Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Einstein didnât say that
ALBERT EINSTEINâS name appears to be a magical talisman on internet quotations, we have noted (6 September). Our request for examples of it being taken in vain produced an enthusiastic, if disgruntled, response from you.
Brigitte Pflueger is delighted that her latest DVD purchase includes âEnglish subtitles for the death and hard of hearingâ â thatâll help pass the time, when the time comes
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A bee quote for the birds
ONE of the more egregious misquotations of recent years is: âIf the bee disappeared off the face of the Earth, Man would have only four years left to live â Albert Einstein.â Grant Hutchison wonders whether âanyone has ever read this quote without thinking, âBees? Einstein? Why?'â He alerts us to on the website , which contends that the original perpetuator of the misquote may have confused Einstein with Charles Darwin and the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. An easy mistake to make.
Much though Feedback appreciates bees and efforts to save them, surely people who care about accuracy are part of the constituency for that campaign?
Does Einstein play dice?
GOD, Einstein said, âdoes not play dice with the universeâ. This publication has several times as a handy illustration of doubts about quantum mechanics. But did he say quite that? Robert Jenkins writes that in a on 12 December 1926 Einstein wrote: âQuantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.â
You know that Einstein equationâŠ
WITH even more concern for precision â or âbeing pedanticâ, as he puts it â Phil Cutmore asks whether Einstein actually used the equation E = mc2. In brief, in his 1905 paper content?â he used different symbols for energy and the speed of light, that m = L/V2.
Can words programme energy?
THESE days, false Einstein quotes are finding homes as endorsements for fruitloop candidates. Pennie Quinton recently attended a free course that was billed as helping participants âdefine your vision by creating clear goalsâ. When the PowerPoint presentation flashed up âEverything is down to energy and we can programme our energy with words â Albert Einsteinâ it rather strengthened her suspicion that this was in fact a pitch for further, expensive courses in what is called Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
Albert Einsteinâs 200 motels
SIMILARLY, Don Jewett doubted whether the great physicist said âInformation is not knowledgeâ. He therefore tracked this quote down â to the great creative noise merchant Frank Zappa.
Relatively, this is false
CAN we be sure Uncle Albert failed to say all of these things? Hans Martens points out that âNobody can falsify my statement âEinstein often said: Drinking a decent bottle of red wine will help everybody to understand general relativity,â and Bertrand Russellâs celestial teapot illustrates the problem.â He refers to Russellâs assertion that being unable to disprove a teapot orbiting the sun is not grounds for believing one does.
What do we call this, then?
WHAT, though, are we to call the act or phenomenon of taking Einsteinâs name in vain? We provisionally named it âgeneral errortivityâ and asked for further suggestions.
We received five nominations for âNeinsteinâ and two for âKeinsteinâ, which we find a slightly more elegant piece of made-up German, kein meaning ânoâ as in ânoneâ. Conrad Lawrence further proposes âthe word âKleinsteinâ to describe something that is a little Einsteinâ.
Spooky attribution at a distance
LIMITING ourselves to the dialect of German called âEnglishâ, we come to Pat Fox-Robertsâs suggestion that Einstein misquotations should be referred to as âspooky attribution at a distanceâ. Jack Hampson, inspired by the Latinate words âmalapropismâ and âmalwareâ, comes up with the rather beautiful âmalbertâ.
Is this paragraph also false?
FEEDBACK has already celebrated Hinchliffeâs Rule: âwhenever the title of a paper is a question with a yes/no answer, the answer is always noâ (16 August). Recently we found a striking, if not ultimate, example on the front page of â âMeteor strikes: are we ready?â The article was not, we should add, about the psychology of calm resignation to unpredictable but unavoidable unpleasantness.
Grim reapers of bank accounts
FINALLY, a colleague has received a grimly opportunistic version of the â419 scamâ seeking to recruit a stooge allegedly to empty someone elseâs bank account â but in fact to have theirs drained. âA client of mine who died of the EBOLA virus deposited a huge amount of money in a bank,â it begins enticingly, before continuing âhere in the NIGERIA, but i donât know how much. He is a Liberian Citizen, so i want you to stand in as his next of kin so that the whole fund will be yours.â
A web search confirms that this is a widely spreading outbreak. Could the way these thing spread teach us anything about the epidemiology of real horrors?
