I’m reading Bertrand Russell’s The ABC of Relativity (well, listening to it, in an audiobook read by Derek Jacoby FTW), and for one, it’s helping me understand relativity a tiny, tiny bit, which is huge. Relatively.
But I also just heard Jacoby pronounce this tidbit, which delighted me:
If people were to learn to conceive the world in the new way, without the old notion of ‘force’, it would alter not only their physical imagination, but probably also their morals and politics. The latter effect would be quite illogical, but is none the less probable on that account. In the Newtonian theory of the solar system, the sun seems like a monarch whose behests the planets. In the Newtonian theory of the solar system, the sun seems like a monarch whose behests the planets have to obey. In the Einsteinian world there is more individualism and less government than in the Newtonian. There is also far less hustle: we have seen that laziness is the fundamental law of the Einsteinian universe.
This is why conservatives hate science so much! The more we learn about the truth of the universe, the more we become dirty, hippie, slackers.
Near-Earth Object 
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