Alternate url for this page:
http://tinyurl.com/geniusscope

What Is A Historyscope?

Westerners are not only known as history ignoramuses, but double dumbass history ignoramuses when it comes to genius history. Since I'm the one-and-only Historyscoper (tm), let me quickly bring you up to speed before you dive into my Master Historyscope.

In 469 B.C.E. Greek (Athenian) plug-ugly philosopher (gay?) Socrates (-469 to -399) is born in Athens to sculptor Sophroniscus and midwife Phaenarete; he goes on to sculpt a statue of the Three Graces which stands at the entrance to the Acropolis until the 2nd cent. C.E.?; father of the Maieutic (Gr. "midwife") Method of dialectic, based on "Socratic irony", an ironical profession of ignorance ("As for me, all I know is that I know nothing"); his main teaching is that all vice is ignorance, therefore no man is willingly bad, he just has to be enlightened with knowledge to act virtuously (he never heard of the Bible?); "How many things there are that I do not need" he exclaims, wearing one garment all year long and going barefoot in the snow; his student Plato writes down his ideas which otherwise would be lost since Socrates believes that writing distorts ideas, and writes nothing of his own - he could never have been a cop?

In 335 B.C.E. after breaking ranks with his master Plato of the Academy in Athens, Stagira, Macedonia-born Greek Golden Mean philosopher ("the Peripatetic Philosopher") (the first scientist?) (gay?) Aristotle (Gr. "best (purpose) of all") of Stagira (-384 to -322) begins his career by founding a gymnasium in E Athens called the Lyceum (Lykeion), named after a nearby temple to Apollo Lycean (Gr. "lukos" = wolf), founding the Peripatetic School, named either after the collonades of the Lyceum, or for his habit of walking and talking; he prefers to go around collecting data before solving problems, vs. Platonists, who sit around thinking up answers by pure thought; Aristotle writes the 10-vol. Nicomachean Ethics, which becomes a hit during the European Middle Ages, and uses lunar eclipses to prove that the Earth is ball-shaped. He goes on to become the teacher of undefeated world conqueror Alexander III the Great, preferring to collect data rather than sit around thinking, and (after much personal experimentation?) deciding that all inheritance comes from the father, the mother merely providing the material, and that female babies are caused by "interference" from the mother; he leaves 260 treatises, incl. Constitution of Athens (written in -350) (discovered in 1890 C.E.), Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, Logic (Prior Analytics), Zoology, De Anima (On the Soul) (the nous poietikos or active intellect vs. the nous pathetikos or passive intellect), which first mentions the Tabula Rasa view of the mind as starting out a blank slate, and Poetics, the first work on art criticism, valuing art based on how it imitates the universal in human nature, and claiming criticism as a science: "Man is by nature a political animal"; "Hope is a waking dream"; "Tyrants preserve themselves by sowing fear and mistrust among the citizens by means of spies, by distracting them with foreign wars, by eliminating men of spirit who might lead a revolution, by humbling the people, and making them incapable of decisive action"; "Music directly represents the passions of the soul. If one listens to the wrong kind of music, he will become the wrong kind of person."

In 1581 with clocklike precision, Italian scientist Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) discovers that the time taken by a swinging lamp in the Cathedral of Pisa does not depend on the angle through which it swings (i.e., a pendulum swings isochronously). In 1591 he drops a 1 lb. and a 100 lb. weight from the Tower of Pisa simultaneously to prove a point in physics about bodies falling at the same speed regardless of mass, refuting the know-it-all Aristotelians.

