Alexandria, Again

Andrew and I took the Metro down to Alexandria to visit the Torpedo Factory. My hope was to pick up something that I’d seen last week, but didn’t buy. Unfortunately, the artist wasn’t in the studio today. Sigh.

We did play around a bit, though. Andrew quite liked the Torpedo Factory, and has seconded my motion to save up next year (after the wedding expenses have disappeared) for some original art for the house.

(Funny comment from a boy, probably 10-12 years old, as he was walking past the sculptures on the stairway railing from the second floor: “And here we have a city of ugly people. And here’s a naked girl.” I wish I could have followed him around a bit longer…)

We stopped at the Olsson’s near the Torpedo Factory, and I found an entertaining book from 1936 entitled Back to Newton. In the introduction, the author, George de Bothezat, writes:

The generalization advanced by Einstein, as rigorously shown in this Essay, is most extravagant, being based upon a set of misunderstandings. Einstein’s fantastic conceptions have only involved Science into disconcerting sophistry based upon ill-founded arguments. It is with the thorough discussion and clarification of these misconceptions of Einstein that this Essay is concerned….

….It is only on account of a few weaknesses in the fundamentals of science that the erection of such a fallacious theory as the Einstein theory of relativity was rendered possible….

The Author of this Essay after mediating for more than twenty-five years over the fundamentals of Newtonian dynamics — one of the greatest cognitive creations ever conceived by a human mind — was able to eliminate these weaknesses, one by one. This once achieved it becomes evident — as was always felt by sound minds — that the whole of Einstein’s theories of relativity have no ground to stand on and really are but a stupendous delusion.

Hmmm…ever heard of de Bothezat? Me neither.

From the Torpedo Factory, we walked down King Street back toward the Metro, stopping in a few shops on the way. Just a couple blocks from the Metro is a used bookstore that we often forget about, since it’s off on a side street. Today we remembered, and popped in. Turns out they were having a moving sale — they’ll be moving around the corner onto King Street. That will probably be very good for their business (and very dangerous for Andrew and me).