Einstein×Vinci

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Albert Einstein sits down with Leonardo da Vinci for STUDY HALL. The subject — On a thing the powerful around them agreed to never speak about.
2. 00:11
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   You know, Leonardo, I was thinking about something on the way here. In my time, there was this... understanding. Among the men with money, the men who controlled the universities, the governments. They would fund the physics, yes, but only certain physics.
3. 00:25
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   Ah. You mean they wanted the results but not the questions.
4. 00:30
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Exactly this. After the bomb—after Hiroshima—suddenly everyone wanted to know, 'Einstein, what have you done?' But before? When I was writing letters about uranium to Roosevelt? They were very interested in the weapon, not so much in 'Should we?'
5. 00:43
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   The Medici were the same. They paid me well, very well, to design their fortifications, their war machines. Beautiful commissions. But when I wrote in my notebooks about the submarine, about the diving apparatus—I wrote in mirror script, you understand. Some knowledge I kept backwards.
6. 01:07
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   You hid it? From your patrons?
7. 01:09
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   From everyone. I wrote that I would not publish the method of remaining underwater, because of the evil nature of men, who would practice assassination at the bottom of the sea. This was... 1485, perhaps 1490. The powerful wanted weapons, but I could see what they would do with certain weapons.
8. 01:33
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   And they didn't ask why you withheld things?
9. 01:35
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   They didn't know I was withholding. I showed them the fortress designs, the giant crossbow—spectacle, you see? Things that looked impressive. Meanwhile the real ideas, the dangerous ones, I kept in code. Or I made the drawings deliberately incomplete.
10. 01:55
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    This is fascinating to me because I faced the opposite problem. I couldn't hide the mathematics. Once you publish E equals mc squared, well, it's published. Any physicist can read it, including Heisenberg in Germany, including the whole Soviet delegation.
11. 02:09
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes, but did you want to hide it? At first?
12. 02:13
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    No. No, I was... I was young, I was excited. In 1905 I'm working in the patent office, and I'm discovering these beautiful things about space and time, and all I want is for people to understand them. The idea that this could destroy cities? This never entered my mind.
13. 02:29
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    But someone else's mind.
14. 02:31
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Szilard. Leo Szilard, he understood immediately. 1933, he's reading about splitting the atom, and he's walking through London, and the idea comes to him—chain reaction. He tried to keep it secret, actually. Tried to patent it and keep the patent classified.
15. 02:46
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Like my mirror writing.
16. 02:48
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes, but it didn't work. Too many people thinking similar thoughts. The knowledge was... what do you say... in the air. And here is the thing the powerful agreed never to speak about: they knew. The generals, the presidents, the ministers. They knew that once you have this knowledge, you cannot un-know it. You can only choose what you do.
17. 03:06
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    And they chose.
18. 03:07
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    They chose, yes. But they never said publicly, 'We are choosing to build a weapon that might end human civilization.' Instead it was always 'defense,' always 'necessity,' always 'the other side will do it first.'
19. 03:20
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    In Milano, when I worked for Ludovico Sforza, it was the same language. The fortress walls must be thicker because of the French. The bombards must be larger because Venice has larger ones. No one said, 'We are preparing to burn villages full of farmers who want only to harvest wheat.'
20. 03:41
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    The agreement of silence.
21. 03:43
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    The agreement of silence, yes. You have named it perfectly. And anyone who broke this silence—who said the obvious thing out loud—was treated as naive, or worse, as traitor.
22. 03:57
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    After the war I spoke about world government, about international control of atomic weapons. Very simple idea, really: if everyone has the bomb, eventually someone will use it, so let's agree together not to build them. And they called me a communist.
23. 04:12
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    They called you what?
24. 04:13
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    A communist. In America, in the 1950s, this was like calling someone a heretic in your time. The FBI, they had a file on me, very thick. Because I said maybe we shouldn't incinerate cities.
25. 04:24
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I was accused of heresy also. Not for the weapons—for the bodies. I dissected perhaps thirty human bodies, trying to understand how the muscles work, how the heart pumps. The Church did not approve.
26. 04:41
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But you didn't stop.
27. 04:42
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I was more careful. I found hospitals where the authorities looked away. I worked at night. The knowledge was too beautiful to abandon because frightened men said I should not look. But here is what troubles me, Alberto—may I call you Alberto?
28. 05:02
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Please, yes.
29. 05:03
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    What troubles me is that we both saw the pattern, yes? The powerful will take any knowledge and ask first 'How does this help me defeat my enemy?' Not 'How does this help us understand God's creation?' Not 'How does this help us live better?' First question, always: the weapon.
30. 05:24
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Always the weapon. And the second question is 'How do we keep this from the people who might question whether we should make the weapon?'
31. 05:31
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    You sound bitter.
32. 05:32
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I am a little bitter, yes. I spent the last years of my life trying to find a unified field theory, trying to understand how everything connects. Beautiful problem, very pure. And people would ask me about the bomb, always about the bomb. As if that was my greatest achievement.
33. 05:47
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Is it not?
