instabram

A Book Dedicated to Einsteins Mistakes

Dear parents, I am sorry to bring this disgrace on the family, but I am pregnant. Marguerite.

Bram Adams

15 Oct 2025 — 18 min read

When a pin is balanced vertically on its point and allowed to fall, the direction in which it topples is random. Or is it? Suppose we could measure its state before toppling with extreme accuracy. Then we might find that it wasn’t perfectly upright to begin with, so we have introduced a bias that decides the direction. So we get a better method of alignment. But now we see that the pin itself isn’t perfectly symmetrical: there’s slightly more mass on one side, and so that is weighed down more. So we make the pin perfectly symmetrical. But now we can detect exactly how many air molecules strike it from different directions, and find that in each experiment there’s a very tiny imbalance that pushes the pin one way or another. So we let it topple in a vacuum – and so on. The point is that what seemed random turns out in each case to have a definable cause that produced a bias. Apparent randomness was simply a consequence of our lack of knowledge about the system. This kind of randomness is easy to accept, because we may rest assured that there’s a causal logic to what we see even if we can’t get at it: in short, things happen for a reason. But the probabilistic nature of the Schrödinger equation, which predicts only the likelihood of different experimental outcomes, leaves it offering no reason why one specific outcome is observed instead of another. In effect, it says that quantum events (the radioactive decay of an atom, say) happen for no reason. They just happen. That sounds like a terribly unscientific thing to say, and seems to go against the grain of everything that scientists and natural philosophers have striven to achieve since well before the time of Isaac Newton: to explain the world. Quantum events don’t appear to have an explanation as such – one in which definable causes lead to specific effects – but only a probability of occurrence. This is what Einstein found unreasonable. Who can pretend that it isn’t?

--Beyond Weird - Philip Ball

If the universe isn't deterministic, does that mean that all of our efforts are for naught?

Albert Einstein seemed resigned with good grace to a widespread determination to prove him wrong. An endless stream of cranks has attempted to ‘disprove’ Einstein’s theories of relativity ever since they were first published, and Einstein responded patiently to some of the untutored correspondence he received that claimed to find errors in his work. Obviously, if you could show that Einstein had erred then you would be revealed as a genius of the highest degree, and there was (and still is) no shortage of applications for that position. It is a sign of supreme intellectual renown when even your ‘errors’ and ‘blunders’ are celebrated, and when announcements that you have been proved ‘wrong’ make newspaper headlines. But actually Einstein was ‘wrong’ about many things. He made a few trivial lapses in his calculations. He famously fudged his theory of general relativity to avoid its prediction of an expanding universe, just a few years before astronomers found that to be precisely the state of the cosmos. Even his many proofs of the celebrated E = mc2 contained little gaffes. Heck, there’s an entire book enumerating Einstein’s mistakes.*1 None of this has the slightest bearing on Einstein’s status as the greatest scientist of the twentieth century. To imagine that genius implies freedom from error is to misunderstand the nature of creativity and insight. Arguably, geniuses (whatever that means) must incur an above-average chance of being wrong.

--Beyond Weird - Philip Ball

Every single thing seems to have some kind of competitive streak, even if the competition is relegated to physicist nerds trying to prove other physicist nerds wrong.

Cookery supplies the popular metaphor: if we add the baking powder after we have mixed the other ingredients and baked the cake, we get a different result from adding it before baking (I have tried this experiment, so I can verify the statement). I like to think that a better, if peculiarly British, analogy is supplied by making tea. Adding the milk to the cup before pouring the tea gives a different quality of brew to adding the milk to the tea in the cup. It might seem improbable, but connoisseurs swear it is true (I believe them), and there may be good scientific reasons for it. (They are not, I should add, quantum reasons.)

--Beyond Weird - Philip Ball

Measurement in the classical physics world is often communicative, meaning that if you measure a to b and b to a, you get the same distance. But in the quantum world, that's not necessarily the case. Measurement has a direct impact on the experiment itself and the results that you receive.

There is (we’re told) a fuzziness to the quantum world that prevents us from knowing everything about it in absolute detail. Ninety years ago, Werner Heisenberg articulated this with his famous Uncertainty Principle. But Heisenberg’s discovery is often misunderstood. It might be taken to imply either that nothing in the quantum world can be measured exactly (perhaps because we can’t help disturbing what it is we want to measure?) or – a more sophisticated misconception – that if we want to measure one thing very accurately then we have to accept a commensurate blurring in the values of everything else. Neither idea is correct. We can’t blame these misunderstandings on a woeful lack of public science literacy. The Uncertainty Principle actually is rather technical, and it’s not surprising that non-specialists may miss its message. The problem is compounded by the catchy name. It’s a name that chimed with the insecure times in which Heisenberg deduced his result in 1927: between the wars, with Germany reeling from hyperinflation and political crises, and with Nazism on the rise. To make things worse, even Heisenberg did not fully understand the implications of what he had stumbled across. He couched the Uncertainty Principle in terms both hazy and apt to mislead, and which have left physicists arguing about it even today. He made trouble for himself. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is not exactly a constraint on how precisely we can make a measurement of some quantum property. Rather, it constrains how precisely the property we want to know about exists at all. It might have been better christened the Unknowability Principle – better still, the Unbeability Principle – although doubtless that would have spawned a mysticism of its own.

