This signifies a “personification of nature”, notes physicist and Nobel laureate Leon Lederman (author of The God Particle, 1993).Įinstein’s name has also been affixed since his death to quotes from elsewhere. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not play dice.” Einstein does not use the word ‘God’ ( Gott) here, but ‘the Old One’ ( Der Alte). Theirs is: “Quantum mechanics … delivers much, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. It is published in the new volume of Einstein’s papers, in which the editors comment on its “varying translations” since the 1920s. It derives from a letter written in German in December 1926 to his friend and sparring partner, theoretical physicist Max Born. That rewords a passage in a 1936 article in the Journal of the Franklin Institute: “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility … The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.”Įven “God does not play dice”, arguably Einstein’s most famous quote, isn’t quite his words. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler” might, says Calaprice, be a compressed version of lines from a 1933 lecture by Einstein: “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” More certain is the provenance of “The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible”. Some are edited or paraphrased to sharpen or neaten the original. The interesting point is that this kind of superstition is so tenacious that it could persist through so many centuries.”Īmong the hundreds of quotes that Calaprice notes are misattributed to Einstein are many that are subtly debatable. “I fully agree with you concerning the pseudo-science of astrology. Einstein’s only known comment on astrology is in a 1943 letter to one Eugene Simon: The real source was the foreword to a reissued book, Manuel d’astrologie (1965), first published by Swiss-Canadian astrologer Werner Hirsig in 1950.
It taught me many things and I am greatly indebted to it.” These lines, displayed by some astrology websites as Einstein’s, were exposed as an obvious hoax by the magazine Skeptical Inquirer in 2007.
The website Wikiquote has many more entries for him than for Aristotle, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin or Stephen Hawking, and even than Einstein’s opinionated contemporaries Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw.īut how much of this superabundance actually emanated from the physicist? Take this: “Astrology is a science in itself and contains an illuminating body of knowledge. Indeed, Einstein might be the most quoted scientist in history. “There appears to be a bottomless pit of quotable gems to be mined from Einstein’s enormous archives,” notes Alice Calaprice, editor of The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (2011) one detects a hint of despair. Even the website of the US Internal Revenue Service enshrines his words (as quoted by his accountant): “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.” His insights were legion, as we are reminded by this month’s publication of volume 15 in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Credit: Ullsten Bild via Gettyīeyond his towering contribution to physics, Albert Einstein was an avid commentator on education, marriage, money, the nature of genius, music-making, politics and more.
Albert Einstein in Caputh, Germany, in 1929.
0 kommentar(er)