On Nov. 10-11, 1619 (St. Martin's Day) (night) after joining the Dutch States Army in 1618, La Haye en Touraine, France-born philosopher-mathematician (Roman Catholic) (Rosicrucian) ("Father of Modern Philosophy") Rene (René) Descartes (1596-1650) has divine visions in Neuburg an der Donau, Germany in which he "discovered the foundations of a marvelous science", which later becomes Analytic Geometry, along with his famous dictum "Cogito ergo sum" (Je pense donc je suis), causing him to dedicate his life to the mathematical basis of Nature; in 1620 he leaves the army, returning to the Dutch Repub. in 1628, spending 20 years formulating his philosophical works; in 1637 after the horrific Galileo affair, he pub. Discourse on Method (Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences (Discours de la Methode pour bien Conduire sa Raison, et Chercher le Verite dans les Sciences); an epoch-making work expounding the technique of divide and conquer, containing the three appendices (Qui Sont des Essais de Cete Methode): La Dioptrique, advancing the corpuscular theory of light; Les Meteores: Traite de la Lumiere, on cosmology; and La Geometrie, founding the field of analytic geometry and introducing the concepts of a coordinate plane and a mathematical function. In 1644 he pub. Principia Philosophiae (Principles of Philosophy) in Amsterdam, containing the ultimate philosophy soundbyte "Je pense, donc je suis" ("I think, therefore I am"); too bad, it kowtows to the Roman Catholic 1616 anti-Copernican decree by stating that "I want what I have written to be taken simply as an hypothesis, which is perhaps far removed from the truth"; it declares that all motion is relative, thus the Earth can be considered at rest like the Church dictates, drawing criticism from Newton; also that bodies can act on each other only through contact; famous for its diagrams of vortices in which planets are carried in the whirlpool of subtle matter around the Sun - don't try to fight it, don't try and save me, she's a woman in love? In 1662-4 he posth. pub. Treatise on the World, proposing the Dualistic Model of Reality, mind vs. matter.

On Aug. 16, 1662 French savant mathematician-physicist-philosopher Blaise Pascal (b. 1623) blazes out in Paris at age 39 after rejecting medical care, with the soundbyte: "Sickness is the natural state of Christians"; last words: "May God never abandon me"; he leaves Pensees (Pensées) (Fr. "Thoughts") (pub. 1670), which anticipates Existentialism, Pragmatism, and Voluntarism, and contains the first formal use of decision theory; section 180 incl. the immortal soundbyte: "Had Cleopatra's nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed"; section 223 contains Pascal's Wager, which claims that there is an infinite gain or loss if God exists, hence a rational person should live as though he does, because if God does not exist, there is only a finite possible loss; "For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed"; "Diversion is the only thing that consoles us in our wretchedness, and yet diversion is itself the greatest of our miseries. For it is diversion above all that keeps us from seriously taking stock of ourselves and so leads us imperceptibly to perdition": "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction"; "The heart has its own reasons which reason does not know" - he quit thinking and was not?

The year 1666 contains all the Roman numerals MDCLXVI) once; also 1444, 1446, 1464, 1466, 1644, 1646, 1664. In 1666 the Millennium Fever (MF) over the Big Year 1666 stirs mass paranoia in Christendom, the smart money being that all those evil scientists and secular pagans (and the antichrist pope and his papist followers, according to Protestants) are going to be consumed in fire just as the unbelievers were consumed in water in the days of Noah; later, when the disappointment sets in, hope springs eternal in the human breast, so anybody born in this year is suspected of being the Devil or the Antichrist, and Armageddon is at least going to happen in his lifetime, so don't give up the faith?; meanwhile never fear, the Scientists are here, as the Annus Mirabilis of English Cambridge U. man Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) begins when the plague causes him to be sent home from Cambridge to his home in Woolsthrope, where the world's most famous apple falls from the tree, revolutionizing Science with the stunning realization that the heavens and the Earth are subject to the same universal laws - one little orb falls from the sky, causing their minds to fall from the divine Heavens into the material world of Earth, and like it? I walk this empty street on the boulevard of broken dreams? Don't let a migraine upset you? As a total rebuff to the Millennium Feverists who say the world is not worth studying (since this is its last year), Isaac Newton goes into a glorious brilliant Rain Man funk in Woolsthorpe and discovers the Integral Calculus (not dental rot but the branch of mathematics) and the Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation (inverse square law), measures the Moon's orbit, and, when not otherwise occupied, buys a glass prism "to try therewith the phenomena of the colours", becoming the first to deduce that the prism splits white light into a spectrum as a result of the different refractive index for each color; sitting under a you know what kind of tree, he observes a you know what falling, and calculates that at a distance of 1 ft. the attraction between two objects is 100 times stronger than at 10 ft., making the super mental leap that the force exerted by the Earth on the apple is the same as that exerted by the Earth on the Moon; "And the same year [1666] I began to think of gravity extending to the orb of the Moon, and having found out how to estimate the force with which a globe revolving within a sphere presses the surface of the sphere, from Kepler's Rule... I deduced that the forces which keep the Planets in their Orbs must [be] reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about which they revolve: and thereby compared the force requisite to keep the Moon in her Orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth, and found them answer pretty nearly. All this was in the two plague years of 1665 and 1666, for in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention, and minded Mathematicks and Philosophy more than at any time since" - Isaac Newton, memo in the Portsmouth Collection, 1714; the Newton pippin is later named to commemorate the Big Apple of 1666 - the first modern scientist walks the Earth, and he's white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, but actually not so modern, as he's still got one foot in the past and believes in alchemy and bizarre Bible theories, taking a few years out of his all-important studies to figure out math and physics, in the belief that the Universe is a giant code and he can crack it; his success paradoxically strengthens belief in astrology? Newton's funeral was presided over by "A. (Alexander) Pope".

