Einstein is often credited with developing relativity, but Galileo was actually the original founder of the concept. Galileo faced persecution from the Roman Catholic Church for his words supporting heliocentrism, while Einstein succeeded despite threats from Nazi Germany. Both men experienced fates that did not align with their circumstances - Galileo with the Church despite supporting the views of his time, and Einstein with the Nazis as a member of a despised Jewish ethnicity.

1. Einstein and Galileo,
Masters of Relativity and
History's Pawns
Del John Ventruella
Abstract: Einstein is often credited with
devising relativity, but Galileo is in truth the
original founder of the concept. What made
Einstein, even in the face of the Nazi threat,
such a success, while Galileo, in the course
of his lifetime, faced the inquisitional
powers of the Roman Catholic Church in
response to the words of Salvatius,20
the
narrator in his text on heliocentrism?
Introduction
Einstein, as a member of a religion and
ethnic group despised by the Germans, was
born into a time in Europe when one might
have granted him little hope for a future
given his Jewish origin and the rise of the
Nazi Party. Galileo on the other hand, with
everything about him aligned with his time
and place, was rendered a target of the
Roman Catholic Church. It is as if each
experienced a fate better suited to the other.
How did history conspire to bring this
about?
Special relativity is now more than a century
old. General relativity followed as an
extension of special relativity but was
originally introduced by Einstein via a
differential equation that lacked a closed
form solution. It was not until a Prussian
artillery officer produced his namesake
Schwarzschild1
(in very rough, phonetic
terms, SHVARTS-SHIELD) solution for
Einstein's equation as it pertains to a
stationary mass during World War One that
Einstein's differential field equation relating
energy density to changes in the curvature of
a space-time that only came into being after
he had described it using more basic terms
in his theory of general relativity had a
solution expressed in four, Euclidean
dimensions that was applicable to a general
problem in physics.10
The Einstein equation is usually explored
using tensor variables.2
Tensor mathematics
is not a common element of undergraduate
engineering curriculums (which suggests
one prospective audience for this
discussion). Non-physics (or mathematics)
majors may shrink from their first encounter
with Einstein's most famous insight when
presented in the context of its tensorial roots.
A great deal of patience can overcome this
mathematical obstacle if one is willing to
delve into tensor calculus, and many
textbooks seem to confirm that nothing will
fully correct for want of a solid foundation
in tensor mathematics if one wishes to
consider the shape of space-time in detail
relative to matters germane to cosmology.
(An alternative path to understanding
general relativity, focused on LaGrangian
mechanics3
, has been previously presented
elsewhere. LaGrangian mechanics was a
favorite domain of the famous, twentieth
century physicist, Richard Feynman, and he
has written an introduction to the subject for
undergraduates in the related text, which
may appeal to those with suitable curiosity.)
1

2. The obstacle erected by tensor mathematics
is usually sufficient to limit undergraduate
engineering students to momentary contact
with the subject of relativity. This may occur
within a broader, statistical and modern
physics course in which only special
relativity is briefly discussed, perhaps, too
often, while being perceived by the
instructor as a subject that a particular
section of engineering undergraduates will
rarely if ever find to be applicable to their
future work.
Such an attitude is not historically
surprising. Einstein himself noted that
general relativity was a field that was not
given a great deal of emphasis in college
curriculums, perhaps in part due to its
specialized application (in his time) to
astronomy and cosmology before the
introduction of global positioning system
based navigation and analysis of the decay
rates of muons4
, which, together, add only
very narrow, relevant applications in
engineering and particle physics. Of course,
Einstein was in favor of correcting the want
of attention regarding general relativity and
authored a book, The Meaning of Relativity,
to enhance such possibilities.
Other books, such as Introduction to the
Theory of Relativity, by Peter Gabriel
Bergmann, (an older text), and Gravity, An
Introduction to Einstein's General Relativity,
by James B. Hartle, have acquired some
renown among past students and some
teachers of the subject for individuals
seeking more accessible treatments available
in paperback. Even with such resources,
relativity is not commonly encountered in a
broad range of scientific fields, including
many associated with physics, although its
consideration may enrich analysis. (Brian
Greene offers some interesting insight into
this from the perspective of a theoretical
physicist in his new introduction to The
Meaning of Relativity. Those with an
interest can pursue a study of relativity at
www.worldscienceu.com in the company of
Brian Greene, currently with no charge.)
