The Curious History of Relativity:

[P Taylor]

Yeah, those were the good ol' days of science; I think Michell was a
geologist before all else...  People used to do a lot of different
things.

And, to go full circle, if I remember anecdotally and correctly,
Einstein found geology or geoscience too hard for him, and so spent
time on other physics.

Talk about this discussion coming full circle.  Or full Mobius strip.
I know there's a better geometry-driven pun/witticism, which I will
offer up for creative input.

--pt

On 10/18/06, Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:
> PT:
> > black holes...were postulated by John Michell in the 1780s
>
> The very Michell who conceiv'd (tho' didn't Implement) Cavendish's
> experiment, --- in a Context readily divin'd....
>
> "The first man to measure the mass of the Earth was Astronomer Royal Nevile
> Maskelyne in 1774, using a method called the Attraction of Mountains. He
> worked out a mass of about five million million million tonnes. Using
> Michell's apparatus, Cavendish calculated a figure close to six million
> million million tonnes, which is close to what Newton had estimated a
> hundred years earlier and close to the accepted figure of today."
>
> http://www.exnet.com/1996/02/20/science/science.html
>
>