Mr. Epstein was not only a world-class child abuser, he was a big fan of theoretical high-energy physics and of theoretical physicists. Some of my colleagues, unfortunately, got to know him. A number who were famous and/or had John Brockman as a book agent were even invited to a physics conference on Epstein’s private island, well before he was first arrested. This was no secret; as I recall, a lot of us heard about the existence of this conference/trip, but we hadn’t heard Epstein’s name before and didn’t pay much attention (ho hum, just another weird billionaire).
Personally, I feel quite lucky. The Brockman agency rejected the proposal for my recent book without comment (thank you!); and my research is mostly considered unimportant by the Brian Greenes of the world. As a result, I was not invited to Epstein’s island, never made his acquaintance, and blissfully avoided the entire affair. Clearly there are some benefits to being considered ordinary. And so — I’m sorry/not-sorry to say — I can’t tell you much about Epstein at all, or about how certain physicists did and did not interact with him. Regarding my colleagues who did get to know him, I can’t speak for them, since I wasn’t there, and I don’t know to what extent Epstein hid his immoral activities when they were around. It’s up to them to tell their own stories if they feel the need to do so (and I hope a couple of them do, just to clear the air.) Personally I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt — probably some literally didn’t know what was up until Epstein’s arrest in 2008, while perhaps others felt there wasn’t much they could do about Epstein’s actions on his own private island. I imagine they are deeply embarrassed to have been caught in this horrible man’s ugly web.
Fans of physics come in all shapes and sizes, and some have large wallets, large egos, and/or large ambitions. Among the wealthy supporters, we can count Alfred Nobel himself; billionaires sit on important scientific institute and university boards, and the more recent Breakthrough Prizes were funded by deep pockets. The extreme wealthy have outsized influence in our country and in our world, and one could argue that their influence in 2025 was not for the better. Usually, though, the influence in physics and related fields tends to be relatively benign, funding postdoctoral researchers and graduate students who deeply want to do science but also need to eat. That said, sometimes donors fund non-essential fields at the expense of critical ones, or favor theoretical research over the gathering of crucial experimental data, or push money on famous rich organizations when there are poor ones that are equally deserving and far more needy.
When gazillionaires, on their own initiative, come calling on non-profit organizations, whether they be community centers, arts organizations, or universities, they pose a problem. On the one hand, it is the job of anyone in a non-profit organization to help raise money — fail to do that, and your organization will close. When a single person offers to permanently change the future of your program, you would be derelict in your duty if you did not consider that offer. On the other hand, donors who might have ethical or criminal problems could drag the organization’s name through the mud. Worse, they might be able to force the organization itself to do something ethically questionable or even illegal.
There is a clear lesson for young academics and other up-and-coming non-profit actors in the Epstein affair: the more money potentially offered to our organizations, the more carefully we must tread. Money is power; power corrupts; and every pursuit of dollars, even for the best causes, risks infection. We can’t be large-scale non-profit fundraisers without doing serious and thorough background checks of the biggest donors; we have to question motives, and we can’t look the other way when something seems amiss. Those of us with clear hearts and honest pursuits tend to assume the best in other people. But we have to beware of those hoping to bolster their reputations, or clean their consciences, by giving away “generously” what they never deserved to have.
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Even physicists, but then, all in all we are just our brains (Dick Swaab), maintaining the illusion that life has meaning.
On files: AI (artificial ingenuity) is a further development of our external memories.
“I have no idea who was in contact with Epstein after 2008.” You have no idea or you don’t want to have any idea? Larry Krauss had a voluminous email correspondence with Jeff Epstein long after 2008. Some of them were literally discussing strategies to discredit Krauss’s accusers in Krauss’s own sex harassment scandal. There are other well-known physicists you can easily find searching the files who had private appointments with Epstein. Unfortunately some of them are string theorists.
