Einstein - An Accessible Genius
Too much attention is paid to Einstein's scientific contributions but not enough to his practical, common sense advice about life.
I’ve been thinking about doing a couple of series of pieces - Books In My Life and People In My Life. Lots I could discuss and I think readers would benefit from my suggestions. Stay tuned.
I already made a list of “books in my life” and was reading one of them on the shitter, while putting coffee into me, when I got thinking about Einstein, a book, his role in my own life.
It was Koestler’s - The Act Of Creation. In his chapter “Underground Games’ he writes about the role of the unconscious in both artistic creation and scientific discovery. He writes;
The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage of cabbages and kings - all previously unrelated frames of reference or universes of discourse - whose union will solve the previously insoluble problem. The search for the improbable partner involves long and arduous striving - but the ultimate matchmaker is the unconscious. Arthur Koestler, The Act Of Creation, pg 202.
Einstein had this process going on in spades. We are all probably familiar with his Bern clock tower, streetcar analogy and thought experiment that unlocked for him and us, the secret of special relativity.
But it wasn’t analogy alone operating in Einstein that led him to that important discovery. It was that for a long time, over a decade, his unconsious mind had been thinking of the problem, the paradox between Newtonian mechanics and Maxwell’s equations. Einstein just needed the right frame, the metaphor to make his leap forward and fit this paradox in.
I tell this story and relate this because it brought to mind my own relationship with Einstein and my fondness for his mind, especially his humanity and wisdom as a person. So often that is forgotten when we think of him through the popular lense of a “mad scientist”.
I was a very precocious young boy. Interested in any and all things. One person in my life, really noticed that. His name was John Mycka - we called him, “Mitchka”.
For me as a young kid, he was a superhero. When he’d stay at our place, he’d lumber down the stairs in the morning, in only his underwear. Walk straight through the kitchen and out the porch and dive into the deep snow. Jumping up, rubbing his huge Polack body over and over theatrically. Us kids, faces glued to the window, looking at him in amazement.
He was an incredibly talented artist. He would sit us kids down and ask us to name an animal. Then he’d start to draw it and then ask us for the name of another animal. Then, he’d add that animal to the previous animal. This continued until we had an amazing “wingdingdilly” - hybrid animal, before us.
In the summer, we’d often go up to Pumphouse to swim. A beautiful, spring-fed lake, a lake where the old steam trains used to get water from. Mitchka, in his usual fashion, would be the first to run down to the lake and dive in, us kids running after. Then, us kids would wait and wait and wait for John to surface. It was minutes, seemed like hours. We all panicked, even when we knew he was doing it on purpose. I still remember that panic, thinking he must “this time” be dead. But then, he’d surface and give out a big laugh, us kids relieved and amazed at his superhuman, breath-holding abilities.
John, gave me a book by Einstein for my 10th birthday. I still have it to this day. It’s among all my books stored up in Canada. He had signed it, “David. May you one day be Einstein.”
As a kid, the book drew me in for several reasons. Firstly, because Einstein looked like my father. When my dad visited me in S. Korea, we’d walk the streets and everyone would be pointing and giggling at him. However, it is the words of Einstein himself, his beliefs about war, human nature, how to live well that made me return to the book again and again over the years. Einstein was not just a scientist, he was a true nightwatchman of the human soul. His greatest gift was his soul, his humanity and his artistic use analogy - rubbing like against like and using it to create light and a new form of truth.
I’ll abandon this rambling post and leave you with some words from the book, from Einstein’s beautiful mind. Both a “book in my life” and a “person in my life”, as too was Mitchka.
Thank you John for noticing my own potential as a young boy and introducing me to the beloved Einstein.
"I am happy because I want nothing from anyone. I do not care about money. Decorations, titles or distinctions mean nothing to me. I do not crave praise. I claim credit for nothing. A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future."
“I didn't arrive at my understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind.”
“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to point of visibility. There is no matter.”
"Time and space are not conditions in which we live, but modes by which we think.
Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, determined by the external world."
“Time does not exist – we invented it. Time is what the clock says. The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
“I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me."
"The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.”
"A human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
"Our separation from each other is an optical illusion."
“When something vibrates, the electrons of the entire universe resonate with it. Everything is connected. The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness.”
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
“We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.”
“When you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you discover one thread that winds through them all. They have been aligned first with their spiritual nature and only then with their physical selves.”
“The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.”
“The ancients knew something, which we seem to have forgotten.”
“The more I learn of physics, the more I am drawn to metaphysics.”
“One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike. We still do not know one-thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us. It is entirely possible that behind the perception of our senses, worlds are hidden of which we are unaware.”
“I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books.”
"The common idea that I am an atheist is based on a big mistake. Anyone who interprets my scientific theories this way, did not understand them."
"Everything is determined, every beginning and ending, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper."
“The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It will transcend a personal God and avoid dogma and theology.”
“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”
“Everything is energy and that is all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you can not help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.”