Albert Einstein:
Astronomer of the Mind
By Clark M. Thomas (2007)
Albert Einstein was an ordinary person who spent an extraordinarily long time freshly thinking about very basic problems. For this reason he is in the pantheon of science, and also remains a mysterious semi-deity among the populace. I see him mostly as an astronomer of the mind.
Einstein’s ideas of relativity are profound, but not totally original. Devotees of Einstein rarely look closely at the implications. I am sufficiently naïve to see all of his ideas from a fully relativistic perspective, which is something Einstein himself did not always do. My own decades of thinking have led me to a deeper appreciation of what he actually did accomplish. You can see my results in this web page: http://astronomy-links.net/cosmofallacies.htm
Below in no particular order are twenty of his "astronomy of the mind" quotes. These are all from:
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/albert_einstein.html
- He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
- I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.
- I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.
- If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.
- If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
- Imagination is more important than knowledge.
- Information is not knowledge.
- It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
- It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.
- It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.
- Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.
- Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
- Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.
- Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.
- The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.
- The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
- There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.
- There could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on as a limiting case.
- We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.
- When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.