Mabey Einstein wasnt too smart..

"A short history of nearly everything"- by Bill Bryson.
This is a great book, anyone else read it?

There is a section in this book which says: "One of Einsteins experiments involved looking directly at the sun for as long as he could, he then had to spend the next 6 weeks in a dark room for his eyes to forgive him"

Coluld anyone give conformation of this? I found nothing of such an experiment when searching goolge, and I find it hard to believe that one of the most intellegent people in the world would do something so stupid...

 

Mabey he was, and maybe he wasn't it. Would you vote him off the island?

 

load of wank

 

maybe he did, maybe he didn't. But let's just say he did. Maybe it was like a personal test against the elements? Very intelligent people get bored easily too...

 

I have several Einstein books in my library. None of them mention this act of stupidity.


x

 

I love that book! That's the book that really got me thinking about things. Never heard it mentioned by anyone else either.

 

Curiosity can bite you in the ass sometimes! Ah well lesson learned.. I hope.

 

Maybe he was testing the theory of sun gazing?

 

First off AWESOME BOOK!!!!

It took me a while to finish it but all in all awesome book!! I have also read that quote before, and maybe in his own psyche it was an important expirement of light's disturbance to human optical receptors???

Who Knows??

 

maybe this einstein who started the Mabey einstein aint too smart thread aint themselves too smart mabey LOLOL

 

Or maybe he wanted confirmation for something he was skeptical about? LOLOLOLROFL

 

or maybe this isn't a true story...

I've heard it about at least three other scientists

 

You know I heard this story about that Richard feynman
I heard he is one dumb son of a bitch that could hardly read or write but somehow he fooled the entire scientific community

I am not too sure, but here is the potential conman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

 

According to the story, how old was Einstein at the time of this experiment?

 

I don't know if this kills the credibility of the story or if it boosts it. But people say that Sir Isaac Newton used to stare at the sun, supposedly he would also stick things in his eye. Sharp stuff or just a finger and try to change the shape of his eye to see if it would change the shape of what he was seeing.
Most of us would see that as a pretty stupid thing to do, but I guess the genius part of it would be that Newton didn't see the eye purely as a magical thing, as some in his time surely did.

Do you really think Feynman was an idiot? He was definitely a character, but i didn't think he was dumb.

 

Isaac Newton was autistic... so what

Einstein has done more for mankind than most men... so intelligence be damned... I rate him.

Also maybe he was trying to do an experiment on the intenity of light reaching us in W/m^2... cos his retina would decay wiht a certain amount of joules J after t seconds where J = Ws .... and thereby work out the power of the sun

I=P/(4*pi*r^2) where P is the power in Watts and r is the seperation between his eye and the sun in meters (work out with triangulation)

r = approximately 1 AU = [size=+1]149[size=-2] [/size]598[size=-2] [/size]000 kilometers[/size] (thanks google, but give it in meters)

the retina would decay with a certain amount of joules that would be the hardest thing to work out

but maybe he was trying to work out something else... photons have an energy of E=hf if you do a simultaneous equation with the data from the other stuff minus the intensity you could probably work out the wavelengths against intensity of light from the sun... though you'd be better off using a spectrometer...

so if einstein really did tis.... I can't justify it

 

Einstein was autistic, he focused on what interested him, not what was going to look intelligent or make him famous.

 

Simply not true. He's dead so there is no way to know or not.

 

Well, then you can't say that it is "simply not true"...what difference does it make anyway?

 

I've never heard he was autistic, I read an article about how research done on his posthumous brain has revealed he had an extra lobe or an over sized lobe or something...