In 1666 19-y.-o. German polymath superbrain Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) (pr. LIPE-nits), Germany's answer to England's Isaac Newton pub. Disserto de Arte Combinatoria (Discussion of the Combinatorial Art), which formulates the idea that all reasoning and discovery are reducible to an ordered combination of elements, incl. words, numbers, colors, and sounds; contains his suggestion, based on the work of Raymond Lully, that a mathematical language of reasoning should be developed, which is taken up by George Boole et al. In 1672-94 he constructs the Stepped Reckoner, the first calculating machine capable of multiplication and division; the cylindrical crank-operated calculating machine was inspired by a pedometer he saw while on a diplomatic mission to Paris, and he visits London to seek financial backing from the Royal Society, claiming it can calculate trig tables. In 1672 he first describes the mysterious invisible Ether (Aether), so dear to Newtonists; meanwhile in 1672 Isaac Newton announces his discovery of the decomposition of white light into the rainbow, breaking it into spectral colors each with a different index of refraction. In 1679 Leibniz discovers the Binary Number System; he doesn't pub. his findings until 1701.

In 1736 Swiss #1 mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707-83) solves the Konigsberg (Königsberg) Bridge Problem, and founds the study of Analytical Mechanics. In 1744 he discovers the Calculus of Variations. In 1752 he pub. the Polyhedron Face-Vertex-Edge Formula f+v=e+2 (e.g., f=6, v=8, e=12 for a cube, f=32, v=60, e=90 for a buckyball). In 1768 he proposes that the wavelength of light determines its color.

In 1760 4-y.-o. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91) begins cranking out world-class musical works, beginning with Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star (the first song you probably sang?) (they should have made his gym class more fun?). On Jan. 7, 1761 little Wolfy gives his first public concert at age six for Bavarian elector Maximilian III Joseph; he and his older sister Maria Anna "Nannerl" Mozart (1751-1829) are paraded across Europe as child prodigies by their violinist father Leopold Mozart; Count Karl Johann Christian von Zinzendorf (1739-1813), HRE Joseph II's finance minister (nephew of Moravian Count Nicolas Ludwig von Zinzendorf) attends their performance and records how wowed he is in his diary, and goes on to attend Wolfy's performances up to the day of his funeral, always recording the weather. In 1763 Wolfie pub. Sonatas for the Harpsichord and Violin, KV 6-9 in Paris while on a Grand Tour of Europe, where he gives concert for Louis XV; it features Sonata in C major, KV6. In 1764 Wolfie completed his Symphony No. 1.

