Einstein Best Quotes

The best way to cheer yourself is to cheer somebody else up.

Life is a preparation for the future; and the best preparation for the future is to live as if there were none.

Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury - to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best for both the body and the mind.

Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.

What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused, or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, and rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to bodyguards, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere.

Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but is noble to live life and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.

The individual must not merely wait and criticize, he must defend the cause the best he can. The fate of the world will be such as the world deserves.

It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.

Be brave. Even if you're not, pretend to be. No one can tell the difference. Don't allow the phone to interrupt important moments. It's there for your convenience, not the callers. Don't be afraid to go out on a limb. That's where the fruit is. Don't burn bridges. You'll be surprised how many times you have to cross the same river. Don't forget, a person's greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated. Don't major in minor things. Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Helen Keller, Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. Don't spread yourself too thin. Learn to say no politely and quickly. Don't use time or words carelessly. Neither can be retrieved. Don't waste time grieving over past mistakes Learn from them and move on. Every person needs to have their moment in the sun, when they raise their arms in victory, knowing that on this day, at his hour, they were at their very best. Get your priorities straight. No one ever said on his death bed, 'Gee, if I'd only spent more time at the office'. Give people a second chance, but not a third. Judge your success by the degree that you're enjoying peace, health and love. Learn to listen. Opportunity sometimes knocks very softly. Leave everything a little better than you found it. Live your life as an exclamation, not an explanation. Loosen up. Relax. Except for rare life and death matters, nothing is as important as it first seems. Never cut what can be untied. Never overestimate your power to change others. Never underestimate your power to change yourself. Remember that overnight success usually takes about fifteen years. Remember that winners do what losers don't want to do. Seek opportunity, not security. A boat in harbor is safe, but in time its bottom will rot out. Spend less time worrying who's right, more time deciding what's right. Stop blaming others. Take responsibility for every area of your life. Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get. The importance of winning is not what we get from it, but what we become because of it. When facing a difficult task, act as though it's impossible to fail.

The brain best remembers things that are repeated, rhythmic, rhyming, structured, and above all easily visualized.

In my experience, the best creative work is never done when one is unhappy.

Albert Einstein put it best: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

It is right in principle that those should be the best loved who have contributed most to the elevation of the human race and human life.

The best ship, the best culture, the best knowledge, is the one which allows us to go farther, explore more territories or oceans of reality, and have the least damaging leaks possible.

Comprehending and knowing better and deeper are the best guarantees we can have to attain ideas and criteria of our own; i.e. to stop depending on what other people say. In summary, to be freer to choose our own path in life.

One has to realize that the powerful industrial groups concerned in the manufacture of arms are doing their best in all countries to prevent the peaceful settlement of international disputes

Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to the amalgam of reality and fantasy. ("The New Russian Prose")

I do not believe there is a way in which this deeply entrenched evil can be quickly healed. But until this goal is reached there is no greater satisfaction for a just and well-meaning person than the knowledge that he has devoted his best energies to the service of the good cause.

So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.

Einstein said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.

be the best loved who have contributed most to

What a person does on his own, without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of others, is even in the best of cases rather paltry and monotonous.

Albert Einstein once said that weak people revenge, strong people forgive, and intelligent people ignore. It was one of the few things he was wrong about. Success is the best revenge. Try to remember that.

I believe that we must attack these things in which we do not believe. Not attack by the method of cutting off the heads of the people, but attack in the sense of discuss. I believe that we should demand that people try in their own minds to obtain for themselves a more consistent picture of their own world; that they not permit themselves the luxury of having their brain cut in four pieces or two pieces even, and on one side they believe this and on the other side they believe that, but never try to compare the two points of view. Because we have learned that, by trying to put the points of view that we have in our head together and comparing one to the other, we make some progress in understanding and in appreciating where we are and what we are. And I believe that science has remained irrelevant because we wait until somebody asks us questions or until we are invited to give a speech on Einstein’s theory to people who don’t understand Newtonian mechanics, but we never are invited to give an attack on faith healing, or on astrology — on what is the scientific view of astrology today.

So why bother investing in one’s memory in an age of externalized memories? The best answer I can give is the one I received unwittingly from EP, whose memory had been so completely lost that he could not place himself in time or space, or relative to other people. That is: How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memories. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character.

The weak get revenge. The strong forgive. The intelligent ignore. Fuck that. Einstein wasn't always right. Revenge is a dish best served cold... Now that I agree with. It means they forget you're coming for them, and their screams sound so much prettier when the time finally comes.

The best that Gauss has given us was likewise an exclusive production. If he had not created his geometry of surfaces, which served Riemann as a basis, it is scarcely conceivable that anyone else would have discovered it. I do not hesitate to confess that to a certain extent a similar pleasure may be found by absorbing ourselves in questions of pure geometry.

