Eisenstein

I notice a sort of strange hunger in popular culture these days for Einstein to be proven wrong. What they mean, really, is that they want to see Relativity proven wrong. Einstein himself was often wrong. He once said, for example, “A little schnitzel never hurt anyone.” Yeah, tell that to people who choked to death on pieces of schnitzel! (And this in the days before the Heimlich Maneuver, when one imagines the cafes and bistros of the world were littered with the prostrate bodies of choking victims, when the accepted wisdom was to give a choking person a glass of water, thus compounding choking with drowning.)

Thus we see that Einstein WAS wrong. At least once. But here’s another example. He once said “I see; the souls of the departed pass into the trousers of the living.” (He really did.) This, as I think any thinking person will agree, is nonsense. The only stuff that passes into MY trousers are my legs and other bits of biological undercarriage. So there, Einstein was wrong twice. (Would it not be fundamentally creepy to find that the souls of the departed really DO pass into the trousers of the living? Imagine discovering that you've got the soul of Ho Chi Minh in your trousers. How would you even grapple with such a thing emotionally?)

But why do people hunger to see Relativity proven wrong? Do they not like Relativity? Do they not like Einstein? Do they blame him for the fact that science is hard? (Einstein once said “Do not worry about your problems in mathematics; I can assure you that mine are worse still.”) Do they not like his hair? Do they blame him for the atom bomb? Maybe they log on to the Internet to find out more about Lindsay Lohan’s fingernails and are suddenly confronted by news stories they don’t understand but seem to have something to do with that creepy German guy with the funky hair. You know, one of the Einstein Brothers, the one that went into physics instead of staying home like a good boy and making bagels, the one that came up with all that claptrap about invariance and equivalent frames of reference instead of just asking us if we’d like schmeer on our onion bagel.

In the novel “Angels & Demons” Dan Brown establishes the scientific bona fides of the luscious Italian physicist by tossing off the remark that she had “disproven Einstein with a stopwatch and a school of tuna fish.” Again, I think he means she disproved Relativity, not Einstein, because I can’t see what a stopwatch or a school of tuna have to do with choking on a piece of schnitzel. I’m glad they left that part out of the movie – I would have brayed like an Army mule and then, most likely, choked to death on a piece of schnitzel.

Thus I am deeply gratified to report that General Relativity just passed its most exhaustive and extreme test yet when the behavior of a binary pulsar system was found to agree with the predictions of General Relativity down to a ridiculous number of decimal places – it don’t get much more relativistic than two pulsars orbiting one another! And the early word from Argentina is that the GZK Cutoff is indeed observed in the real world, thus confirming Special Relativity, and consigning the dubious contender “Doubly-Special Relativity” (nicknamed “DSR” so it doesn’t sound quite so much like an ice cream dish) to the trash can of history. “I’d like a Doubly-Special Relativity, please. With sprinkles. And butterscotch syrup.”

I am, as you can doubtless tell, bored out of my skull. I think I suffer from a weird form of ADD. I know what the GZK Cutoff is and what it means, but I can’t balance my checkbook. Why is that? And why do I think you’re even remotely interested in the GZK Cutoff? (I don’t think you’re interested in the GZK Cutoff; I think that you’re interested in the fact that I’m interested in the GZK Cutoff. I think that’s what I mean. But I’m not sure it’s interesting. I think.)

I should go do something productive, like prove Einstein wrong with a sundial and a sleeping dog.

Years ago I watched an episode of Night Gallery (I think it was) where a guy had some kind of earwig eat its way through his brain from one ear to the other. I’m having the same problem, except without earwigs or a brain (so to speak). I’ve discovered that when shingles heals, intense itching sets in. It’s like someone rubbed a shedding cat all over the right side of my face; sometimes the desire to gibber and scratch at my face with some kind of gardening trowel is almost insurmountable. As it happens, I DO gibber, but lacking a garden implement, I’ve taken to worrying at my face with a comb. Good thing I’m not a werewolf; I’d tear the side of my face off by accident. Hard enough to explain the clutter of half-eaten sheep carcasses around the apartment without having to explain why your face is hanging off in ribbons at the same time.