Quotes about Einstein

The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties – this knowledge, this feeling … that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men.

That which is impenetrable to us really exists.  Behind the secrets of nature remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable.  Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.

"What a shift!  In a radically different interpretation of our relationship to the world we live in, Wheeler states that it's impossible for us to simply watch the universe happen around us.  Experiments in quantum physics, in fact, do show that simply looking at something as tiny as an electron--just focusing our awareness upon what it's doing for even an instant of time--changes its properties while we're watching it.  The experiments suggest that the very observation is an act of creation, and that consciousness is doing the creating.  These findings seem to support Wheeler's propostion that we can no longer consider ourselves merely onlookers who have no effect on the world that we're observing.

To think of ourselves as participating in creation rather than simply passing through the universe during a brief period of a lifetime requires a new perception of what the cosmos is and how it works.  The groundwork for such a radical worldview was the basis for a series of books and papers by another Princeton physicist and colleague of Einstein, David Bohm.  Before his death in 1992, Bohm left us two pioneering theories that offer a very different--and in some ways, a nearly holistic--view of the universe and our role in it.

The first was an interpretation of quantum physics that set the stage for Bohm's meeting and subsequent friendship with Einstein.  It was this theory that opened the door to what Bohm called the "creative operation of underlying ... levels of reality."  In other words, he beileved that there are deeper or higher planes of creation that hold the template for what happens in our world.  It's from these subtler levels of reality that our physical world originates."

As the twentieth century began, science equaled a materialistic worldview. As the twenty-first century began, the worldview of science, at least of physics and astronomy, may have traded place with that of religion. Consider Einstein's famous equation E = mc2. Nothing of matter dies but continues on in another form, elsewhere. The church divines and theologians for two thousand years have devised arguments and "proofs" of immortality but nothing equal to this.

I have no special talents.  I am passionately curious.

Our task must be to free ourselves...by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

If at first an idea isn't absurd, there's no hope for it.

For those familiar with the officially acknowledged applications of Einstein’s theories of Relativity, it should be easy to see how the mere existence of particles that move faster than light and/or communicate telepathically through an aetheric medium begins to unravel an entire paradigm for understanding the physical universe.  On the subject of the “Crumbling of Certainty” in the wake of such logic-challenging discoveries in quantum physics, Charles Eisenstein writes, “The whole idea of certainty of knowledge, built through objective reasoning, is only as sound as the objectivity at its basis. Question that, and we question the soundness of the entire edifice of experimentally-derived knowledge” on which our current sciences, and the worldview connected to them, depend.

When you put numbers into this formula [E=mc2] and perform a short calculation, the implication is that inside 1 gram of matter lies dormant an energy equivalent to the explosion of about 20,000 kg of TNT. [] But that's obviously wrong, isn't it? How did Einstein cope with this enormous contradiction? No worries, Einstein pointed out that we do not notice energy, but only variations in energy. I feel cold if thermal energy moves from my body into the environment. I feel my car accelerating if I push the accelerator pedal and burn fuel, thereby taking chemical energy from the fuel and converting it into motion. The tremendous amount of energy harnessed inside 1 gram of matter passes unnoticed because it is never released into the world; it's just like a huge reservoir of energy sitting inside a body, never making its presence known.

God may not play dice with the Universe, but we're not Gods so we have to keep rolling the dice until we get it right.

Character of Rene speaking on our choice in the matter – how our thinking literally creates reality.

“Einstein once said, ‘The problem will not be solved by the same minds that created it.’  I always thought that meant that different people needed to come in to solve our problems.  But what about our personal problems?  Someone else can’t necessarily come in and solve them for us.   I,  …  realized that it isn’t someone else’s mind that is needed, it is a change of mind that is needed.    We can change our own minds!  We have the choice to relinquish our past and choose a new set of possibilities.  All we have to do is change our minds.  Einstein also knew it wouldn’t be easy. … He said, ‘Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
Character of Fritz speaking on our choice in the matter – how our thinking literally creates reality.

“We become accustomed to what we believe reality to be and we are overwhelmingly convinced that we are limited in our ability to make that reality any different.  We must give up these convictions and limitations.  I think it was Richard Bach who said, ‘Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they are yours.’”

I have reached an age where if someone tells me to wear socks, I don't have to.

Albert Einstein is the Wilber of physics.

Einstein said that if quantum mechanics is right, then the world is crazy. Well Einstein was right. The world is crazy.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

When scientists use the word God, they usually mean the God of Order. For example, one of the most important revelations in Einstein's early childhood took place when he read his first books on science. He immediately realized that most of what he had been taught about religion could not possibly be true. Throughout his career, however, he clung to the belief that a mysterious, divine Order existed in the universe. His life's calling, he would say, was to ferret out his thoughts, to determine whether he had any choice in creating the universe. Einstein repeatedly referred to this God in his writings, fondly calling him "the Old Man." When stumped with an intractable mathematical problem, he would often say, "God is subtle, but not malicious."

It took Einstein ten years of groping through the fog to get the theory of special relativity, and he was a bright guy.