Dr. Brian May, guitarist for Queen, PhD in astrophysics, all around marvelous dude.
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Heck, many geologists would go on to make the exact same kind of mistake about continental drift. They knew the continents weren’t floating around on a liquid mantle, and they didn’t know about the earth convecting yet, so for a while most harshly rejected what proved to be a very insightful idea. I think it’s really unfair for Kelvin to be dragged for getting things wrong for surprisingly similar reasons.
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I fully support this belief, as it helps clear the stupid out of the gene pool.
Do I follow it, of course not, I’m not an idiot.
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If the stupid were in the gene pool, the way eugenicists would have you believe. You shouldn’t, they’re at best in this category too.
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A necessarily warped viewpoint that I am coming from, but here it’s not the kids making that choice.
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Now i’ve got the song stuck in my head.
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Suzanne Somers was also an early influencer (before that was even a term) hyping and normalizing unsafe, untested, and unregulated “bioidentical” hormone “protocols” for anti-aging and menopause. I have several family members who bought into that because of her books and promotions; all developed breast cancer. I’m not giving her a pass as one of the underrated smart ones.
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… he seems very relaxed at least
I can believe he has very steady hands
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That’s how I woke up underneath a land rover with no boots or money that one time.
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The prevailing thought was that the Earth was ‘indefinitely old’ not ‘infinitely old’ - it was certainly millions of years old, but the original rocks had long since been recycled and there were no fossils to even give a relative stratigraphy. Geologists were following James Hutton’s maxim of: “The result, therefore, of this physical enquiry “is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”
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Pauling is the only one on the list who could reasonably be called a genius in the first place.
Making money doesn’t make someone a genius.
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Yeah, I wonder how different those really were at the time. Hutton also writes:
Time, which measures every thing in our idea, and is often deficient to our schemes, is to nature endless and as nothing; it cannot limit that by which alone it had existence; and as the natural course of time, which to us seems infinite, cannot be bounded by any operation that may have an end, the progress of things upon this globe, that is, the course of nature, cannot be limited by time, which must proceed in a continual succession.
And in the article I linked it gives this from Kelvin:
I asked Ramsay how long a time he allowed for that history. He answered that he could suggest no limit to it. I said “You don’t suppose geological history has run through 1,000,000,000 years?” “Certainly I do.” “10,000,000,000 years?” “Yes.” “The sun is a finite body. You can tell how many tons it is. Do you think it has been shining for a million million years?” “I am as incapable of estimating and understanding the reasons which you physicists have for limiting geological time as you are incapable of understanding the geological reasons for our unlimited estimates.” I answered, “You can understand the physicists’ reasoning perfectly if you give your mind to it.”
It sure seems to me like they are arguing against putting any limit on things. And I know some supporters of the uniformitarian principle had argued against assuming any past processes that no longer exist, and ultimately it had its successor in the steady state theory which likewise denounced the big bang as just a new creation myth.
So no, I don’t think painting the geologists as all just being sensible while the thermodynamicists missed the boat is a fair take. That’s a nice myth for geology textbooks, but it distorts the real history.
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John McAfee has never been convicted of rape and murder, but—crucially—not in the same way that you or I have never been convicted of rape or murder.
ETA: Definitely not a genius, nor an idiot really, just crazy.
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Can you define that? Are you saying that mental illness is the cause of violence? Because, you know, it’s not.
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… that is apparently from
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This reads like the episode list of Cautionary Tales
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…but maybe governments near you thought Elon was cool, and you clicked on them or something, whatever governments did then? But then the government there was like, ‘hey really, we’re counting on you not remembering this in particular tho’ at the time.
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So what you’re saying is that if I megadose vitamin C, I can get rich selling my pee?
Oh, wait, it seems Amazon beat me to it.
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At least he went through with it.
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