Quotes about Albert Einstein

220 Sourced Quotes

There were many at Bell Labs and MIT who compared Shannon's insight to Einstein's. Others found that comparison unfair - unfair to Shannon.

William Poundstone

Perhaps the signal accomplishment of the IPPNW has been the broad-based, free-flowing dialogue between physicians of the two contending power blocs. We heed Einstein's words, "Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding". In a world riven with confrontation and strife, IPPNW has become a model for cooperation among physicians from East and West, from North and South. Paranoid fantasies of a dehumanized adversary cannot withstand the common pursuit of healing and preventing illness.

I began with a strong bias toward skepticism. Besides, to tell the truth, I still find occult phenomena a little preposterous and irrelevant. What do they really matter if you place them against the truly great human achievements — against the creative genius of a Michaelangelo, a Beethoven, an Einstein? In that context they seem almost trivial.

Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer. Much of the complexity he must master is arbitrary complexity […] because they were designed by different people, rather than by God.

Such as contribute most to human progress and human enlightenment — men like Gutenberg, Copernicus, Newton, Leibnitz, Watts, Franklin, Mendeleieff, Pasteur, Sklodowska-Curie, Edison, Steinmetz, Loeb, Dewey, Keyser, Whitehead, Russell, Poincaré, William Benjamin Smith, Gibbs, Einstein, and many others — consume no more bread than the simplest of their fellow mortals. Indeed such men are often in want. How many a genius has perished inarticulate because unable to stand the strain of social conditions where animal standards prevail and "survival of the fittest" means, not survival of the "fittest in time-binding capacity," but survival of the strongest in ruthlessness and guile — in space-binding competition!

Alfred Korzybski

Although the Special Theory of Relativity does not account for electromagnetic phenomena, it explains many of their properties. General Relativity, however, tells us nothing about electromagnetism. In Einstein's space-time continuum gravitational forces are absorbed in the geometry, but the electromagnetic forces are quite unaffected. Various attempts have been made to generate the geometry of space-time so as to produce a unified field theory incorporating both gravitational and electromagnetic forces.

Gerald James Whitrow

Oh, that Einstein, always cutting lectures... I really would not believe him capable of it.

Hermann Minkowski

Particles that, like 4He, show constructive interference are said to be bosons—a shorthand term for "particles obeying Bose–Einstein statistics." …One way to recognize bosons is their tendency to imitate one each other.... the presence of one boson increases the chance that another of its identical siblings will also appear in the same spot. There's an attraction between them. We will speak... of an attractive identity force drawing together identical bosons. Lasers are a spectacular example...

The abstractions of Einstein's curved space and time gave rise to analogies and pictures that played a new explanatory role. Space and time gave way to space-time, visible light was augmented by images across the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum, and we realised that we could see back towards the apparent beginnings of time.

The truth and value of a theory does not depend on the number of people who are interested in it — otherwise you might compare the number of people who follow the predictions of astrologers in the daily press with those who attend lectures by Einstein, and conclude that astrology was more valuable and true than physics.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of even Newton or Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. It is not just a wonderful idea. It is a dangerous idea.

In Einstein's general theory of relativity the identity of these two coefficients, the gravitational and the inertial mass, is no longer a miracle, but a necessity, because gravitation and inertia are identical.

Willem de Sitter

I wanted to kill myself. I would have done it, too, if I had owned a gun. I was considering the gruesome alternatives — pills, slitting my wrists with a razor blade, jumping off a bridge — when another student called to ask me a detailed question on relativity. There was no way, after fifteen minutes of thinking about Mr. Einstein, that suicide was still a viable option. Divorce, certainly. Celibacy, highly likely. But death was out of the question. I could never have prematurely terminated my love affair with physics.

Arthur C. Clarke

It seems clear that the present quantum mechanics is not in its final form. Some further changes will be needed, just about as drastic as the changes made in passing from Bohr's orbit theory to quantum mechanics. Some day a new quantum mechanics, a relativistic one, will be discovered, in which we will not have these infinities occurring at all. It might very well be that the new quantum mechanics will have determinism in the way that Einstein wanted.