Hi Simeon — indeed, I am a physicist first, and a gossip last, so I’m not inclined by nature to go rummaging around. But I am sure I will find out more over time, as word spreads. Personally I am unwilling to name names or cast blame without knowing all the facts, and I’m not willing to be enough of an investigative journalist to learn all those facts; I will leave that to the professionals. One thing I’m sure of: just because someone’s name appears in Epstein’s files is not enough for condemnation. I learned recently of a colleague who went to the island for a conference and came home deeply shocked. I’m sure there were others who had no idea what they were getting into, or didn’t recognize what they’d gotten into. But if certain of our colleagues did much more than merely go to a conference, to the point of doing immoral and even illegal things, well then — let them pay the price. Neither wealth nor brilliance is an excuse for breaking basic ethical codes or breaking laws.
OK Matt to each his own but: “just because someone’s name appears in Epstein’s files is not enough for condemnation” is a straw man. We are not talking, in this case, about “someone’s name appearing”.
You don’t have to be an investigative journalist to see that. The emails are online and can be read by anyone. You can search for Larry Krauss’s name on the Epstein files link on the DOJ website, or, alternately, you can search jmail.world , where the messages have been organized conveniently in a gmail-clone format. For instance, you can search here : https://jmail.world/search?q=krauss for all of them. They aren’t just mentions of Krauss’s name. They are lengthy email correspondences between Krauss and Jeff Epstein about how to exculpate himself from sexual harassment charges including by questioning the credibility of his accusers, whom he referred to as “the creeps”.
Shamefully, this man is still — STILL! — allowed to serve as President of the Origins Project foundation. This is a genuine disgrace to our field in every respect.
I think someone ought to stop the cancer of pedophiocracy from metastasizing in our field as it has done in the overclass of the larger society.
You misunderstand me, Simeon.
I am not defending any particular person, and if the evidence is against any particular person, that person should face the consequences. (And if the evidence was already there, consequences should already have occurred.) In some cases the evidence may be clear and the case open and shut.
My point was that wherever the evidence is ambiguous, a proper investigation has to be done, and it is not appropriate to rush to judgment even against those who might appear guilty, and especially not those who have only a minor connection with this affair. I have often seen situations where someone seemed guilty but instead the evidence was misunderstood.
Let us say that you are right about Krauss (who is already under a cloud and whom I am in no way defending.) What about the others whom you have not mentioned by name? What gives you the authority to discuss one name in public and not the others? Where is this headed? Shall we have a long discussion about each of them and precisely what they did or did not do, right here on this blog? We may indeed ruin the reputations of the guilty and feel righteous about that, but shall we compound the crimes by accidentally ruining the reputations of innocent people who found themselves caught up in something far more ugly than they were capable of imagining?
Perhaps the physics community needs a forum where these issues can be aired and evidence discussed. It is not crazy to suggest a committee of those who had no contact with Epstein to plan community response and to suggest (and maybe execute) some kind of censure on those who may badly have misbehaved, even if they did not break a law. But to do that on a physics blog seems to me wholly inappropriate.
“I learned recently of a colleague who went to the island for a conference and came home deeply shocked.”
If that colleague is who I suspect it is, I hope that at some point they’re willing to come forward with their story. I would understand if the current media environment makes that difficult. But I think when people are able to approach this in a more nuanced way, that story may have something valuable to say about what it takes to convince someone that something fishy is going on, and where those thresholds lie for different people.
There are so many elements to this that are not clear yet. Why, indeed, haven’t more of the innocent bystanders come forward, even before this past week? Is it because they have felt they would be betraying their colleagues? Have they felt they would be endangering themselves and their families? Did Epstein assure there would be apparently-compromising photographs taken of everyone in attendance? The whole thing is so incredibly creepy and sordid that it is very hard to know how deep this all might go.
I have been wondering why Hawkins was in Epstein’s island. Though, I managed to find a connection after finding out that Epstein was a Mathematician. This clear the air. Albeit, Hawkins is not here to give his account.
Epstein was arrested in 2008. That was a long time ago. How many times did your friends/colleagues visited his island since he was arrested? Those are the ones that should be suspect of perversion.
Present laws do not protect women and children, there should be more severe penalties and screening. And as for children, anyone who just touches them deserves the death penalty. PERIOD.
MAGA-fascist Republicans are a curse to humanity.
I have no idea who was in contact with Epstein after 2008. I was honestly way too busy with my own problems during the great recession and its aftermath.
