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ECCENTRIC GENIUSES
Both ISACC NEWTON and Albert Einstein were complex and contradictory characters. Despite his powerfully analytical mind and his astonishing mathematical genius, Newton held many strange beliefs. To the end of his life, he studied alchemy and the transmutation of metals, that is, how to turn lead into gold. He wrote many curious manuscripts concerning the end of the world and the prophecies of Daniel, which so embarrassed his friends when they discovered them after his death that these writings remained hidden for years.
As a child, Albert Einstein had a poor memory and spent much of his time building card towers or solving jigsaw puzzles. Einstein slopped going to school when lie was 15; the next year, he failed the entrance examination to the Zurich polytechnic. When he finally entered the Polytechnic, he hated learning so much that, he later claimed, he lost all interest in science for 12 months. Scraping through his final examinations, he worked as a tutor and then as an examiner of patents in Bern. It was not promising start for the greatest scientist of the 20th century. Yet, only three years after taking up his job in Bern, Einstein became world famous for his Special Theory of Relativity.
THE LAST OCCASION on which professional scientists took any Serious notice of an alchemists' claim to have turned lead into gold occurred in 1783. The Royal Society in London called on one of Fellows, James Price, to show how he had achieved the alchemists dream. But Price failed to repeat his successful experiment and, before the eyes of three colleagues, drank prussic acid and died.
A prick of the skin sends a signal of pain to the brain at 98 feet per second. Burns or aches register more slowly at 6 feet per second whilst some leg pain registers at 425 feet per second.