Somebody who reads only newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous.

Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but it is noble to live life, and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.

Remember, Thursday, that scientific thought -- indeed, any mode of thought, whether it be religious or philosophical or anything else -- is just like the fashions that we wear -- only much longer lived. It's a little like a boy band." "Scientific thought a boy band? How do you figure that?" "Well, every now and then a boy band comes along. We like it, buy the records, posters, parade them on TV, idolise them right up until --" ... "-- the next boy band?" I suggested. "Precisely. Aristotle was a boy band. A very good one but only number six or seven. He was the best boy band until Isaac Newton, but even Newton was transplanted by an even newer boy band. Same haircuts -- but different moves." "Einstein, right?" "Right. Do you see what I'm saying?" "I think so." "Good. So try and think of maybe thirty or forty boy bands past Einstein. To where we would regard Einstein as someone who glimpsed a truth, played one good chord on seven forgettable albums." "Where is this going, Dad?" "I'm nearly there. Imagine a boy band so good that you never needed another boy band ever again. Can you imagine that?

I will even go out on a limb and say that we mistakenly may have been putting all our educational eggs into one basket only, while shortchanging other truly valuable capabilities of the human brain, namely perception, intuition, imagination, and creativity. Perhaps Albert Einstein put it best: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

I think a strong claim can be made that the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art. This is best seen in the theoretical aspects of Physical Science. The mathematical theorist builds up on certain assumptions and according to well understood logical rules, step by step, a stately edifice, while his imaginative power brings out clearly the hidden relations between its parts. A well constructed theory is in some respects undoubtedly an artistic production. A fine example is the famous Kinetic Theory of Maxwell. ... The theory of relativity by Einstein, quite apart from any question of its validity, cannot but be regarded as a magnificent work of art.

from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind. With my best wishes, sincerely yours, Albert Einstein.

Albert Einstein put it this way: I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination. Mozart felt the same way: When I am traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep—it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.

Only a few centuries ago, a mere second in cosmic time, we knew nothing of where or when we were. Oblivious to the rest of the cosmos, we inhabited a kind of prison, a tiny universe bounded by a nutshell. How did we escape from the prison? It was the work of generations of searchers who took five simple rules to heart: 1. Question authority. No idea is true just because someone says so, including me. 2. Think for yourself. Question yourself. Don't believe anything just because you want to. Believing something doesn't make it so. 3. Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment. If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it's wrong. Get over it. 4. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. If you have no evidence, reserve judgment. And perhaps the most important rule of all... 5. Remember: you could be wrong. Even the best scientists have been wrong about some things. Newton, Einstein, and every other great scientist in history -- they all made mistakes. Of course they did. They were human. Science is a way to keep from fooling ourselves, and each other.

It is a special blessing to belong among those who can and may devote their best energies to the contemplation and exploration of objective and timeless things. How happy and grateful I am for having been granted this blessing, which bestows upon one a large measure of independence from one's personal fate and from the attitude of one's contemporaries. Yet this independence must not inure us to the awareness of the duties that constantly bind us to the past, present and future of humankind at large. Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here, involuntarily and uninvited, for a short stay, without knowing the why and the wherefore. In our daily lives we feel only that man is here for the sake of others, for those whom we love and for many other beings whose fate is connected with our own. I am often troubled by the thought that my life is based to such a large extent on the work of my fellow human beings, and I am aware of my great indebtedness to them. I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper. I have never coveted affluence and luxury and even despise them a good deal. My passion for social justice has often brought me into conflict with people, as has my aversion to any obligation and dependence I did not regard as absolutely necessary. [Part 2] I have a high regard for the individual and an insuperable distaste for violence and fanaticism. All these motives have made me a passionate pacifist and antimilitarist. I am against any chauvinism, even in the guise of mere patriotism. Privileges based on position and property have always seemed to me unjust and pernicious, as does any exaggerated personality cult. I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I know well the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual have always seemed to me the important communal aims of the state. Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice keeps me from feeling isolated. The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is.

One has to realize that the powerful industrial groups concerned in the manufacture of arms are doing their best in all countries to prevent the peaceful settlement of international disputes, and that rulers can achieve this great end only if they are sure of the vigorous support of the majority of their peoples. In these days of democratic government the fate of the nations hangs on themselves; each individual must always bear that in mind.

There are less than 14 million Jews in the world, compared to the almost two billion Muslims who own most of the oil and natural resources. Yet if you visit any major city in the world, you will find that the best hospitals are named Mt. Sinai, Cedars Sinai, or Albert Einstein because they are hospitals built by donations from Jews for the good of the people. If you go to any major university, you will see how many of the major donors and scholarship providers are Jews. The Jewish people are more likely to give as much they can to charities, and at the same time will be the most value-conscious consumers.

Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character. —Albert Einstein

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”—Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein’s daughter, Margot, was there to honor the man who had been her father’s boss at the Institute for Advanced Study.

In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

The best of the best were graduates of the two-year Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School,

Indeed, the single best predictor of an individual’s chess skill is not the amount of chess he’s played against opponents, but rather the amount of time he’s spent sitting alone working through old games.

What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled “deliberate practice.” Having studied the best of the best in many different fields, he has found that top achievers tend to follow the same general pattern of development. They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance. In other words, they force themselves to stay in the “cognitive phase.

Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. –H. Jackson Brown

Though it accounts for only 2 percent of the body’s mass, it uses up a fifth of all the oxygen we breathe, and it’s where a quarter of all our glucose gets burned. The brain is the most energetically expensive piece of equipment in our body, and has been ruthlessly honed by natural selection to be efficient at the tasks for which it evolved. One might say that the whole point of our nervous system, from the sensory organs that feed information to the glob of neurons that interprets it, is to develop a sense of what is happening in the present and what will happen in the future, so that we can respond in the best possible way. Strip away the emotions, the philosophizing, the neuroses, and the dreams, and our brains, in the most reductive sense, are fundamentally prediction and planning machines.

Einstein’s 1905 burst of creativity was astonishing. He had devised a revolutionary quantum theory of light, helped prove the existence of atoms, explained Brownian motion, upended the concept of space and time, and produced what would become science’s best known equation.

But Mandelbrot continued to feel oppressed by France’s purist mathematical establishment. “I saw no compatibility between a university position in France and my still-burning wild ambition,” he writes. So, spurred by the return to power in 1958 of Charles de Gaulle (for whom Mandelbrot seems to have had a special loathing), he accepted the offer of a summer job at IBM in Yorktown Heights, north of New York City. There he found his scientific home. As a large and somewhat bureaucratic corporation, IBM would hardly seem a suitable playground for a self-styled maverick. The late 1950s, though, were the beginning of a golden age of pure research at IBM. “We can easily afford a few great scientists doing their own thing,” the director of research told Mandelbrot on his arrival. Best of all, he could use IBM’s computers to make geometric pictures. Programming back then was a laborious business that involved transporting punch cards from one facility to another in the backs of station wagons.

Hence I most seriously believe that one does people the best service by giving them some elevating work to do and thus indirectly elevating them. This applies most of all to the great artist, but also in a lesser degree to the scientist. To be sure, it is not the fruits of scientific research that elevate a man and enrich his nature, but the urge to understand, the intellectual work, creative or receptive.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that almost the entire first two sections of his relativity paper deal directly and in vivid practical detail (in a manner so different from the writings of, say, Lorentz and Maxwell) with the two real-world technological phenomena he knew best. He writes about the generation of “electric currents of the same magnitude” due to the “equality of relative motion” of coils and magnets, and the use of “a light signal” to make sure that “two clocks are synchronous.” As Einstein himself stated, his time in the patent office “stimulated me to see the physical ramifications of theoretical concepts.”51 And Alexander Moszkowski, who compiled a book in 1921 based on conversations with Einstein, noted that Einstein believed there was “a definite connection between the knowledge acquired at the patent office and the theoretical results.

If you are disappointed because you can’t be the best person to do everything yourself, you are terribly naive. Nobody can do everything well. Would you want to have Einstein on your basketball team? When he fails to dribble and shoot well, would you think badly of him? Should he feel humiliated? Imagine all the areas in which Einstein was incompetent, and imagine how hard he struggled to excel even in the areas in which he was the best in the world.

But Einstein was not the best mathematician around, and others, undeterred by neither the difficulty of the equations nor the war that was ravaging Europe (this was 1916), were able to find solutions. Some of the most important solutions ever found—those that describe the gravitational fields of stars and black holes—were written down by a German officer named Karl Schwarzchild as he lay dying in a field hospital of a skin disease he had picked up in the trenches.

There is an old debate," Erdos liked to say, "about whether you create mathematics or just discover it. In other words, are the truths already there, even if we don't yet know them?" Erdos had a clear answer to this question: Mathematical truths are there among the list of absolute truths, and we just rediscover them. Random graph theory, so elegant and simple, seemed to him to belong to the eternal truths. Yet today we know that random networks played little role in assembling our universe. Instead, nature resorted to a few fundamental laws, which will be revealed in the coming chapters. Erdos himself created mathematical truths and an alternative view of our world by developing random graph theory. Not privy to nature's laws in creating the brain and society, Erdos hazarded his best guess in assuming that God enjoys playing dice. His friend Albert Einstein, at Princeton, was convinced of the opposite: "God does not play dice with the universe.