I don’t see that Epstein directly has anything to do with MAGA or any other particular political outlook.
It is amusing to me how billionaires gravitate towards physics. Either by claiming they could have done or as aficionados. There is, I think, an air of intelligence around the field, the idea of it being the ‘most sciency science’ that the wealthy hope rubs off on them. We can be thankful that mishaps of this magnitude are astoundingly rare.
It’s Einstein. Ah! I can formulate a new equation: Money = Power = Energy = Mass = Gravitational Attraction. It’s better than some of the crazy theories I receive in the mail, and it has the feature that all four equalities are false in physics.
I like your. ‘ didn’t get invited to the party ..lucky me ! ‘
The caution about the motives of sponsors and wealth is timeless and worth repeating.
FYI: I am writing a song-cycle on 20th Century Physics:
called WARPING. I have finished “Einstein Special Relativity aka “They are the Same”]
“Eddington1919” & “Hubble’s Constant”.
Now I have started a song about the EPR Paradox. [I knew Rosen, I am That old] Upcoming will be “The Big Bang Theory” and possibly the “I didn’t kill my grandfather”
Always glad to hear from you. I can’t comment on your Facebook Page, you are followed by too many.
Very well said, especially “the more money potentially offered to our organizations, the more carefully we must tread. Money is power; power corrupts; and every pursuit of dollars, even for the best causes, risks infection….we have to beware of those hoping to bolster their reputations, or clean their consciences, by giving away “generously” what they never deserved to have.”
It is important too remember that the reverse is also true: if you have power and privilege, it is incumbent on you to exercise that power carefully and thoughtfully.
I have a tweak: Those of us with “clear hearts and honest pursuits” need to recognize that human behavior is almost never pure. The best of us have urges to self-maximize that we have learned to contain, mostly. The temptation to defect from civil, self-managed society is great, however. We see the potential loot all around us.
It is incumbent on us to overcome our biology with knowledge and we rely one each other to keep us all from straying too far.
Welcome back, Matt, unfortunately ‘power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ (Lord Acton). I hope you’ll soon pick up again the discussion you left off on your blog. (in addition to Nobel and Solvay as positive examples we can remember Carlsberg the beer brand associated with Niels Bohr)
It’s good to see you posting again, Dr. Strassler. Even if mostly by luck, you are extremely fortunate not to have been involved with this meeting. From the most recent batch of email releases, there’s an excellent change Epstein was a vital part of Vladimir Putin’s long-term strategy of collecting “kompromat” on important or potentially important US and European personalities. This generally boils down to getting men involved in sexually compromising activities. Russia, especially under Putin, has had a long and sordid history of creating situations for collecting kompromat, with the sullying of leaders in Poland decades ago when they rebelled being one example. They also excel at poisons and maskirovka, that is, clever military deceptions. Another dark thread in which the US is as guilty as anyone (can we all say Taliban together?) is taking over a religion and perverting it for your own specific goals. Putin has been very active in that domain in the US for decades; you can find radio channels in the US that are nominally “religious,” yet come over as blatant ads for Putin.
Given the now-revealed Putin connection, there’s a very good chance that if you had gone to that meeting, you would have been positioned, enticed, recorded, and archived in Moscow, regardless of your actual sexual habits or importance to Russia at that time. You may well find your colleagues who attended strangely reluctant to talk about their time there, even ones you might not think of as good candidates for kompromat. Again, the Russians have a long history of this stuff, and the thousand or so emails exchanged between this fellow and Putin are a very bad sign.
And yet, yes, billionaire have certainly also contributed in positive ways to physics. In addition to Alfred Nobel, I would suggest the Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay as one of the most positive examples of a positive contribution to theoretical physics.
Epstein’s original sponsor was the American owner of Victoria’s Secret. Ghislaine Maxwell’s father had Russian connections, but he was given a state funeral in Israel, so, you do the math…
As Balzac noted:”Behind every great fortune there is a crime”. Also, I can think of many horrific actions of the US and other physics-supporting governments . Wow! You propose diving into a massive rabbit hole that most researchers are ill-equiped to navigate. Many people and organizations give money away to help them feel that they contributed some value to the human race. Money is green.
Well said!!