When reading The Physicists I never
really suspected Newton, Einstein or Solomon to be mad. Yes they killed people,
but the way they acted normally didn't make me think they were mad. Take
Einstein, whenever he got upset he would play his violin. That seems perfectly
normal to me. When people get stressed there is generally something they do to
calm down. Also the way all three of them were constantly changing who they
were seemed that they didn't even know who they were. I don't mean this in the
clinically crazy sort of way, but in the way when you're trying to lie and
appear as someone else. Keeping a lie going is very difficult. It's like
acting. Unless you know what you're doing and have done it for a while it's
difficult to keep strait who you're playing and who you're not. One thing I did
think of though was the idea proposed by philosopher Philip K Dick.
"Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans… If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality in singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, his reality is so different from ours that he cannot explain his to us, and we cannot explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication … and there is the real illness."So considering all the physicists admitted they weren't crazy in the end but chose to return to how they were acting before, should we call them crazy or smart? Perhaps if humanity as a race chose to see each person as someone who is living in a completely different reality than their own, then we would have more peace than we do.