--Beyond Weird - Philip Ball

So much of science, we want to believe, is this objective reality descriptor. But in fact, because we use language and because science is always done in a time where humans, being the political creatures we are (a la Aristotle) , find ways to leverage science to get across political aims. We're currently seeing this with the technology of language models vs the perception of what artificial intelligence is in the public sphere, for example.

This book is dedicated to MY SON, GUY JOHNSON, AND ALL THE STRONG BLACK BIRDS OF PROMISE who defy the odds and gods and sing their songs

--I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou

SING YOUR SONGS BIRDS!!!! SING!!!!

As my sixth month approached, Mother left San Francisco for Alaska. She was to open a nightclub and planned to stay three or four months until it got on its feet. Daddy Clidell was to look after me but I was more or less left on my own recognizance and under the unsteady gaze of our lady roomers. Mother left the city amid a happy and cheerful send-off party (after all how many Negroes were in Alaska?), and I felt treacherous allowing her to go without informing her that she was soon to be a grandmother. Two days after V-Day I stood with the San Francisco Summer School class at Mission High School and received my diploma. That evening, in the bosom of the now-dear family home I uncoiled my fearful secret and in a brave gesture left a note on Daddy Clidell's bed. It read: Dear Parents, I am sorry to bring this disgrace on the family, but I am pregnant. Marguerite. The confusion that ensued when I explained to my stepfather that I expected to deliver the baby in three weeks, more or less, was reminiscent of a Molière comedy. Except that it was funny only years later. Daddy Clidell told Mother that I was “three weeks gone.” Mother, regarding me as a woman for the first time, said indignantly, “She's more than any three weeks.” They both accepted the fact that I was further along than they had first been told but found it nearly impossible to believe that I had carried a baby, eight months and one week, without their being any the wiser.

--I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou is an expert at delivering the perfect amount of information her audience needs to hear in her real life and in her book.

The world had ended, and I was the only person who knew it. People walked along the streets as if the pavements hadn't all crumbled beneath their feet. They pretended to breathe in and out while all the time I knew the air had been sucked away in a monstrous inhalation from God Himself. I alone was suffocating in the nightmare. The little pleasure I was able to take from the fact that if I could have a baby I obviously wasn't a lesbian was crowded into my mind's tiniest corner by the massive pushing in of fear, guilt and self-revulsion. For eons, it seemed, I had accepted my plight as the hapless, put-upon victim of fate and the Furies, but this time I had to face the fact that I had brought my new catastrophe upon myself. How was I to blame the innocent man whom I had lured into making love to me? In order to be profoundly dishonest, a person must have one of two qualities: either he is unscrupulously ambitious, or he is unswervingly egocentric. He must believe that for his ends to be served all things and people can justifiably be shifted about, or that he is the center not only of his own world but of the worlds which others inhabit. I had neither element in my personality, so I hefted the burden of pregnancy at sixteen onto my own shoulders where it belonged. Admittedly, I staggered under the weight.

--I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou

In her memoir, Maya takes on so much and puts so much weight on her shoulders and is forced to grow up so fast, it really makes me think of how we can actually bear much more weight than we think that we can. And that what feels like insurmountable odds rarely are. And that even the worst-case scenario of death is fine, because really everyone's done it before anyway (even if their life was going really well after all.).

WE CAME FROM BETHLEHEM, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle. My sisters and I were all counting on having one birthday apiece during our twelve-month mission. “And heaven knows,” our mother predicted, “they won’t have Betty Crocker in the Congo.” “Where we are headed, there will be no buyers and sellers at all,” my father corrected. His tone implied that Mother failed to grasp our mission, and that her concern with Betty Crocker confederated her with the coin-jingling sinners who vexed Jesus till he pitched a fit and threw them out of church. “Where we are headed,” he said, to make things perfectly clear, “not so much as a Piggly Wiggly.” Evidently Father saw this as a point in the Congo’s favor. I got the most spectacular chills, just from trying to imagine.

--The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver

If you can go to a desert island with one item and you decide to bring Betty Crocker...

What is the conqueror’s wife, if not a conquest herself? For that matter, what is he? When he rides in to vanquish the untouched tribes, don’t you think they fall down with desire before those sky-colored eyes? And itch for a turn with those horses, and those guns? That’s what we yell back at history, always, always.

--The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver

Much of the vows in a traditional heterosexual marriage, even to today, are kind of along the lines of giving the woman away to the man, even though we don't readily believe that anymore in modern society. At least I don't think there are some people who do. It's interesting that those words are still used in a way because they haven't been able to be replaced by words that make more sense and represent the function of what marriage is as a legal construct vs. what it is as a love construct. Basically the idea of ownership vs. companionship.