Even quantum theory was somehow
originally conceived without the need to
integrate Einstein's older, general relativity,
which was eventually corrected, to the
extent possible. With relativity commonly
perceived as limited in relevance to
somewhat obscure cosmological and
astronomical questions focused on
gravitational interactions beyond the
expectations of the laws of Newton, the
founders of quantum physics turned simply
to the clock on the mantle instead of
Einstein's relativistic theory of space and
time.5
Discussion
We should recall that in the long march of
human history both relativity and quantum
theory were new to the first half of the
twentieth century. Near the middle of the
nineteenth century many physicists had
come to believe that all that remained for
science to discover could be achieved
through the measurement of a few more
significant digits associated with the
constants employed by classical physical
theories then held sacrosanct by
government, industry, and teaching
institutions, whose funding they
substantially influenced or controlled.6
The black body radiation spectrum and
inability to resolve other conundrums via
classical physical theories, including
problems such as the so-called, “occultation
of Mercury”, (leading to the assertion of an
unobserved and non-existent planet, given
the name, “Vulcan”, to explain Mercury's
orbital irregularities through Newton's
gravitational theory) suggested the need for
scientific advances, but acceptance of
movement away from classical models as
the ultimate expressions of natural theory
came slowly in a world of experts known
specifically for their prowess with those
2

3. same theories. Determined attempts to apply
classical perspectives to seemingly
unsolvable scientific problems continued
(unsuccessfully relative to both of the
puzzles just described) into the twentieth
century.
It was not until the twentieth century that
Albert Einstein, as an undergraduate in a
state run college intended to produce
Switzerland's next generation of sub-college
level scientific teachers, chose to seek to
define the profession of a “theoretical
physicist” and, by working resolutely toward
that goal, overcame the strict notion of
science as no more than the practical servant
of industry and, in certain instances, the
chosen field of peculiar aristocrats, in a
world in which everything was perceived to
be very old, and thus a place in which
everything must already have been very well
defined. With bold new scientific
perspectives rising to confront the new
problems that much older ideas were
powerless to address, there arose a
corresponding potential for eager young
“theoretical physicists” to be perceived as an
annoyance or simply as misguided by elder
scientists, whose reputations had been built
upon their mastery of classical theories.
In the ensuing conflict between the old and
the new there arose not a whisper of the
specter of the harsh lesson learned by
Galileo (1564-1642)7
when presenting his
evidence in favor of displacing the earth
from the center of the universe before the
foot soldiers of a disapproving religious
power and under the influence of
governments controlled by princes, who
claimed to rule by the will of the favored
deity, and who had grown fond of having
their crowns bestowed in publicly acclaimed
ordinations by revered, religious elites to
impress those they ruled in a world in which
the lives of many, amid the ravages of
disease and war, were sufficiently harsh that
heaven could easily seem their sole hope for
happiness.
Galileo's ideas did not suit the intellectual
paradigm that empowered glorification of
“god and country” from the perspective of
those who jealously guarded their
intellectual influence over the masses, their
associated standing as a deity's chosen
leaders, and thus, their positions as rulers,
whom most dared not question on pain of
torture, death, and hell fire. Perhaps it is not
surprising that the Galilean transformations
are the first attempt in history to establish
relativistic theory (see Galilean Relativistic
Theory).
Sun Tzu comments on the underlying
motivations of princes and generals in The
Art of War, noting the importance of the
moral standing in which kings are perceived
by the people as the foundation of their
power to martial the populations of their
kingdoms without question in time of war.
Being proclaimed the “chosen ones” of a
deity based upon church perspectives that
none dared to question clearly empowered
that effect. Machiavelli (1469-1527)8
too
relates the importance of public perceptions
and those of other princes in the lives of the
leaders of Italian cities and states eager to
maintain and perpetuate their standing and
influence in The Prince.
Whether premised on the will of a deity as
proclaimed by religious elites or the power
held by state and church favored leadership
of scientific circles, surrendering easily to
upstart ideas, however well supported, was
unlikely in Galileo's day, where it posed a
challenge to the existing power structure of
the state, and not merely the scientific elite.