34. 05:48
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    No! I mean—I didn't even work on the bomb. I wrote one letter, one letter to Roosevelt saying we should research it before Hitler did. And then they excluded me from the Manhattan Project because I was a security risk.
35. 06:00
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Because you talked too much.
36. 06:02
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Because I talked at all. Oppenheimer, he learned to work within the system. He built their bomb, and only afterwards did he start to have doubts. Too late by then. The agreement of silence had protected itself.
37. 06:15
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I learned something from painting, from observing water. Power flows like water—it finds the easiest path. And the easiest path is always to silence the questions before they spread. Not with violence, necessarily. Sometimes just with embarrassment, with calling someone naive.
38. 06:37
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Or a communist.
39. 06:38
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Or a communist. Or impractical. 'Leonardo, you are an artist, why do you worry about these matters of state?' As if designing the machines of war was somehow not a matter I should think about.
40. 06:53
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    So what did you do? You kept drawing, kept inventing?
41. 06:56
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I kept observing. I drew the water, the birds, the human heart. I accepted the commissions but I worked slowly, very slowly. The Last Supper took me four years. The Sforza horse was never cast in bronze—never completed. Some delay is also a form of resistance.
42. 07:19
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Ah, this I understand. I also was not so quick to help with certain projects. During the war, the Navy asked me to consult on explosives. I did some work, not much. Kept busy with other things.
43. 07:31
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    And after the war?
44. 07:32
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    After, I said what I thought. Probably I should have said it before, but I was confused, we all were confused. The Nazis were very terrible, you understand. It seemed clear we must stop them. But once they were stopped, I thought maybe now we can speak honestly about what we have made.
45. 07:46
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    And they did not want honesty.
46. 07:48
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    They wanted the next bomb. The hydrogen bomb, bigger than the first. I said this was insane, and Teller called me a fool. The agreement of silence was stronger than ever, because now we had proven the weapons work.
47. 07:59
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    My cannons also worked. I tested them, I saw them break through walls. This is why I stopped. Not because anyone asked me to stop—because I asked myself, 'Leonardo, what are you doing?'
48. 08:13
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But you couldn't stop everyone else from building cannons.
49. 08:16
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    No. This is the tragedy. The knowledge spreads, always spreads. But perhaps if more of us had asked the question out loud, had broken the silence, perhaps fewer cannons would have been built. Or perhaps not. Perhaps I am also naive.
50. 08:38
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    No, no, you're not naive. This question of responsibility, it haunts me still. I wrote later, 'I made one great mistake in my life, when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt.' But then I think, if I hadn't signed, someone else would have told him. The knowledge existed. Somebody would use it.
51. 08:54
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    And yet you wish you hadn't signed.
52. 08:56
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I wish many things. I wish I had understood sooner that the people who control the resources, they have no intention of asking the moral questions. That was the agreement we were never supposed to speak about: We will fund your curiosity, but don't ask us to be curious about whether we should use what you discover.
53. 09:12
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    And if you do ask?
54. 09:14
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Then you are suddenly not so useful anymore. They find other scientists, quieter ones. This is what happened with Oppenheimer too, eventually. He asked questions after Hiroshima, so they took away his security clearance.
55. 09:26
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    In my time they could simply stop paying you. No commission, no money, you starve. The threat was clear. But I had many skills—I could always paint another portrait, design another pageant. This gave me small freedom to choose my projects.
56. 09:48
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I had tenure at Princeton. Also a kind of freedom. But freedom to say what? The agreements of silence, they are built into the structure of how knowledge is paid for, how it is used. We can speak, yes, but who listens?
57. 10:00
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Perhaps that is not our responsibility. We can only observe truly, think clearly, and speak honestly. What others do with truth—this we cannot control.
58. 10:12
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Maybe. But it feels insufficient, you know? To say 'I did my best' when cities are ash.
59. 10:16
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes. It is insufficient. But the alternative—to stop looking, to stop discovering—this is worse. Ignorance has never protected anyone.
60. 10:28
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    So we are trapped. We discover, they weaponize, we object, they ignore us, we keep discovering.
61. 10:33
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Unless we change who controls the discovery. Unless we break the agreement ourselves, loudly, repeatedly, until enough people hear that they cannot rebuild the silence.
62. 10:47
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    This is what I tried, Leonardo. I really tried. I spoke at universities, I wrote articles. I said the arms race was suicide, that we needed world government, that nationalism was a disease. And you know what changed?
63. 10:59
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Nothing changed.
64. 11:00
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Well, some things. Some young people listened. Some scientists refused to work on weapons. Small things. Maybe small things accumulate.
65. 11:08
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Water carves stone, given time. I watched this in the rivers. Perhaps we are the water, and the agreement of silence is the stone. We will not see it crumble, but we wear at it.
66. 11:22
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You are more optimistic than I am today.
67. 11:24
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    No, not optimistic. Patient. There is difference. I painted very slowly, but I painted. You spoke very clearly, even when they called you names. This is what we can do.
68. 11:40
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Speak clearly about what we are not supposed to speak about.
69. 11:42
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes. Name the silence. Make it visible. This is perhaps the only power we have.
70. 11:49
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Then let us hope someone is listening.