It taught me many things and I am greatly indebted to it.” These lines, displayed by some astrology websites as Einstein’s, were exposed as an obvious hoax by the magazine Skeptical Inquirer in 2007. The website Wikiquote has many more entries for him than for Aristotle, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin or Stephen Hawking, and even than Einstein’s opinionated contemporaries Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw.īut how much of this superabundance actually emanated from the physicist? Take this: “Astrology is a science in itself and contains an illuminating body of knowledge. Indeed, Einstein might be the most quoted scientist in history. “There appears to be a bottomless pit of quotable gems to be mined from Einstein’s enormous archives,” notes Alice Calaprice, editor of The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (2011) one detects a hint of despair. Even the website of the US Internal Revenue Service enshrines his words (as quoted by his accountant): “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.” His insights were legion, as we are reminded by this month’s publication of volume 15 in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Credit: Ullsten Bild via Gettyīeyond his towering contribution to physics, Albert Einstein was an avid commentator on education, marriage, money, the nature of genius, music-making, politics and more. Vinocour, Nobody's Child: A Tragedy, a Trial and a History of the Insanity Defense (2020).Albert Einstein in Caputh, Germany, in 1929. Porter, A Social History of Madness: The World Through the Eyes of the Insane (1989) S. Recent years have seen the restrictions surrounding insanity defense considerably narrowed, with the sole criteria for a successful plea being the determination of whether or not the defendant knew he was breaking the law. In fact, the plea is rarely employed in the United States, and it is estimated that less than 1% of defendants have used it successfully. Many have contended that the insanity defense is nothing more than a legal loophole, allowing serious criminals to escape imprisonment. In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled it permissable to keep a mentally ill defendant hospitalized for a term longer than the maximum sentence for the crime with which the defendant was charged. This verdict allows defendants deemed mentally ill to be hospitalized but requires them to carry out a reasonable prison sentence as well. The court's initial verdict of “not guilty by reason of insanity” generated public outcry and renewed interest in the verdict of “guilty but mentally ill,” which is permissible in some states. Such tests try to ascertain whether or not a defendant can distinguish right from wrong, and whether or not he acted on an “irresistible impulse.” John Hinckley's assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan (1981) became another landmark in the history of the insanity defense. Today, psychologists may perform tests to determine whether or not the defendant is mentally stable. the United States led to the establishment of new rules for testing defendants. In the United States, the 1954 case of Durham v. The case of Daniel McNaughtan, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity after making an assassination attempt on British prime minister Robert Peel (1834), gave rise to the modern insanity defense used in many Western nations today. Today, the term insanity is used chiefly in criminal law, to denote mental aberrations or defects that may relieve a person from the legal consequences of his or her acts. Insanity, mental disorder of such severity as to render its victim incapable of managing his affairs or of conforming to social standards.
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