Quotes about Albert Einstein

220 Sourced Quotes

Much later, when I was discussing cosmological problems with Einstein, he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder he ever made in his life.

If it's true what is said, that only the wise discover the wise, then it must also be true that the lone wolf symbolizes either the biggest fool on the planet or the biggest Einstein on the planet.

The idea that physicists would in future have to study the theory of tensors created real panic amongst them following the first announcement that Einstein's predictions had been verified.

Bertrand Russell

Just read the farm relief bill. It's just a political version of Einstein's last theory. If a farmer could understand it, he certainly would know more than to farm. He would be a professor at Harvard.

One of the most essential and mundane of human activities - taking care of children - requires high levels of anxious vigilance.... [Parents] dare not risk assuming that the sudden quiet from the toddlers' room means they are studying with Baby Einstein. Visualize fratricidal stranglings and electric outlets stabbed with forks: this is how we have reproduced our genomes.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Einstein, in thus analyzing what is involved in making a judgment of simultaneity, and in seizing on the act of the observer as the essence of the situation, is actually adopting a new point of view as to what the concepts of physics should be, namely, the operational view.

Percy Williams Bridgman

The difference between the amoeba and Einstein is that, although both make use of the method of trial and error elimination, the amoeba dislikes erring while Einstein is intrigued by it...

What would have happened if Darwin and Einstein as young men had needed to apply for government support? Their probability of getting past the grant reviewers would be similar to a snowball surviving in Hell.

I sometimes think there is a dimension beyond the four of experience and Einstein: insight, that fifth dimension which promises to liberate us from bondage to the long, imperfect past

Einstein's relativity work is a magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king... its exponents are brilliant men but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists.

Newton viewed space and time as separate and absolute. As conceived by Einstein they are united in a flexible continuum that responds to the presence of matter. The stars and planets wrap the spacetime continuum around themselves, in a sense, each sitting in the center of a sort of spacetime whirlpool.

Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called self-interestedness. This was not a

Some weeks later the Einsteins were taken to the Mt. Wilson Observatory in California. Mrs. Einstein was particularly impressed by the giant telescope.

There are two kinds of physicists in Berlin: on the one hand was Einstein, and on the other all the rest.

Rudolf Ladenburg

The action of the child inventing a new game with his playmates; Einstein formulating a theory of relativity; the housewife devising a new sauce for the meat, a young author writing his first novel; all of these are in terms of definition, Creative, and there is no attempt to set them in some order of more or less Creative.

Einstein may be a treasure, but there is a fearsome troop of mathematical reptiles keeping inquisitive folk away from it; though there can be no doubt that they have, like our Gothic gargoyles, a hidden, beauty of their own.

Charles Nordmann

Einstein examined the photoelectric effect, which is now so well understood that it is used to open the doors of supermarkets and elevators when you step through a beam of light. In 1905 it was still a mystery.

Sheldon Lee Glashow

From the amoeba to Einstein, the growth of knowledge is always the same: we try to solve our problems, and to obtain, by a process of elimination, something approaching adequacy in our tentative solutions.

Neither you nor I nor Einstein nor the Supreme Court of the United States is brilliant enough to reach an intelligent decision on any problem without first getting the facts

We can't all be Einstein (because we don't all play the violin). At the very least, we need a sort of street-smart science: the ability to recognize evidence, gather it, assess it, and act on it.

Well, I'm gonna preach you a sermon 'bout Old Man Atom I don't mean the Adam in the Bible datum I don't mean the Adam that Mother Eve mated I mean that thing that science liberated Einstein says he's scared And when Einstein's scared, I'm scared.

Philosopher Bertrand Russell suggested that 'Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.' And, it was Albert Einstein who explained, 'Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.' So which is it - stupidity, ignorance or insanity - that explains the behavior of my fellow Americans who call for greater government involvement in our lives?

Walter E. Williams

Einstein's relativity did not speak to human values. Those were, or were not, relative for reasons unrelated to the physics of objects moving at near-light speed. Borrowing metaphors from the technical sciences could be a dangerous practice.

In Einstein's theory of relativity the observer is a man who sets out in quest of truth armed with a measuring-rod. In quantum theory he sets out with a sieve.

Arthur Eddington

Einstein is the only figure in the physical sciences with a stature that can be compared with Newton. Newton is reported to have said "If I have seen further than other men, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants." This remark is even more true of Einstein who stood on the shoulders of Newton. Both Newton and Einstein put forward a theory of mechanics and a theory of gravity but Einstein was able to base General Relativity on the mathematical theory of curved spaces that had been constructed by Riemann while Newton had to develop his own mathematical machinery. It is therefore appropriate to acclaim Newton as the greatest figure in mathematical physics and the Principia is his greatest achievement.

Stephen Hawking

Einstein said that "the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious." So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?

Leonard Bernstein

We are a people born of many peoples. Our culture, our skills, our very aspirations have been shaped by immigrants—and their sons and daughters—from all the earth. Sam Gompers from England, Andrew Carnegie from Scotland, Albert Einstein from Germany—and Booker T. Washington and Al Smith—Marconi and Caruso—men of all nations and races and estates—they have made us what we are.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

From the beginning I could not believe that the efficient market hypothesis was dependent on a pure Brownian motion white noise or any truly random random walk. Place a minuscule colloidal molecule on a horizontal table that covers unlimited acres. Bombard it from every direction with thousands of minute atoms; and then if you wait long enough that original molecule can have traveled a billion miles in one direction. That's truly a random Bachelier-Einstein walk, but not my notion of economic fluctuations.

When we consider a human work, we believe we know where the "intelligence" which fashioned it comes from; but when a living being is concerned, no one knows or ever knew, neither Darwin nor Epicurus, neither Leibniz nor Aristotle, neither Einstein nor Parmenides. An act of faith is necessary to make us adopt one hypothesis rather than another. Science, which does not accept any credo, or in any case should not, acknowledges its ignorance, its inability to solve this problem which, we are certain, exists and has reality.

Pierre-Paul Grassé

It was then that through the open door Einstein saw the man connecting the new battery, and precisely at the same time he did it, Einstein saw the cows jumping up away from the wire. All at once. Exactly. A fair amount of displeased mooing ensued.