Once again Chen I take your yen? Fledgling capitalist U.S.A. has a bible written by a stingy Scot? On Mar. 9, 1776 Scottish U. of Glasgow economist and Calvinist minister Adam Smith (1723-90) ("Father of Economics") pub. his epic 1K-page capitalist Bible Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which advances the theory of laissez-faire economics, a "system of natural liberty", and the concept of the "invisible hand", becoming a bestseller, selling out in a few weeks; "Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production, and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer"; "The real price of everything is the toil and trouble of acquiring it"; "The propensity to truck, barter, and exchange... is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals"; "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest"; "Every individual endeavors to employ his capital so that its produce may be of greatest value. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own security, only his own gain. And he is in this led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it"; "To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear unfit for a nation of shopkeepers, but extremely fit for a nation whose Government is influenced by shopkeepers"; "The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind"; "The first duty of the sovereign, that of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies, can be performed only by means of a military force"; discusses the excess burden of taxation AKA deadweight loss or distortionary cost - or, there's a certain chick I've been sweet on since I met her, and she works cheap?

On May 30, 1778 after a dazzling career cranking out 20K letters and 2K books and pamphlets criticizing the Bible, the Roman Catholic Church, and Islam, advocating freedom of religion, thought, and speech, and separation of church and state, spending time in the Bastille and returning to Paris for the first time in 20 years and falling ill, French Englightenment philosopher (Deist) (known for his lightning wit and satire) Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet) (1694-1778) dies, leaving Mahomet the Prophet; or, Fanaticism (play) (1741), Zadig; or The Book of Fate (novel) (1747), Micromegas (Micromégas) (short story) (1752), Candide; or Optimism (novel) (1759), and Philosophical Dictionary (Dictionnaire Philosophique) (1764); "He who has heard the same thing told by 12,000 eye-witnesses has only 12,000 probabilties, which are equal to one strong probability, which is far from certainty"; "Historians are gossips who tease the dead"; "History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up"; "All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon"; "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" (Nov. 10, 1770); "Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world"; "Originality is nothing but judicious imitation"; "No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible"; "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize"; "But that a camel-merchant [Muhammad] should stir up insurrection in his village; that in league with some miserable followers he persuades them that he talks with the angel Gabriel; that he boasts of having been carried to heaven, where he received in part this unintelligible book, each page of which makes common sense shudder; that, to pay homage to this book, he delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse, at least if he was not born a Turk, or if superstition has not extinguished all natural light in him." In 1864 his tomb is opened and discovered to be empty.

In July 1781 after setting out to explore the limits and conditions of knowledge, Konigsberg, Prussia-born German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) pub. Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der Reinen Vernunft) in Riga (2nd ed. 1787), which rejects David Hume's extreme empiricism, proposing that there is more to knowledge than bare sense experience, distinguishing between "a posteriori" and "a priori" knowledge, the former derived from perception, hence occurring after it, and the latter a property of thought, independent of experience and existing before it, founding the Idealist School of Philosophy, which promotes Transcendental Idealism and the Transcendental Aesthetic, dividing knowledge into sensible (based on the senses) and logical (based on reason) - I know what I want to say but it takes so many pages to say it? In 1785 he pub. Foundations (Groundwork) (First Principles) of the Metaphysics of Morals (Ethics); presents the concept of the Categorical Imperative, which tells us which actions are obligatory and which forbidden, all without mean old Jehovah and his Bible? In 1788 he pub. Critique of Practical Reason, claims that pure practical reason must not be restrained like pure theoretical reason, but cultivated, founding deontological moral philosophy, making a fan of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In 1790 he pub. Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft), which founds modern aesthetics; divided into Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and Critique of Teleological Judgment. In 1797 he pub. The Metaphysics of Morals (Die Metaphysik der Sitten); divided into the Doctrine (Science) of Right (Metaphysical Elements of Justice) and the Doctrine of Virtue, promoting classical republicanism in political philosophy. In 1798 he pub. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, based on lectures delivered in 1772-96, trying to define anthropology as a branch of philosophy, dividing it into a physiological category ("what nature makes of the human being") and a pragmatic category (what things a human "can and should make of himself").

