Tuesday, February 22, 2005

If you think your committee is rough on you...

From Jim Holt's New Yorker article on Einstein and Gödel:
Einstein’s conclusions were the product of pure thought, proceeding from the most austere assumptions about nature. In the century since he derived them, they have been precisely confirmed by experiment after experiment. Yet his June, 1905, paper on relativity was rejected when he submitted it as a dissertation. (He then submitted his April paper, on the size of atoms, which he thought would be less likely to startle the examiners; they accepted it only after he added one sentence to meet the length threshold.)
The article dwells at length on Gödel's interpretation of time (something I had mentioned a while ago). Read the whole thing: it's fascinating.

(HT: Libertarianoid)

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