In the end, Einstein was more fortunate than
Galileo, perhaps in part by living long after
the Ottoman conquest of Europe, the
Ottoman war with Venice (1463-1503), and
later, the Ottoman war with Rhodes, Malta,
and the Holy League (1522-1573)9
, which
3

4. may have provided some additional grounds
for the autocratic leaders of Italian states in
Galileo's time to fear “heretics” and to
empower the Inquisition to solidify their
pseudo-mystical political footings and the
resulting power to make war.
Galileo had been the focus of the inquisition,
and the empowering authority was not
merely the church, but princes, who relied
upon religion to back their status as
creatures acting by the will of god and with
the support of religious elite in an era of
foreign attacks by non-Christians into the
heart of the Church's European stronghold.
Einstein, to the contrary, did not risk
slighting a theological principle via his
theory of relativity, but at times he may have
chaffed the egos of some of those who
perceived themselves as the scientific high
priests of classical physics. In so doing, he
risked reprisals from among the ranks of the
same elite group, whose relationships with
state authorities empowered their standing in
prominent positions in state scientific
institutions. This frequently not only gave
them control over curriculum but
employment as well in the field of physics.
Einstein clearly enjoyed significant
improvement relative to social and
government attitudes toward science
compared to those faced by Galileo, and
resistance to his new ideas inevitably fell
away with observational support. The
conditions that empowered this outcome
may have been somewhat ironically nudged
along by history with some help from the
Ottoman's early use of gunpowder and crude
cannon in siege warfare practiced against
more western, European targets.19
Italian rulers' interest in finding new and
superior weapons to use against each other
was marked by sketches of a giant cross-
bow10
prepared by DaVinci (1452-1519)11
himself. The urge to arm themselves with
superior weaponry was surely amplified
during the era of the Ottoman attacks against
the Italian peninsula and Europe in general.
The Ottoman invaders came with their navy
and presented Europe with the effects of
cannon applied to siege warfare. They
successfully subdued the maritime influence
of Venice in the Mediterranean, an event
that was not easily dismissed.
The historical relevance of the Ottoman
Empire's wars against Christian Europe is
well documented, but only of limited
relevance to the development of western
technology over the long term. The military
appetites of Christian kingdoms and their
wars against each other were a more
constant force in shaping the rise of modern,
western European nations and their attitudes
toward science and technology.
The dense cluster of what were small
European principalities and minor kingdoms
were constantly metamorphosing into or
being absorbed by new states and old
empires, commonly via the transformational
power of warfare. They eventually became
the modern countries that we know today,
but only after a long history marked by
bloodshed and change that was so
commonplace that the modern notion of
citizens with a national identity is relatively
new in a historical context in many places.
The industrial revolution (≈ 1760 to 1840) 12
eventually linked a setting for frequent,
violent, European conflicts that drove
interest in military technologies 13
with an
extended era of manufacturing competition
coincident with warfare that rendered
mathematics, science, and the technology
that could be produced by those who
mastered such subjects relevant to all
matters of warfare and industrial production
in eras of both peaceful coexistence and
state sponsored slaughter.
As the power of technology began to
threaten to undermine brute force based
largely upon the size of armies and navies,
4

5. prowess in mathematics and science rose to
primary importance from the perspectives of
governments across the globe, whether they
cast themselves as nations of explorers or
one of the great military powers of Europe.
Better science and mathematical skills
provided an edge in the European state
competition for survival.
New technologies powered empires, and
empires created new wealth. This fact
presumably pleased both modern Caesars
and the local deity's most prominent princes.
Technology and the mathematics and
science that empowered it became self-
catalyzing through inventions exploiting
scientific principles that provided for
consistent performance, mass produced,
replaceable parts, and which, through such
advantages, bore out the importance of
technological superiority premised upon
mathematical models of nature relative to
conceptualizations focused more
substantially upon artistic whimsy.
The fact that Einstein lived significantly
after the industrial revolution in an era in
which his own father was involved in the
electrification of European towns certainly
helped his ideas (less radical in a historical
context of then evolving scientific ideas than
some might think) to flourish. With the
technologies produced by science already
increasingly commonplace and inclined to
produce attitudes critical to the state and
embraced by the public, instead of facing the
inquisition, Einstein was able to simply
publish his ideas in the Annalen der Physik
14
, a professional journal of physics.