In 1794 17-y.-o. Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), a language student at Caroline College in Brunswick, Germany gets interested in math and takes up the classical problem of constructing regular n-gons, proving that it can't be done when n is a prime number except for 17, 65, 257 and 65,537, causing him to switch next year to the U. of Gottingen, submitting a doctoral thesis in 1798 proving the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra (every possible algebraic equation has a solution), going on to become the Princeps Mathematicorum, the #1 mathematician in da whole wide world - I can win that race?

In 1807 Stuttgart, Germany-born Idealist philosopher ("the Protestant Aquinas" - Karl Barth) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) pub. The Phenomenology of Spirit (Mind) (Phanomenologie des Geistes), his first major work, which gets him a job as dir. of the gymnasium of Nuremberg in 1808-16; it proposes the Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis dialectic according to which knowledge pushes forwards to greater certainty, and ultimately towards knowledge of the noumenal world, making fans of Marx, Nietzsche et al. In 1812 he begins pub. The Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logic) (Die Objektive Logik) (3 vols.) (1812, 1813, 1816); rev. 1831; how history is a progressive process from Pure Being (China) to the Absolute Idea (Prussia) (pure thought thinking about pure thought), based on the dialectic (thesis + antithesis = synthesis); "This unity is consequently the absolute and all truth, the Idea which thinks itself"; "The power of the Spirit is only as great as its expression, its depth only as deep as it dares to spread out and lose itself in its exposition"; "The history of the world is the discipline of the uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience to a universal principle and conferring subjective freedom. The East knew, and to the present day knows, that 'one' is free; the Greek and Roman world, that 'some' are free; the German world knows that 'all' are free", therefore America is the land of the future, and the Absolute will reveal itself one day, perhaps in a contest between North and South America", with war being necessary, along with class structures and the state; his 1811 marriage makes him get serious, and this work gets him a job as prof. of philosophy at the U. of Heidelberg in 1816, followed by prof. of philosophy at the U. of Berlin in 1818-31. In 1816 he pub. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences; rev. ed. pub. in 1827, 1830. In 1820 he pub. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Elements of the Philosophy of Right), which claims that a person is not really free unless he participates in the life of the state, dissing Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843) for participating in student agitation and the Burschenschaft and for being emotional instead of rational, causing Fries to diss him for defending the govt. order to keep his privileged position, with the soundbyte: "Hegel's metaphysical mushroom has grown not in the gardens of science but on the dunghill of servility" - 50 is the new 30?

In 1842 German Young Hegelian Friedrich Engels (1820-95) meets former Young Hegelian, German Jewish know-it-all Karl Marx (1818-83) at the offices of the Rheinische Zeitung in Manchester, England, but they are not impressed with each other; Engels hooks up in Manchester with Irish working class radical Mary Burns (1821-63), shacking up with her without doing that old-fashioned marriage thang, making enough money to support Marx, who next June 19 marries childhood friend, Prussian aristocrat Baroness Johanna Bertha Julie Jenny Freiin von Westphalen (1814-81) (after Marx dedicated his doctoral thesis to her liberal father Ludwig von Westphalen); they go on to have seven children, only three of whom survive to adulthood, Jenny, Laura, and Eleanor. On Aug. 28, 1844 after sending his first economic work "Outline of a Critique of Political Economy" to be pub. by Marx, Friedrich Engels meets Karl Marx again at the Cafe de la Regence in Paris, and this time they become close pals. In 1845 Engels pub. The Condition of the Working Class in England in Leipzig, written in Manchester, England in Sept. 1844-Mar. 1845, where he witnessed "the most unconcealed pinnacle of social misery in our day" incl. child labor and degrading working conditions, making a fan of Karl Marx. In 1845 German writer Wilhelm Weitling (1808-71) pub. Der Evangelium eines Armen Sunders (The Poor Sinner's Gospel), which traces Communism to 1st cent. Christianity, impressing Karl Marx. On Feb. 1, 1848 London Tribune reporter (managing ed. Richard Henry Dana Jr. - a coincidence? Did he mention his California days?) Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95) pub. The Manifesto of the Communist Party in London as a broadside for the coming revolutions, containing the immortal soundbyte: "When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class"; "A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Communism"; "Those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work"; when the little revvies all fizzle the document is repub. as The Communist Manifesto 20 years later, and those who think that socialism can be implemented bloodlessly are labelled as "utopian socialists"; of course the new Communist movement is militantly atheistic and anti-clerical.

