You may have heard of those proverbial professors who are always absent-minded. The same applies to geniuses as well. Quite a number of them were known to suffer from temporary absent-mindedness. This has often led to embarrassing situations.
One day Albert Einstein was riding in a train in Berlin. Absent-minded as he was, the noted physicist told the conductor that he had not given him the correct change. The conductor counted the change again, found it correct and handed it back to him. He told him rather rudely, "The trouble with you sir, is that you don't know mathematics," What a thing to say to none other than Einstein - the greatest mathematician of he century!
One day Edison too found himself in an embarrassing situation. The famous American scientist had gone to the court house to pay his taxes. When the clerk asked him his name, Edison instead of replying stared blankly at other people in the queue. Nobody there knew that he was a great scientist who had given the world not less than a thousand inventions.
If Edison blissfully forgot his own name Sir Walter Scott, the famous poet and novelist often forgot the poms he wrote. He once praised one of his own poems very highly, thinking that it was the poem of Byron.
Failing to remember one's wife's birthday or forgetting one's own wedding by not turning up for the occasion is indeed amusing. Louis Pasteur, the eminent French chemist's marriage was fixed for 29 May 1849. But on the appointed day, after all the guests had arrived there was no sign of Pasteur. Someone rightly guessed that he might still be in his laboratory and rushed over to catch the scientest and bring him to the Church.
"Did you forget about your wedding?" asked his friend finding Pasteur busy in his laboratory.
"As a matter of fact i did remember before i started this experiment," said Pasteur. "But later i totally forgot. Thank God you came".
Sir Isaac Newton, the famous English scientist never dared to marry. He died a bachelor. He was once madly in love with a girl. But the disease of absent-mindedness sealed his fate.
One day having decided to propose to his lady love, Newton fell on his knees, took his fiancee's hands in his own and looked lovingly into her eyes. All of a sudden his mind wandered. Dreamily he grasped his sweetheart's finger and took it for a pipe cleaner. He then rammed it up his smoking pipe. When the girl uttered a long , loud cry due to pain, Newton apologised, "Ah! my dear, i beg your pardon! i am afraid i am doomed to remain a bachelor".
And he remained a bachelor. No woman could have possibly lived with Newton. He was always shabbily dressed and he even forgot to have his meals. One day he had his lunch, he then had a second meal, having totally forgotten that he had already eaten!
Percy Bysshe Shelley, the great English poet's wife invariably sent meals into his study. But he frequently forgot to eat them. Later he would join her and inquire, "Mary, have i dined?"
If Newton and Shelley forgot their meals, Swinburne, the famous poet invariably forgot his hat. One day he searched for it in a club he often visited, he called the hall porter and wanted to know where his hat was. The man replied thatSwinburne had not worn a hat when he entered the club that evening!
Not being able to recollect where one is supposed to alight having set off on a train journey is rather strange. But this often happened to the famous journalist and essayist G.K. Chesterton. Once he got off a train at a palace called Harborough and immediately sent a telegram to his wife, "i am at Harborough, where should i be?"
