For, without doubt, another great physicist, who is worthy of ranking up alongside Newton, is a scientist born in AD 965 in what is now Iraq who went by the name of al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham.

BBC: The 'first true scientist'

Most of the time, as physicist Wolfgang Pauli put it in another context, they are not even wrong.

FORBES: The Confidence Game

As if that were not bad enough, Tsuyoshi Hondou, a physicist at Tohoku University in Japan, published a paper in 2002 that gave commuters yet another reason to feel uncomfortable.

ECONOMIST: Are mobiles phones on trains dangerous or not?