WHY EINSTEIN WAS NO EINSTEIN…
A cautionary note, don’t become overly enamored with seemingly smart individuals. Most of them are merely an “emperor with no clothes”. Once you get past their high IQ and Mensa scores, you are usually left with incredibly naive and personality-challenged individuals. Sometimes they can even be downright dangerous.
So I was not surprised to find out one of our generation’s greatest minds, physicist Steven Hawking, recently professed that “women are his greatest mystery”. He can postulate about radiation within black holes millions of miles in space but he can’t figure out the fairer sex seated a few feet across from him. In all fairness, the same can be said for the rest of us.
Sometimes we confuse “intelligence” with “common sense”. Voltaire had it right when he said “Common sense is not so common”. We find that these two are not mutually exclusive.
Another case in point is Nobel Prize winner, Albert Einstein who was the father of modern physics and also the husband to his cousin. I guess his intellect for physics didn’t carry over to biology.
We give far too much credence to intellectuals who seem incapable of dispensing judgments not rooted within a text book. “Smart people” will often try to convince you that they are authorities on any number of subjects. We give in to the façade not realizing the underpinnings are as flimsy as a lacy undergarment. Let me highlight a recent example.
Over the past decade, our “smart” people in Washington forced auto makers to make smaller, more gas efficient vehicles. They pushed for alternative fuels like ethanol that pulled 40% of the corn out of our food production.
They sold this to the American people by touting the savings in fuel costs and the mistaken belief that adding corn to gas was good for the environment.
It seems the unintended consequence was gas tax revenues dropped since cars required less gas. Congress is now exploring a “vehicle miles traveled” tax to take back any savings we might have received from their earlier actions.
Added to that, with the recent droughts, there is now a worldwide famine as the price of corn has skyrocketed due to the limited supply. Richard Volke, an economist for the USDA recently stated that “Corn is either directly or indirectly in about three-quarter of all food consumers buy.”
Poverty stricken nations are complaining that diverting corn to produce ethanol is causing millions to face potential starvation worldwide.
I guess the argument can be made that our “geniuses in government” could not have foreseen these occurrences. Others have argued correctly for years that ethanol was never clean nor efficient. They pointed out that producing a gallon of ethanol from corn requires as much energy as it gives out.
So we find ourselves diverting our food to a product that produces more problems than it creates, has never done what it was purported to do and has exacerbated worldwide food shortages due to the intervention of our “so called experts”.
A few years ago, some “smart person” in a London museum thought it would be a bright idea to hire a guard dog to watch over a priceless collection of teddy bears including one by Elvis Presley. The dog proceeded to go on a rampage and destroyed hundreds of the rare, stuffed bears.
Our Congress has a lot of bright ideas too but unlike the teddy bear museum, they are toying with more than just expensive cotton stuffing.
Einstein was reported to have said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”.
I would go a step further and state, “If you don’t understand it well enough and you can’t explain it simply, you are now qualified to hold public office”.
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