When Einstein's relativistic insights were
presented, many mathematical and scientific
experts, like Schwarzschild, were in the
direct or indirect employ of the militarizes
and defense industries of great states. In
Schwarzschild’s example, he developed his
solution to Einstein's equation while
targeting long range artillery in the First
World War. Perhaps this uniquely
demonstrates the evolution of the influence
of science and mathematics within nations
from the ancient domain of philosophers to
the principle basis for power of state
enterprises, such as warfare. It has been
asserted that this went so far among what we
now know as the great powers that in the
twentieth century those powers began to
seek to use science as a sort of state religion
to fundamentally alter the perspectives of
populations.15
By nineteen hundred, traditional religious
extremism capable of subverting significant,
scientific advancement may not have
appeared to many to be in the best interests
of autocrats in the advancement of their war
machines, economic influence, or national
pride, but religion or pseudo-religion is a
powerful influencer when it can be
successfully created and harnessed. Even in
the new era of science in the twentieth
century, the scientific theories of mass
production that had empowered the
industrial revolution could be twisted to
serve a darker influence when seeking to
mass produce political thought and social
values to manufacture “new peoples” for the
upstart governments of major powers in
Europe and Asia. Utopian thought, from the
perspective of some, required a new breed of
man if Utopian lifestyles were to be
achieved. Death camps, gulags, and state
police or military forces served to eliminate
those deemed incapable of empowering the
new Utopias, or appreciating them.
Political thought driven by pseudo-religious
movements gained power in many countries.
In one, in particular, a force would arise that
would forever alter Einstein's life. The Nazi
state, which applied science and medicine
willfully to support both the substance and
the propaganda of genocide, was to
eventually inspire Einstein's emigration to
the United States. The Nazi state religion
encouraged the national perception of the
5

6. superiority of a single German people from
one origin marching in lock step and with
the will to usher in a new era of national
harmony by enforcing the natural order
proclaimed by the state throughout the
world, with Germany intrinsically destined
to be dominant under the leadership of a
chosen race.
The “Third Reich” was itself a concept tied
to Joachim of Flora, a theologian. He
asserted that human history would follow
three stages after the Christian teaching of a
trinity, unfolding on earth not through direct
action by a three-part deity but rather in the
context of social and historical change to
arrive at a third, perfect age of man in which
lesser beings could no longer subvert the
natural, Utopian order in which the German
people, led by a racial group proclaimed to
be superior by the state, would dominate.86
Even in Einstein's early years in physics,
when the state's interest in science was
clearly founded in its own best interests, any
challenges to scientific perspectives that had
become doctrinal as “scientific law” may
have placed one at some risk of being
perceived as hostile to “established” science
simply by the attempt to reduce the
credibility of long standing viewpoints in a
highly stratified scientific culture that
produced the foundations of related,
individual influence. In an era in which
national governments with close ties to
industry controlled all aspects of science via
the state run establishment's experts installed
at state funded institutions to teach or
exploit what in the nineteenth century were
widely perceived as hallowed, classical laws
of science, those who might challenge such
“natural laws” were at some risk of being
perceived as not merely odd, but
disrespectful, and in some circles, perhaps
even dissident (in less than complimentary
terms) relative to the established social and
scientific order. In time, dissident Nazis
would even call them “un-German”. 18
Fortunately, traditional religion had largely
abandoned its resistance to science by the
twentieth century, and Einstein was
eventually joined in his relativistic beliefs by
Lemaître16
, a Catholic priest who first
proposed the “big bang” theory of cosmic
origin and a “cosmic egg” as a (“primeval”)
quantum particle of origin. He is credited as
having originated the idea of an expanding
universe that was later mathematically
defined using observational data by Edwin
Hubble. Even the model of cosmic
expansion known as the Friedmann-Walker-
Robertson equation is renamed by some as
the Friedmann-Walker-Robertson-Lemaître-
Hubble equation, in what appears to be an
effort to credit all who may have contributed
at some level to the intrinsic concepts.
