August 2008
{monthly archives}
Newton’s Revenge
In recent years, particularly after the third Nobel prize, a lot of people have asked me about my first brush with Physics, and why I chose Physics over Priesthood. The following short note is an humble attempt at answering those curiosities.
If I said that I was one of those precocious child prodigies that people read about in dailies, then I would be understating the case.
By the age of six, I already knew the difference between a Monet and a Manet, and by the age of 10, I was translating Shakespeare into English in my spare time. In class four, when we were first introduced to Euclidean geometry, I gave four different (and new) proofs of the Pythagorean theorem within the first two months, and then proceeded to work out the theorems of “Elements” in the exact order in which they appear in the book. True, I never proved the Riemann Hypothesis and then lost the proof by reinventing paper-napkins as they tell in the anecdotes, but I came pretty close. The actual accounts can be found in the version of Einstein’s paper on General Relativity containing my margin notes, which will be published five years after my death. Advance bookings are already available in Amazon.