Thank you for all the well thought out responses to my off-hand comment.

Just to clarify my comment ....

Not suggesting that Einstein and Fauci are exactly equivalent .. its more to keep the assertion in mind (however accurate, or ridiculous or inaccurate it may be), when reading through the development of Modern Physics.

Its a guard statement that will help you see where Physics departed one trajectory and landed in another.

That path of the development of Modern Physics in turn leads to the Standard Model, Quantum Theory, String Theory, and all sorts of fun ideas.

If there is one thing they definitively have in common - it is that just like our latest Lord, Master and popular Hero Yelensky of Kyiv, both Einstein and Fauci have been shoved down our throats as brand names, who's unquestioning acceptance will excuse the humble reader from the burden of critical thinking.

Einstein himself may well have been an innocent pawn in this, or not. Who knows ?

He has certainly been used, over and over again, as a role model for everything good that we should aspire to. The bumbling, awkward genius with the bad hair, who loves riding bicycles, and who has magically made the world a better place. A real life Homer Simpson character, and one of God's chosen few to boot.

I'm more concerned about the development of the pragmatic, and "hard science" approach from how we developed through the enlightenment to the mid-20th C ... and how we come out the other side of WW2 with a firehose of bullshit accepted as the modern educational best practice.

Now we have Sociology, Psychotherapy, Common Core Maths, Political Science, Gender Studies, Queer Theory, String Theory, Black Holes and the Standard Model of Physics.

We should probably question this.