It is interesting that it was The University of
Berlin that had appointed Einstein to a
professorship. Both Karl Marx and
Freidrich Engles,17
the founding thinkers of
national Communist movements, had also
attended this university. Communist
thinking was the adversary of the National
Socialists. When Hitler came to power in
1933 at the forefront of the Nazi movement,
Einstein had moved to California. He never
returned. 18
It is interesting to note Einstein's position as
a much publicized exception to America's
policies toward Jews in the second world
war. Einstein, a famous researcher, was
allowed to remain in the U.S. during the
war, while the more common passengers on
board the Saint Louis, an ocean liner whose
European passengers were fleeing Nazi
terror, were not allowed to disembark.21
Another famous exception involved the
German rocket scientist Werner von Braun.
His Nazi and SS past were ignored so long
as his expertise could be applied to the post-
war rocket development efforts of the U.S.
The fact that he led the Nazi project to
develop the V-2 missile at Peenemünde
6

7. Army Research Center and the Mittelwerk,
where Jewish slave laborers starved and died
on a daily basis, proved no obstacle to his
acceptance into the highest levels of NASA
management.22
Einstein's theories, based upon gravity,
counted on astronomers to prove them out.
The subject of astronomy, as the study of
heavenly bodies and their movements, with
its link to cosmology, was less relevant to
the domain of theologians when relativity
was introduced, and no great power relied
primarily upon astronomy for national
prestige in the era leading up to World War I
(although this is precisely the era when the
largest telescopes ever built were being
constructed in the western United States and
drawing considerable media attention). The
U.S. was the first major power to build the
large telescopes necessary to answer the
pressing astronomical questions of the day.
In time, it was astronomers who would test
and prove out relativity. Arthur Eddington
was among the first, noting how the position
of stars appeared to move when their light
passed near the sun during a solar eclipse in
1919, thus proving that gravity bent the path
of light waves when it passed near a massive
object like the sun.23
Conclusion
Einstein's theories of relativity were offered
before a Nazi power rose in Europe that
might have sought to prevent a young,
Jewish physicist from becoming known
globally as a scientific genius. They were
introduced long after science' service
enriching industry and state and
empowering military conquest had
purchased it latitude for greater, open
consideration of what had once been too
relevant to the domain of religious leaders
and princes eager to associate their power
with the will of a deity based upon man's
unique place in the universe.
Then and now the intellectual obstacles of
fully integrating the theory of relativity into
scientific thought pose a challenge.33
It still
obstructs meaningful study of Einstein's
general relativity if it is not clearly relevant
to whatever activity is intended to support a
primary means of employment due to the
commitment of time and level of intellect
required to grasp the depths of the subject.
(Even today a quantum physicist working at
the highest levels within the United States
on the cutting edge of his field may not be
able to express expert knowledge of general
relativity.)
Galileo, on the other hand, was trapped by
his time. Europe was under siege by the
Ottoman powers of the east. Italy was
particularly troubled by them, and it was the
seat of power of the church. In such a time
and place, religion, as the ultimate authority
and king-maker, could not be denied given
that power, religion, prince, and his capacity
to make war, were closely entwined.
Acceptance of Einstein's ideas by scientific
leaders of his time would have assured the
beginning of a slow march down the long
road of change wherever relativity
significantly influenced the realm of
scientific theory and analysis. Those who
had reached the tops of their fields in certain
academic arenas without the complications
of Albert Einstein's relativistic ideas were
surely aware of this, but the beginning of the
20th
century was already a time of change, as
the Einstein brothers (his father and uncle),
in business electrifying towns in Europe,
could have testified.
General relativity could have fallen by the
wayside merely as another, peculiar
philosophical notion if only because it
would have been easier to ignore in the vast
majority of the work of engineers and
scientists at the dawn of the twentieth
century focused on more practical matters.
Instead it was given a firm place in scientific
7

8. history and the popular imagination
(although perhaps not in undergraduate
academic studies) through its confirmation
via the observable universe.
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Biography
Del John Ventruella is an electrical
engineer with an interest in the hand
of history in the affairs of men. He
holds a BSEE from The Rose-
Hulman Institute of Technology and
an MSEE from The University of
Alabama at Birmingham.
9