Railways and commerce minister Piyush Goyal, during an event, asked people criticising the government's way of handling the economic slowdown to refrain from doing too much calculation and added that mathematics never helped Einstein discover gravity. Piyush Goyal was speaking at a Board of Trade meeting when he made that gaffe.
When asked to respond on how the projected GDP growth rates will achieve India's $5 trillion economy dream, Goyal said, "Don't get into calculations that you see on television...don't get into those maths. Maths never helped Einstein discover gravity. If he had only gone through structured formulae and what was past knowledge, I don't think there would have been any innovation in the world."
Gravity was discovered 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 His law was superseded by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity published in 1905.
His gaffe comes days after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that millennials are one of the reasons behind the crisis in the auto sector as they prefer Ola and Uber. "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.
"Former Finance Minister Piyush Goyal is correct, Einstein did not require maths to discover gravity, but Sir Isaac Newton did. FYI, maths is also required to #FixTheEconomy," said Congress.
Twitterati took note of the gaffe and set to correct him, following which Newton and Einstein became two of the top trending topics of the day.
Also read: Auto Slowdown: Facts, numbers, economics belie FM Sitharaman's Ola-Uber argument