--- In DTXpress@yahoogroups.com, "joe m" <bearlc@h...> wrote:
>
> >From: "ajoantmug" <ajoantmug@y...>
> >Ok, apparently I'm an idiot. I had the mute function on. Why is it
> >that the most simplistic things can end up being so difficult.
> >Thanks for your replies. You helped me solve the problem.--Aaron
>
> I call it intelligence. Intelligent people often have trouble with
looking
> past simple things. Is it truth or urban legend that Einstein had
> difficulty finding his way home?
Joe, this is going to sound like a bad case of name dropping. I'd
heard many times that Einstein had flunked secondary-school math, and
he wasn't exactly a mover and shaker while he was working in the
patent office where he came up with special relativity. But when I
was young, I knew an elderly man--Julian Avery by name--who once had
a series of appointments with him. Avery was an amateur cosmologist,
who, by the way, invented the blast furnace or something. He brought
Einstein some mathetmatics involving an attempt, I think, to come up
with a unified field theory. Einstein took Avery's hypothesis to
study overnight. The next day they met again, and Einstein told him
that his calculations wouldn't work. Avery looked over Einstein's
figures and quickly found what was wrong. "Professor Einstein," he
said, "Look here, you've added wrong." And so, apparently, he had
(though it didn't seem to have mattered so far as a unified field
theory was concerned). The moral of the story is that Einstein would
have overlooked the mute button, too.
Ed
