Einstein Wrote Back

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John W. Moffat. Einstein Wrote Back

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ALSO BY JOHN W. MOFFAT

Reinventing Gravity

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Millions of children grew up during the Second World War in Europe. I don’t know how many of them had as disruptive a childhood as I had, moving from town to town and school to school sometimes several times each year. I don’t know how many others were subjected to such frightening and frequent bombing attacks and other horrors of war that they sustained permanent psychological damage. Millions of children today, in various parts of the world, still experience daily conditions of war, terrorism, natural disasters and famine. Once one gets beyond a sense of gratitude at having survived at all, it is natural to wonder how a wartime childhood helped shape the adult person one has become.

My inferior, fragmented schooling, together with the panic attacks induced by many nights of fearing imminent death by German bombs, seemed to prevent me from pursuing a life in science— or any other academic field I might have chosen. Yet it may also be possible that the conditions of my childhood helped me to develop the self-reliance and strong personal motivation necessary to overcome those limitations. If I had managed to survive the war, all the dangerous travelling my parents and I had to do, the fierce bombings, the lack of opportunities to form long-term friendships, the constant moving from school to school, then surely I could continue to survive and make something of my life.

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