The physicist's concept of nothing—the vacuum... began as empty space—the void... turned into a stagnant ether through which all the motions of the Universe swam, vanished in Einstein's hands, then re-emerged in the twentieth-century quantum picture of how Nature works.

Einstein was always looking for a unifying principle for the universe. I think anxiety about hair is the unifying principle.

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

The concepts 'system', 'apparatus', 'environment', immediately imply an artificial division of the world, and an intention to neglect, or take only schematic account of, the interaction across the split. The notions of 'microscopic' and 'macroscopic' defy precise definition. So also do the notions of 'reversible' and 'irreversible'. Einstein said that it is theory which decides what is 'observable'. I think he was right - 'observation' is a complicated and theory-laden business. Then that notion should not appear in the formulation of fundamental theory. Information? Whose information? Information about what? On this list of bad words from good books, the worst of all is 'measurement'. It must have a section to itself.

John Stewart Bell

Einstein, Planck, and other leading scientists said, "We're going to have to reassess and redefine the physical universe." — They defined the physical universe as "an aggregate of non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping transformation events."

Buckminster Fuller

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

I believe nothing. I have shut myself away from the rocks and wisdoms of ages, and from the so-called great teachers of all time, and perhaps because of that isolation I am given to bizarre hospitalities. I shut the front door upon Christ and Einstein, and at the back door hold out a welcoming hand to little frogs and periwinkles. I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written. I cannot accept that the products of minds are subject-matter for beliefs. But I accept, with reservations that give me freedom to ridicule the statement at any other time, that showers of an edible substance that has not been traced to an origin upon this earth, have fallen from the sky, in Asia Minor.

I am not even prepared to meet Professor Einstein or Bertrand Russell; why should I vaingloriously assume that God would find me interesting?

Robertson Davies

Just you think, in a rocket a man takes the risk of bursting like a balloon, or freezing, or roasting, or sweating all his blood out in a single gush, before he can even cry out, and all that remains is bits of bone floating inside armored hulls, in accordance with the laws of Newton as corrected by Einstein, those two milestones in our progress. Down the road we go, all in good faith and see where it gets us. Think about our success Kelvin; think about our cabins, the unbreakable plates, the immortal sinks, legions of faithful wardobes devoted cupboards...

It wasn't businessmen who developed new technology and science but amateur inventors or salaried professors instead; from the foundation of this country to the invention of the Internet, continuing with Einstein and finally, the arrival of the first man on the moon. Not to mention, the basis of the sciences—which were shaped by those horrible and uncivilized Arabs centuries before—from the numbers that we use to Algebra to algorithms and many other sciences and philosophies that are part of Western civilization today, continuing with the Europeans in the 17th century. None of these men were businessmen, of course.

A similar situation occurred in astronomy, where the Newtonian law of gravitation had been found to predict the orbits of the outer planets with great accuracy, but had failed with the orbits of Mercury and Venus. The relativity theory of gravitation had provided the necessary modification of Newton's law, and in working out the details of the new theory, Einstein had utilized the fact that Newtonian law gave the right result at great distances from the sun. Heisenberg, confronted with a similar problem, was able to avail himself of the fact that the classical mechanics gave the right result at great distances from the atomic nucleus. Here, and here alone Heisenberg's theory made contact with the world of the older physics.

Academics tend to think they are each the next Einstein whose 'creativity' will finally be uncovered a hundred years from now. That's when society should deliver their project funding.

To say that Nature displays intelligence doesn't make you a Christian fundamentalist. Einstein said as much, and a fascinating theory called the anthropic principle has been seriously considered by Stephen Hawking, among others.

Could it be, nevertheless, that Einstein's theory is wrong? Might it be necessary to modify it—to find a new theory of gravity that can explain both the stronger gravity and the apparent anti-gravity being observed today—rather than simply throwing in invisible things to make the standard model work?

Different ways of writing the same equation can suggest very different things, even if they are logically equivalent.... In Einstein's original 1905 paper, you do not find the equation E = mc2. What you find is m = E/c2.... the title of the paper is a question: "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?" …If we can explain mass in terms of energy, we'll be improving our description of the world. We'll need fewer ingrediants in our world-recipe.