Bengaluru: Union Railways and Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal drew a bizarre analogy Thursday as he sought to undermine concerns about the economic slowdown.
As he offered his remarks at a meeting, Goyal said it wasn’t maths that had “helped Einstein discover gravity”. His comment goes against the accuracy meter on many counts.
Statement: Mathematics did not help Einstein discover gravity.
Who said it: Minister of Railways and Commerce Piyush Goyal.
Full statement: “Don’t get into the maths that you see on television. Oh, if you look at a five-trillion economy, the country will have to grow at 12 per cent. Today it is growing at 6-7 per cent. Don’t get into those maths. Those maths [sic] have never helped Einstein discover gravity. If he had only gone by structured formulae and what was past knowledge, I don’t think there would have been any innovation in this world.”
Accuracy meter: 0/5
Explanation: Albert Einstein did not discover gravity. Isaac Newton did around 200 years before Einstein was even born. Einstein is actually famous for his general theory of relativity.
Additionally, both Newton’s and Einstein’s work is built on mathematics, which is often called the language of science. It is only when theories are mathematically explained and observations replicated can it be concluded that an important scientific discovery is made and demonstrated.
While the minister’s intention seems to be to encourage out-of-the-box thinking, he erroneously attributes Einstein’s newer theories as being independent of classic Newtonian physics.
On the contrary, Einstein identified inadequacies in existing Newtonian physics and built on top of it to reconcile classical laws of gravity with laws of electromagnetism.
Furthermore, Newtonian mechanics is just as applicable as Einstein’s relativity is, only under different circumstances. Einstein’s equations do not supersede Newton’s completely, as the minister’s implication seems to be about using maths in economics.
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