The Book That Shook the World? Big year for Bible skeptics, secularists, atheistic scientists, anybody against the ancien regime, as Jehovah, the Source of Life Breathed Into Mud is challenged by Godless Evolution, Mud Coming to Life by Itself After It Bubbles Long Enough? The biggest V for the Devil since Eden? The new 95 Theses, but Darwin is smart enough not to publish it on Halloween? On Nov. 24, 1859 (Thur.) English naturalist Charles Robert Darwin (1809-82) pub. On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life; the 1st ed. sells out in 1 day; the 1872 6th ed. shortens the title to "The Origin of Species"; the decider, which causes evolutionary "survival of the fittest" theory to triumph among the intelligentsia; English Anglican minister and Cambridge U. prof. of modern history Charles Kingsley (1819-75), who received an advance copy on Nov. 18 writes that he had "long since, from watching the crossing of domesticated animals and plants, learnt to disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of the species", which Darwin adds to the next ed. of his book in a modified form: "He had gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws"; Darwin pub. it after spending eight years dissecting barnacles in his basement, then inexplicably switching to the Galapagos finch?; catches on first in Germany among atheists?; "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down"; Louis Agassiz of the U.S. opposes Darwin, preferring a theory of "Epochs of Creation", based on the absence of missing links between layers of well-formed fossil ecosystems; the phrase "I'll be a monkey's uncle" is coined by Darwin skeptics; "There is a grandeur in this view of life that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved"; what was that about "my theory would absolutely break down" if anything is found that can't be explained by "numerous, successive, slight modifications"?; in practice Darwinism becomes a religion which denies that there is intelligent design in Nature, and therefore tries to deconstruct any evidence of it they find as they go along, yet clings to the notion of common descent, almost as if there was some original, er, accident, and ends up turning into a narrow naturalistic dogma by the end of the 20th cent., taking over U.S. and other Western educational systems with a chilling priesthood? In 1860 after failing to fit it into his Theory of Evolution, Darwin writes the immortal soundbyte: "The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail makes me sick." On Feb. 1, 1871 he writes a Letter to Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, with the soundbyte: "It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were found." In 1871 he pub. The Descent of Man; "The Simidae then branched off into two great stems, the New World and the Old World monkeys; and from the latter at a remote period, Man, the wonder and glory of the universe, proceeded"; "We civilized men... do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment... Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed"; "This is the book that contains the foundation in natural history for our view" (Marx to Engels); this book is later used by Eugenicists to justify euthanasia of misfits.

