Sailing Equates to E = mc2 (squared)

 

 

 

by Richard Crockett

Here’s a delightful story. Who knew that Albert Einstein enjoyed sailing?

I certainly did not until stumbling upon this delightful piece in the January 1989 issue of SA Yachting mag. It reads as Follows:

Eric van Ees, scribe for the Flying Dutchman class, is an experienced journalist with a prominent Dutch news agency. ln a neat bit of investigative reporting he has unearthed an amazing piece of information which he submitted with his class news contribution last month – ‘to promote the class’.

“It isn’t generally known ,” he says, “that Albert Einstein was a dedicated Flying Dutchman (well, German) sailor, whose inspiration for the famous mc squared equals E came to him at what the French call the Moment Critique de Catapult when a fat gull alighted on the tip of his mast. While Albert doggedly refused to spill wind the FD was inevitably becoming over-powered despite the crew’s cries in Dutch and German.

”The story has it that the bird sat on the burgee just long enough for Murphy ‘s Law to go into effect: it relates to the movement of leaning forward to unclip the harness, at which point the boat goes over. Everybody knows that feeling.

“Except the mathematical skipper shouted ‘Don’t, don’t!’ His crew didn’t – try that these days – and they hit the water, the way these things happen. And as these things happen the crew, still clipped on, ejected at twice the speed of the Moment Critique de Catapult, which the brilliant skipper put into a theory of the movement of one object in relation to another. He never fully proved it as a theory because his crew refused to do it again.”

Well, we all know FD sailing is inspirational and everything is relative.