Friday, May 13, 2011

Trivial Fact of the Day with Olivia Newton-John

We all know that Albert Einstein said: "God does not play dice with the universe." What is not so widely known is that he said it in a letter to his fellow physicist Max Born and that Born was Olivia Newton-John's grandfather.

There is another piece of Olivia Newton-John trivia all over the net: this is the claim that her father Brinley took Rudolf Hess into custody after his landing in Scotland.

I cannot find an authoritative source to confirm this, but it may well be true. Brinley Newton-John was an MI5 officer and a Royal Society paper about Max Born's family records:
Brin’s German was so perfect that the Royal Air Force put him as a fake-German among the Germans in prisoner-of-war camps to gather intelligence: this was clearly a dangerous job, but fortunately he was never found out.

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