The Einstein Effect

Not just weird but deeply unpleasant.

Which explains why he never had a girlfriend.

For every weird man there is an equally weird woman, and vice versa.

He took a vow of chastity, as required to be a Fellow of Trinity College. Probably more interested in math than marriage.

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Joe Gwinn

That's insane.

But he did have a close relationship with the male Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio De Duillier, and was distressed for quite while after it ended.

Nicolas Fatio De Duillier has come up here before - he seems to have been the first person to come up with what is now known as the Le Sage theory of gravity (which can't be made to work but Jan Panteltje likes).

You do realise that the Title of the book is actually taken from a paper about how total gibberish prose attributed to a scientist is more often believed by the general public than the same gibberish prose attributed to a mystic guru (aka religious leader proxy).

It is interesting that Oxford university now host the Newton Project which is slowly building up a picture of his private and public life in as much as it is possible from the very limited historical records available.

He was intensely private and somewhat insecure which led to some of his spats with Hooke (who was a brilliant experimentalist) and Leibnitz (who was a brilliant mathematician). We should all give thanks that Leibnitz notation for calculus ultimately won out although fluxions f, f' and f" live on.

Modern diagnosis might be something like manic depressive genius (he did have what would today be considered a mental breakdown in 1693 after not sleeping for 5 days). He thought his friends were conspiring against him.

OTOH his alchemical interests meant breathing mercury fumes and other noxious gasses from time to time probably didn't help either.

At least for some people. Trump got re-elected after telling the electorate that immigrants in Ohio were killing and eating people's pets. The mainstream media couldn't find any evidence that this had ever happened, and Karmala Harris couldn't hide her amusement when he advanced the claim in the notionally presidential debate

The internet does seem to be delivering nonsense to gullible twits on a massive scale - Cursitor Doom and John Larkin re-post some the choicer items here.

Getting good data from even the scientific literature does depend on exercising quite a bit of careful scepticism, and it doesn't seem to be a skill that is widely taught - John Larkin sees to have got through a science course at Tulane without acquiring it.

ISTR inhaling mercury fumes was a 'cure' for constipation in those days. Supposedly. Not terribly effective and with possible side-effects that today would be unacceptable to say the least.

Not quite. Drinking a small amount as liquid metal was though and had been used since Roman times. Possibly better than the alternatives.

Before antibiotics it was also used as a dangerous "cure" for syphilis.

Breathing mercury fumes makes you go mad - hence the Mad Hatter's Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland. World's largest zenith telescope in Canada used a spinning mercury mirror (it self passivates with an oxide coat so isn't anything like as dangerous as it sounds).

Many medicines are poisonous, chirally modified to make them less potent.

In drug development, enantiomeric selection to maximize clinical effects or mitigate drug toxicity has yielded both success and failure.

Danke,

The dose always makes the poison. Some very effective drugs don't have a lot of leeway between their effective dose and LD50.

Water can be lethal if you consume too much of it in a short time as one unlucky "Hold your wee for a wii" contestant found out the hard way.

Einstein loved the sound of his own metaphysical bark and wasn't above fudging the score:

Regardless, my followup isn't about this thread's titular Einstein. It's about Newton.

"Did you know? It was AYABHATA & not Newton or (sic) Leibniz who first developed Calculus"

Danke,

Ah - you're right. It was drinking the stuff they used to do! I can guess what the chief alternative was and I agree drinking mercury has more appeal! :-D

Not quite sure how that could work, but I'll take your word for it.

Oh, right.

True, but the nastiest variant by a country mile is dimethylmercury, exposure to which gives rise to an extremely unpleasant and protracted death.

See

Paracelsus told us that it's not the substance itself but the dose of it that makes the poison and if you think about it, it's perfectly true.

I knew they had some interesting results but not that they had discovered full blown calculus (at least in differential forms).

The paper by the Manchester & Exeter team is online free access here:

And thank you for the link to the pertinent paper. Here's a paper about Archimedes' contribution to calculus:

Although Achimedes apparently approaches integration from a geometric perspective, Newton's calculus uses Cartesian coordinates.

Danke,

Seems to me that if gravity has finite velocity, there have to be gravitational waves.

Yes, and if there are gravitational waves, there must be quantization effects. Where waves and matter interact, quantization occurs. The scale of the phenomena, both in time and in size, may make it hard to recognize it as such though.

That said, there are plenty of examples of quantization effects in the behaviour of objects in our solar system. Orbital resonances, tidal locking, Trojans, what else?.

Come to think of it, when a star gets ejected at high speed from a star cluster, as sometimes happens, isn't that in some way similar to the decay of a radioactive atom?

Jeroen Belleman

But quantized?

Suppose there was some gigantic mass drifting around. Everything else in the universe would feel its gravitational attraction. Now blow it up, convert all its mass to energy. The sudden loss of mass creates a bubble of not-gravity that expands at the speed of light and everybody will notice (maybe hear a click?) when it hits them, the same time as the flash does.

Since Al discovered E = MC^2, you'd think he would have thought about that.

If something moves really fast, does it make a gravitational wake? Wouldn't that make it lose energy?

Moving things must lose energy. They wiggle other things as they pass.

The g-field around us must be very noisy. Must sound cool.