? Whoever can solve this problem, certainly not ‘transcendent’, operates in a 4-dimensional manifold.

Here too it is a great truism what de Broglie writes: ‘It is not to diminish the merit of the great innovators to note that their discoveries always occur at the right moment, prepared in some way by a whole set of previous works. The fruit is ripe, but no one had known how to pluck it before’. And more deterministically: the one who first picked it had to ripen.

Minkowsky had already described the new ‘universe’ with four dimensions, spacetime, what has been called the Chronotope.

What, in the usual spatial universe, is the point, in the new universe is the event. The point is fixed by three measurements: length, width, and height, to put it simply, and better, as before, for example: latitude, longitude, altitude. At that point today it rains, tomorrow it storms, later it gets dark: the fourth datum that forms the event is time. Lightning has struck: incomplete information: at such latitude, at such longitude, at such altitude above sea level, on such day, hour, and minute. Here is the punctual occurrence, in the infinite chronotope.

A scabrous point. In the mechanics of general relativity, the equations are written in a non-Euclidean spacetime; an image has been presented in which the grid that lays out the various coordinates, which allow us to take those measurements, becomes distorted. And where? Where heavy matter is found in space, where the straight grid has been altered by the presence of a ‘gravitational field’.

Other dualisms have been destroyed, just as the dualism of space and time was. The dualism between geometry and physics is eliminated, because geometry, insofar as it holds as a ‘property of space’, depends on the presence of matter, and not on properties that are found in thought. A rational mathematical activity that is carried out without physical experimentation is reduced to absurdity. In truth, the knowledge that the human species possesses has developed through contact with matter and nature, never through the autonomous work of thought. This is how Marxists pose the matter.

Even de Broglie’s authority assists us in denying that indeterminism prevails in the Minkowsky universe. ‘In spacetime everything that for each of us constitutes the past, the present, and the future is given en bloc and the whole set of events that are successive for us, of which the existence of a particle of matter is made up is represented by a line, the world-line of the particle. This new conception respects the principle of causality and does not undermine the determinism of phenomena’.

Has Einstein unified, within a further system of cosmic equations (which, we repeat, are the same for observations made by any observatory in motion, which are written in the form of derivatives, that is, they assume that quantities can vary through vanishing ‘infinitesimals’, and not only for very small but finite and countable quantities such as electrons, protons, photons, etc.) all the phenomenologies studied by physics, including those that, for Planck and the other indeterminists, are susceptible only to a statistical and probabilistic description? In this he may well have utilised de Broglie’s doctrine, which reconciled particles and waves, expressing the motion of particles also endowed with electric charge as well as mass, and the quanta of energy, in a certain sense, under the grand banner of the canonical equations of impulse and energy. Let us simply assume that this, in the final papers on whose mystery a sideshow publicity would like to unleash itself, has been enshrined.

Would this not be a great milestone on the path of Monism, of our conception of the world? If the mechanical, electrical, magnetic, optical forms of energy, of matter-energy (among which are included those that hold together the complex atomic structures and which are released from them when nuclei are split by corpuscular projectiles) respond to a single law from which the orbit of Sirius millions of light years away and the trajectory of the proton in the core of the nucleus at scales of millionths of a millimetre can be deduced, then Albert Einstein has come very close to the unitary assimilation of even that still little-known form of vital energy that we call thought.

By not only making matter and energy a single substance, but by erasing, through the ingenious construction of gravitationally deformed space, the barrier between every substance and every form, he has ultimately written the monistic and materialistic identity between matter and thought, having removed from the world and from man a soul, which has a law and theory originally independent from those of Total Physics.

The bourgeois demand that science is only possible within the fetters of a constitutional limitedness, the bourgeois attitude of granting it (and even this with ever greater scepticism) only the description of the past, correspond to the claim that no construction of society’s historical future is attainable, and express the terror of Marxism and of revolutionary prophecy.

Historical determinism can present itself as the investigation of the intrinsic laws of a particular trajectory, which is the World-Line of the social forms of production.

Marx, too, has broken the prohibition that no law, science, or powerful certainty of the future may be given, and stated that the very research that teaches how capitalism came to be, serves to establish how it will succumb and disappear, and to give the fundamental outlines of communist society.

We have so many times shouted to those thirsty for the palpable, taken-for-granted political success of conjuncture, that we are revolutionaries not because we need to live and see, as contemporaries, the revolution, but because we live and see it today, as an ‘event’, for the various countries, for the ‘fields’ and ‘areas’ of social evolution into which Marxism classifies the inhabited earth, already susceptible to scientific demonstration. The sure coordinates of the communist revolution are written, as valid solutions of the demonstrated laws, in the spacetime of History.

If proof is needed that it is not the greatest minds who guide the life of the world, it may also be found in the fact that, when Einstein wanted to peer into the dense fog of human social future, he failed to reach conclusions of real depth and fell back into the not-very-gifted formulas handed down to him from a worn-out past, nor did he even try to loosen their miserable shackles, he, the mighty iconoclast of thought.