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Ivanka Trump Embarrassingly Misquoted Einstein And Twitter Is LOVING It (TWEETS)


Ivanka Trump is facing down quite a bit of humiliation after someone dug up an old tweet of hers that was quite stupid yet perfectly appropriate for the Trump administration.

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“If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts,” Ivanka tweeted in 2013, attributing the quote to  Albert Einstein.

So let’s get this straight: Ivanka thinks Einstein, a scientist, essentially believed that whenever the facts don’t fit the overall narrative the facts should be changed. Yes, this is how the Trump family operates — but unfortunately for her, Einstein never said anything of the sort. The quote is often attributed to him, but U.C. Berkeley professor and author of Now — The Physics of Time, Robert Muller, notes that he actually “said the opposite.” If a theory disagreed with the fact, you had to throw out the theory:

Einstein was very specific about the falsifiability of his theories. In 1945 there was a serious discrepancy between the age of the Earth (measured in radioactive rocks) and the age of the universe (determined by the Hubble expansion). When he updated his book The Meaning of Relativity that year, Einstein wrote,

“The age of the universe, in the sense used here, must certainly exceed that of the firm crust of the earth as found from the radioactive minerals. Since determination of age by these minerals is reliable in every respect, the cosmologic theory here presented would be disproved if it were found to contradict any such results. In this case I see no reasonable solution.”

Einstein did not have to retract general relativity; it was the experiment that was wrong, not his theory. Hubble had not recognized that he had confused two types of very similar stars when making his measurements. After this error was uncovered and revised calculations were made, the corrected age of the universe turned out to be greater than the age of the Earth, as it obviously had to be. But it is refreshing to read Albert Einstein stating that, if the experimental numbers didn’t change, the theory would be proved wrong, with “no reasonable solution.”

The quote appears nowhere in Einstein’s published works or in any of his writings anywhere. The earliest usage, in fact, seems to come  from a 1958 article in the journal Product Engineering, which referred to it as an “age-old adage” but did not attribute it to Einstein because to do so would be utterly moronic. No respectable scientist would say that the facts are the problem when they conflict with a theory.

Naturally, the internet is having a field day with this:

Some just invented quotes and attributions of their own:

One person invoked the name of the might Verizon and the gods appeared to see if everything was OK:

There you have it, folks: the origin of the philosophy of alternative facts.

God, our ‘First Lady’ is a moron.

Featured image via Getty Images/screengrab

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