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No portrait of Michell exists, but he was described as “a little short man, of black complexion, and fat.” I think the most likely explanation is that John Mic
by dudeinjapan 3y ago
No portrait of Michell exists, but he was described as “a little short man, of black complexion, and fat.”
I think the most likely explanation is that John Michell was a space alien, looking to peddle common knowledge in his galaxy for Earth fame.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoOr a short fat black man that was extremely smart, I guess.
- dudeinjapan 3y agoOccam's razor: who is more likely to know about black holes, an 18th century English bumpkin, or a spacefaring visitor from another galaxy?
- InCityDreams 3y agoAs a 'bumpkin', by definition, would be considered a 'stupid person', my money, then, is on the traveller.
- dudeinjapan 3y agoThe counter-argument is that the aliens might be bumpkins too. Why do they keep abducting yokels driving down backwater dirt roads??
- denton-scratch 3y agoInteresting and original scifi plotline: humans encounter hayseed, never-been-to-the-city aliens. Perhaps they 'jacked their spaceship; or maybe they're a bit like The Dukes of Hazzard, using their ship to do handbrake turns, and yelling "yeehaw".
- fnordpiglet 3y agoGeorge Green, who discovered Greens Theorem, was such a bumpkin. His father was a miller in the unfashionable countryside, and he had a modest education. A mystery of math history is how such a bumpkin was so poorly versed in advanced mathematics (inaccessible to someone far from a university, where such knowledge was confined at that time), discovered such remarkable mathematics that the average engineering undergrad knows his name. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Green_(mathematician) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Green_(mathematician) Frankly history is replete with bumpkins making extraordinary discoveries. Being a bumpkin is associated with ignorance, not stupidity. Intelligence is pretty uniformly distributed, even among the black, short, fat, and bumpkins.