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Who Rocks Harder: Albert Einstein or René Descartes?

by Jim Jenista

Here we have two brilliant thinkers. I’m not talking about people who always have a witty come-back or win at Trivial Pursuit. The equivalent level of intelligence in ancient history would be the first person who thought to slice up a loaf of bread. What were people doing, wrapping chunks of bread in meat and dipping it in mustard? The elegance of the sandwich is obvious to us now, but it takes a brilliant mind to bust out of these mental bogs in the first place.

So if you take the mental energy of these two dudes and channel into the hyperbolic plane of thought-matter consciousness, who’s manifestation of a musical instrument would out-wail the other?
I swear he's not doing what it looks like he's doing--he is exercising that cranium of his.


Let’s disrobe Ol’ Albert first and take a peek at his inner workings. Everyone knows he worked as a patent clerk while cranking out revolutionary papers on theoretical physics. What puts Einstein in the Van Halen echelon of rocking is that he did all that in his free time and with little or no contact with the scientific community. (Much like how this awe inspiring site is—yes, it’s true—laboriously constructed in moments of free time and with no help from the scientific community). So yeah, Einstein would be sitting there, reading an application for a cat-powered unicycle when he’d pause and say, “Whoa, I’d better remember to sit down when I get home tonight and write up this idea about relativity that will effectively rename all physics up until now ‘classic.’” This is one rockin’ guy.
Descartes on the Swiss $4 bill, I think.


Now for the dark horse, Descartes. What did he do? Well, for one, he’s the “I think therefore I am” philosopher. Again, think sliced bread—this was a huge deal to about 30 philosophers alive at the time and probably at least five more since then. He wrote all kinds treatises in math, physics and philosophy and graduated from the University of Poitiers. Seriously, the French ought to win an award for Giving Stuff Awful Names. Eiffel sounds a lot like awful. Anyway, he did come up with a very good explanation of geometry and in my opinion, his greatest discovery, Cartesian coordinates. Without 2D mathematics the video game would never have been invented and I couldn’t have spent 800 hours of my youth playing Mega Man 2 over and over again (it’s all about the Metal Blades).

In the end, René took a good crack at it but ultimately fell short (for instance, he thought a vacuum couldn’t exist). Einstein drew up plans for an amp that would literally blow the pants off of an entire city, but the government took the idea and changed it into a bomb. So the verdict is:

Einstein Rocks Harder!


Keep it real like Jessica Biel and e-mail me if you have problems with Airman's stage.


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