Merkel is a physicist – she should listen to the words of Albert Einstein.

Politics is an odd second career for the physicist. While the unworldly scientist has a great deal to teach the equally unworldly politician, there is even more he or she can learn from the very best practitioners of their craft. So it is that Albert Einstein, physicist, has a great deal to teach Angela Merkel, politician.

First, Einstein once remarked that if you keep bisecting the distance between the mouse and the hole as a means of escape, the cat gets the mouse. It remains one of the abiding truths of almost every walk of life.

To keep on hoping that delaying tactics in relation to inevitable Greek bankruptcy will render the country solvent is just plain silly. What Friday’s walkout from the Athens ‘haircut’ talks should teach everyone is that the leading, carnivorous Hedge Funds have spotted that the mouse cannot escape.

Second, Einstein disapproved heartily of any physicist deciding that the way to respond to a failed experiment might be to keep on repeating it. I have now lost all hope in (a) Greece as an EU member State and (b) austerity as a policy in relation to the eurozone’s problems. But not Chancellor Merkel: her view is that redoubled efforts in half the time are what’s needed to change the fundamental nature of human nature, and the economics that emerge from that nature.

This would be at least tenable if it was just me that disagreed – but it isn’t. Over the weekend it has become clear that German bankers, S&P, the IMF, the ClubMeds themselves, and even some Greek bondholders think her policies to be morally narrow and economically destructive.

Finally, Einstein went to his death insisting that Quantum Mechanics is an ‘incomplete’ theory of how the Universe works. The majority of contemporary physicists think he was mistaken. I don’t. I am with Einstein because, rather than denying empirical feedback in favour of half-baked mumbo-jumbo ideas about esoteric mind-effects on experiments or inventing tortuous rules for ‘the sub-atomic realm’, he insisted that there was a missing element. Instead of believing in ‘spooky action at a distance’ and electrons existing in two places at once, Albert Einstein stated “God does not play dice”. He thought there was an instantaneous transmission of energy that rendered all things ‘connected’. He posited it would turn out to be electromagnetic threads invisible to us. The week before last, the leading media physicist Brian Cox told his celebrity audience on TV, “everything is connected”.

Merkel’s view of a fiscally united trading bloc is an incomplete theory because – being a physicist – she doesn’t understand social anthropology. She believes that enforcement of rules pertaining to one culture can work on another with immediate effect. Without meaning any disrespect to this brave woman, not even Hitler believed that.

I use the term ‘brave woman’ not to patronise her, but to recognise Merkel’s genuine determination to defend vulnerable taxpayers against exploitative investment bankers. However, in search of a battle, she has lost sight of the point of the war. The game being played here is not the Eurozone v The Rest of the World; rather, it is the Citizen versus the System.

Like Quantum Mechanics and the Universe, Friedmanite globalism is an incomplete explanation of capitalism. It rewards large size, and veers between monopolistic conservatism and irresponsible derivative theory. It ignores the needs of the small, vital entrepreneur keeping capitalist creativity alive. We are not fighting a battle between the eurozone and Hedge Funds here; we are fighting – and currently losing – a life or death struggle between Sovereign governments elected by people on the one hand, and disordered mega-corporations driven by an unhealthy love of money on the other.

For Einstein, this would have been redolent of the fight between relativity theory and the Newtonian concept of the Universe….except for all the human misery that will result from further blinkered EU policy-making. The person wearing the biggest blinkers and most padded headphones is German Chancellor, Frau Doktor Angela Merkel. She needs to remember who put her in office, and look after their interests above all others.