Monday, 4 April 2016

The parable of Einstein and the bean counters

Einstein offered a seminar one day
to describe the elaborate beauty of his calculations.
The bean counters came, having heard of the importance of this work.
They sat for a while, confused,

until Einstein said something that reminded them
of something they had once dealt with. Then they could interject
with complaints about irrelevant and trivial issues of basic arithmetic,
lecturing Einstein about tedious problems he was already familiar with,
which were solved long ago, and Einstein left
having been unable to conclude the exposition of a single point
due to interruptions, while the bean counters left

congratulating themselves on having set straight a cheap charlatan.

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