Every time I tried to tell you the words just came out wrong, so I had to tell you in a relativistic song? In 1905 while working in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, Austria-born Jewish physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) has his Miracle Year of 1905, publishing five theoretical physics papers in Annalen der Physik, three of which are key to the development of 20th cent. physics: on the photoelectric effect (going beyond Planck to explain aborption as well as emission of radiation, and deriving the famous equation E = M * C^2, which goes beyond Maxwell and Planck, who showed how energy can be described by Fourier waveforms, and suggests that matter and energy are waveforms that can be mutually transformed), on statistical mechanics, and on the Special Theory of Relativity, which suggests abandoning the idea of absolute time and space by turning the speed (distance of travel divided by elapsed time) of light upside down as the real absolute (which, like Newton's theory, becomes a religious and political lost-shaker-of-salt hot potato because of its revolutionary social implications to some deep thinkers?); he also pub. a theoretical explanation of Brownian motion in terms of atoms, which is experimentally verified by French physicist Jean Baptiste Perrin, ending the dispute over John Dalton's Atomic Theory; he formulates the Relativistic Mirror Gedankenexperiment, claiming that the reflection from a mirror moving close to c would produce bright light pulses in the short wavelength range, which is confirmed in 2013; for the next five years few read or respond to the articles, until one day the great man himself, Max Planck becomes a groupie and invites him into the club, launching Lazy Eye's meteoric rise through Zurich U., Berlin, his Nobel (for the photoelectric effect, not relativity), and soon I've been everywhere, man, but I still haven't found what I'm looking for, a Unified Field Theory (UFT), AKA the Theory of Everything, a set of five equations attempting to unify electromagnetism and gravity, which he pub. in 1954. In 1915 Einstein pub. his Gen. Theory of Relativity, stating that a uniform gravitational field is equivalent to a uniform acceleration, and reducing all gravitational physics to 4-dimensional geometry; too bad, atheists and Darwinian evolutionists seize on it and try to make it too general, expanding it to all philosophy, psychology, morals and ethics? On May 29, 1919 an eclipse is photographed by two British expeditions, one in Africa and the other in Brazil, the latter manned by English astronomer Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944), and Einstein's Theory of General Relativity is claimed to be confirmed. In 1950 Einstein pub. his General Field Theory; "Time and space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter"; "Physical objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially extended (as fields). In this way the concept 'empty space' loses its meaning... The field thus becomes an irreducible element of physical description, irreducible in the same sense as the concept of matter (particles) in the theory of Newton... The physical reality of space is represented by a field whose components are continuous functions of four independent variables - the co-ordinates of space and time. Since the theory of general relativity implies the representation of physical reality by a continuous field, the concept of particles or material points cannot play a fundamental part, nor can the concept of motion. The particle can only appear as a limited region in space in which the field strength or the energy density are particularly high."

In 1909 after his highly educated Russian Jewish immigrant parents cram him with education starting at infancy, causing him to allegedly read at 18 mo. and speak eight languages at age 8, 11-y.-o. New York City-born child prodigy (IQ 275) (world's highest IQ?) William James Sidis (1898-1944) (uncle of Clifton Fadiman) becomes the youngest person to enroll at Harvard U.; he graduates in 1914 with a B.A. degree cum laude; too bad, after burning out he is arrested in the Socialist May Day parade in Boston in 1919 and sentenced to 18 mo. in prison, and ends up in a sanitorium, after which he becomes a bitter recluse doing manual labor jobs while working on all kinds of pubs. that never get pub., giving him the rep. of "prodigious failure"; "A wonderfully successful result of a scientific forcing experiment" (New York Times); claims the Universe is eternal and the Big Bang is bull, and argues for universal use of 1-way streets - sounds like somebody I know?

On Mar. 25, 1952 Christopher Michael Langan (1952-) is born in San Francisco, Calif., becoming known as "the smartest man in America/world" for his approx. 200 IQ, finding public school boring and dropping out of Mont. State U. while engaging in weightlifting to fight off his stepfather Jack and school bullies before moving in 2004 to N Mo. to operate a horse ranch and calculate the equation of the Universe, going on to develop the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU), which claims that reality is a self-processing self-referential language embodying a dual aspect monism and consisting of infocognition that resides in syntactic operators within reality, uttering the soundbyte "You cannot describe the universe completely with any accuracy unless you're willing to admit that it's both physical and mental in nature", and claiming that the CTMU "explains the connection between mind and reality, therefore the presence of cognition and universe in the same phrase"; the theory is moose hockey masturbating with words?; "In the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe or CTMU, the set of all sets, and the real universe to which it corresponds, take the name (SCSPL) of the required extension of set theory. SCSPL, which stands for Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language, is just a totally intrinsic, i.e. completely self-contained, language that is comprehensively and coherently (self-distributively) self-descriptive, and can thus be model-theoretically identified as its own universe or referent domain."