Maths Never Helped Einstein Discover Gravity: Union Minister Piyush Goyal

New Delhi, September 12, 2019:

Days after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman attributed the slowdown in the auto sector to 'millennial mindset', Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal has now come to the limelight for an amusing gaffe, in which he had implied that Einstein discovered gravity.

He was speaking to reporters following a meeting with the Board of Trade and sought to instill confidence that the country was on track to meet the $5 trillion target in five years.

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Goyal had said, “Don’t go by all these calculations you see on TV, that if the country has to become a $5 trillion economy, it will have to grow at 12% but right now it is currently growing at 6-7%. Don’t get into those maths. Those maths have never helped Einstein discover gravity.”

However, in reality, Einstein never discovered gravity. It had been discovered, many centuries earlier, by Isaac Newton.

Newton's law of universal gravitation was formulated in his work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687. His law was superseded by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity published in 1905.

Finance Minister Sitharaman was earlier trlled for saying that the rise of Uber and Ola is responsible for the downfall in the automobile industry.

"Some studies do tell us that mindset of millennials, who are now preferring not to commit an EMI (equated monthly installment) for buying an automobile, instead prefer to take Ola, Uber, everything else, or take the Metro... A whole lot of factors are influencing the automobile sector. We are trying to solve the problem for them," said the Finance Minister, after which she was mercilessly trolled on social media.