Carmen Miranda meets Albert Einstein

David de Hilster on facebook:

My reply:
The real analogy is between Einstein and Muhammad Ali...

The day on which the standard poetry recital requirement on Wednesday afternoons ended for all time in a particular 12’th grade English class in Northern Virginia was the day of the first Ali/Liston fight, on which about a dozen of the students came in with Ali’s latest poem, “By the Will of Heaven, He’ll Fall in Seven” or something very close to that. About the seventh time Mrs. XXX heard that, she was starting to turn green around the mouth and had to leave the room, and Sonny Liston never made it out for round eight that night either. Ali obviously had taken out Mrs. XXX and Sonny Liston both according to prediction, on the same day; if that wasn’t the greatest, it would clearly have to do, as Fats Waller used to say, until the real thing came along.

Was Ali really “the greatest”, however? Ali was certainly one of the best if not THE best pure athlete ever to earn his living by boxing, but that is not exactly the same thing as being one of the great prizefighters. Ali never had any kind of a punch with his left hand which he could really hurt people with and he never had the kinds of combinations of heavy punches you see with fighters like Joe Louis or Roberto Duran. Nobody who follows boxing would give him any chance in a fifteen round fight with Joe Louis, both in their primes.

There is in fact thus a natural comparison to be made between Albert Einstein and Muhammed Ali. Of all the people who ever earned their living doing physics, Einstein was probably the man with the highest IQ. That is not, however, the same thing as having been history’s greatest physicist. Science is supposed to be about discovering and examining evidence, and not substituting intellectual gymnastics like thought experiments FOR evidence.

That is why some of the wheels appear to be falling off Einstein’s theory of relativity at present. Particularly gravity: there is no way to start with Einstein’s claim of gravity being some sort of a four dimensional differential geometry thing and believe that gravity near the surface of our own planet could have undergone any sort of a major change within recent geological time. Nonetheless it is an easy demonstration that it has, and that a large dinosaur would be crushed by his own weight in present gravity. Gravity propagating instantaneously also presents a problem for Einstein.

Stephen Crothers replies: I beg to differ. Einstein's theory of relativity is riddled with violations of the laws of physics, violations of the rules of pure mathematics, and violations of elementary logic. Such is his 'IQ'.