Followup to:  Einstein's Speed, My Childhood Role Model, Timeless Physics

There is a widespread tendency to talk (and think) as if Einstein, Newton, and similar historical figures had superpowers—something magical, something sacred, something beyond the mundane.  (Remember, there are many more ways to worship a thing than lighting candles around its altar.)

Once I unthinkingly thought this way too, with respect to Einstein in particular, until reading Julian Barbour's The End of Time cured me of it.

Barbour laid out the history of anti-epiphenomenal physics and Mach's Principle; he described the historical controversies that predated Mach—all this that stood behind Einstein and was known to Einstein, when Einstein tackled his problem...

And maybe I'm just imagining things—reading too much of myself into Barbour's book—but I thought I heard Barbour very quietly shouting, coded between the polite lines:

What Einstein did isn't magic, people!  If you all just looked at how he actually did it, instead of falling to your knees and worshiping him, maybe then you'd be able to do it too!

(EDIT March 2013:  Barbour did not actually say this.  It does not appear in the book text.  It is not a Julian Barbour quote and should not be attributed to him.  Thank you.)

Maybe I'm mistaken, or extrapolating too far... but I kinda suspect that Barbour once tried to explain to people how you move further along Einstein's direction to get timeless physics; and they sniffed scornfully and said, "Oh, you think you're Einstein, do you?"

        "...then our people on that time-line went to work with corrective action.  Here."
        He wiped the screen and then began punching combinations.  Page after page appeared, bearing accounts of people who had claimed to have seen the mysterious disks, and each report was more fantastic than the last.
        "The standard smother-out technique," Verkan Vall grinned.  "I only heard a little talk about the 'flying saucers,' and all of that was in joke.  In that order of culture, you can always discredit one true story by setting up ten others, palpably false, parallel to it."
                —H. Beam Piper, Police Operation

Piper had a point.  Pers'nally, I don't believe there are any poorly hidden aliens infesting these parts.  But my disbelief has nothing to do with the awful embarrassing irrationality of flying saucer cults—at least, I hope not.

You and I believe that flying saucer cults arose in the total absence of any flying saucers.  Cults can arise around almost any idea, thanks to human silliness.  This silliness operates orthogonally to alien intervention:  We would expect to see flying saucer cults whether or not there were flying saucers.  Even if there were poorly hidden aliens, it would not be any less likely for flying saucer cults to arise.  p(cults|aliens) isn't less than p(cults|~aliens), unless you suppose that poorly hidden aliens would deliberately suppress flying saucer cults.  By the Bayesian definition of evidence, the observation "flying saucer cults exist" is not evidence against the existence of flying saucers.  It's not much evidence one way or the other.

This is an application of the general principle that, as Robert Pirsig puts it, "The world's greatest fool may say the Sun is shining, but that doesn't make it dark out."