IT ALL BEGINS in what some remember as a kind of paradise. The Iberian Peninsula, cut off from Europe by nearly impassable mountains, and spared the long darkness of northern barbarian domination, had been the locus of a rich intermingling of Moorish, classical, Christian, and Jewish cultures. Three geographically distinct regions pollinated one another economically, intellectually, and aesthetically: the seafarers in the west, the land tenders and silk makers in the south, and the castle dwellers and townspeople of the center and north. A common culture resulted from the balance of these various regions, and it even included an anomalous mixing of religious influences. Spanish historians refer to this period as convivencia, a word loosely translated as “coexistence,” but one implying a far more creative interaction than that of, say, the United States and the Soviet Union during their time of coexistence. In Córdoba, for example, under the rule of the Islamic caliphate, Christians were welcome to hold their worship services in the Great Mosque, and they did so. It was one of the grand building complexes in Europe, dating to the eighth century, proudly situated by a noble river, above an ancient Roman bridge. The mosque still stands, with its dramatic horseshoe arches and arcades, stone window grilles and battlements, although all of the Moorish elements are overshadowed now by the Christian cathedral that was built on top of the mosque in the sixteenth century.

--Constantine's Sword - James Carroll

I had arrived at the seminary with a small cache of books, which I was resolved to read in the spirit of self-improvement. I have no idea how I had made my selection of titles, but one of the books was The Age of Reason by Jean Paul Sartre. Somehow my possession of this philosophical novel came to the attention of the seminary rector, who summoned me. He demanded to know if I had been reading Sartre. I recall that the first phase of my panic was tied to shame at being unable to understand the work of the French existentialist. My intellectual mulishness would be exposed. Then I realized the rector had read as little as I. He confiscated the book, announcing it as “on the Index.” The word carried a jolt, evoking an image of heretics burning at the stake. The Index was the devil’s own library, a store of ideas too dangerous to know about. The Index? Me? But what really seemed amazing was that books on the Index were available in paperback. The Index of Forbidden Books, dating to the sixteenth century, was the Inquisition’s list of publications deemed to be heretical. Catholics could not read these books without formal dispensation. The Index was not abolished until 1966. The Roman Congregation of the Inquisition, formally called the Holy Office, was renamed in 1965, becoming the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The prefect, or head, of that congregation today is Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, to whom we have already referred. Ratzinger is the putative author of Canon 1436. I of the Code of Canon Law, which states, “One who denies a truth which must be believed with divine and Catholic faith, or who calls it into doubt, or who totally repudiates the Christian faith, and does not retract it after having been warned, is to be punished as a heretic or an apostate with major excommunication.”
--Constantine's Sword - James Carroll

One of the freedoms we often take for granted is the adult agency over literacy to read whatever we decide is worth reading. However, the “indexes” of today are largely the existence or non-existence of a book on a Barnes and Noble bookshelf or an Amazon Kindle shelf as opposed to what is banned by some secular or religious organization.

In a sense, we are now dealing with self-published AI-generated book curation that while aren't directly counterproductive to any narrative of a power structure, they are still very powerful in their own right.

By definition, Jews, the original and quintessential dissenters, call into question the supremacist universalism of claims made for Jesus Christ. In the present age, with its overlay of politesse, the depth of this conflict, and the danger of it, are obscure. But the history of the time when its structures were erected—structures that John Paul II has sworn himself to uphold—embodies a tragic warning. Beginning with the Fourth Lateran Council’s (1215) resolve to eliminate heresy, and Pope Gregory IX’s Excommunicarnus (1231), which set up roving Dominican and Franciscan ecclesiastical courts, the early Inquisition had pursued its program intermittently, with no central apparatus. With Pope Innocent IV’s decree (1252), torture was permitted. Boniface VIII’s absolutism (1302) led to the consolidation of both the ideology and the institution. The coming of the Spanish Inquisition in the fifteenth century, as we shall see, would brace the soul of Europe before becoming planted in Rome itself. The cruelty and narrowness of the Roman Inquisition are linked in the public mind with the Galileo case (1633), but that was tame compared to what had gone before. This unprecedented institution, whose abuses are now roundly denounced by all,16 intended only to uphold the oneness of the Church. Is it possible to repudiate the Inquisition without questioning what it sought to defend? Beyond its methods and abuses, what about the broader impact of the Inquisition on the Catholic mind? In fact, the Inquisition would fatally undermine the positive side of the long-standing Catholic ambivalence toward Judaism, and would fundamentally change the Catholic attitude toward “the Jewish-born,” in the careful phrase a newspaper applied to Bob Dylan. The Inquisition would spawn the idea of “Jewish blood.”

--Constantine's Sword - James Carroll

Mrs. Watkins, despite being in her 60s, was in remarkable shape. They say black don’t crack, and Mrs. Watkins was the living embodiment of that timeless adage. One could easily mistake her for being in her mid-40s. Guess you can thank her youthful appearance to yoga, Zumba and cycling classes four to five times a week at her local LA Fitness on top of her semi-vegetarian diet. Standing at around 5’5 and weighing no more than 125 pounds, Mrs. Watkins eerily resembled a younger Lena Horne. She had short and wavy black hair with streaks of gray. Although she wasn’t super-light skinned like the famed and legendary black actress, her hue was Creole red due in part to her Louisiana ancestry.