When you attempt to multi-task, your focus, attention, and energy is spent switching between your tasks and re-orienting yourself to exactly where you were before you switched. It’s like swimming against the current. Every time you take a stroke, you might only get one quarter of a stroke forward because of the current, and sometimes you might even go backwards despite your best efforts.   It’s an inefficient use of your time that ends up in your becoming well-versed in the beginning stages of many tasks, but never quite seeing them to completion.   The better approach is to be willfully ignorant of everything else you need to do, while giving full attention to one task at a time. In a sense, a lumberjack can only chop the tree in front of him or her, and can’t do anything with a bunch of half-chopped trees. Chopping the tree in front of you will allow you to make better progress on everything more than actively working on it while multi-tasking.

It’s a telling statement that pretty much the only place where you’ll find people still training their memories is at the World Memory Championship and the dozen national memory contests held around the globe. What was once a cornerstone of Western culture is now at best a curiosity. But as our culture has transformed from one that was fundamentally based on internal memories to one that is fundamentally based on memories stored outside the brain, what are the implications for ourselves and for our society?

Watching the way an invisible force always guided the compass needle north had convinced Einstein that “something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” He spent the rest of his life trying to find it. My father, too, had offered me my first clue that reality is not what it seems. Only in my case the clue wasn’t an object but an idea, and instead of turning out to be Einstein I grew up to be a counterfeit journalist with more questions than answers. Still, it occurred to me now that the best gift a parent can give a child is a mystery.

You’re saying our lives are like light waves/quanta?” JB asked. “We have fate and free will all at once?” “Exactly!” Jonah said. JB was rubbing his forehead. “I’d have to double-check to see what scientists in this time period think about light, to really know how to answer you without ruining time,” JB said. “The problem is, if you don’t know if you’re riding a wave or a quantum packet of light, how do you make your choices? How do you decide how to live your life? How do you know what’s important?” “Well, it seems like things work out best when time travelers try to help people,” Jonah said, shrugging. He thought about how long it’d taken him to realize that he should give Mileva the Elucidator. Back in 1611 he’d been slow about figuring out how to help too. And in 1600 he’d been a total idiot about his priorities. “But which people are you supposed to help?” JB asked, sounding as if he really wanted to know. “I’ll go back to the Einstein analogy you used before, about the bowling ball on the trampoline, changing the paths of the little marbles around it. Time travelers always thought Einstein was

In conclusion, I return to Einstein. If we find a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, its image, captured by a camera travelling at a fifth of light speed, will be slightly distorted due to the effects of special relativity. It would be the first time a spacecraft has flown fast enough to see such effects. In fact, Einstein’s theory is central to the whole mission. Without it we would have neither lasers nor the ability to perform the calculations necessary for guidance, imaging and data transmission over twenty-five trillion miles at a fifth of light speed. We can see a pathway between that sixteen-year-old boy dreaming of riding on a light beam and our own dream, which we are planning to turn into a reality, of riding our own light beam to the stars. We are standing at the threshold of a new era. Human colonisation on other planets is no longer science fiction. It can be science fact. The human race has existed as a separate species for about two million years. Civilisation began about 10,000 years ago, and the rate of development has been steadily increasing. If humanity is to continue for another million years, our future lies in boldly going where no one else has gone before. I hope for the best. I have to. We have no other option.

The result would be random little lurches that would result in what is known as a random walk. The best way for us to envision this is to imagine a drunk who starts at a lamppost and lurches one step in a random direction every second. After two such lurches he may have gone back and forth to return to the lamp. Or he may be two steps away in the same direction. Or he may be one step west and one step northeast. A little mathematical plotting and charting reveals an interesting thing about such a random walk: statistically, the drunk’s distance from the lamp will be proportional to the square root of the number of seconds that have elapsed.35 Einstein

Albert Einstein, considered the most influential person of the 20th century, was four years old before he could speak and seven before he could read. His parents thought he was retarded. He spoke haltingly until age nine. He was advised by a teacher to drop out of grade school: “You’ll never amount to anything, Einstein.” Isaac Newton, the scientist who invented modern-day physics, did poorly in math. Patricia Polacco, a prolific children’s author and illustrator, didn’t learn to read until she was 14. Henry Ford, who developed the famous Model-T car and started Ford Motor Company, barely made it through high school. Lucille Ball, famous comedian and star of I Love Lucy, was once dismissed from drama school for being too quiet and shy. Pablo Picasso, one of the great artists of all time, was pulled out of school at age 10 because he was doing so poorly. A tutor hired by Pablo’s father gave up on Pablo. Ludwig van Beethoven was one of the world’s great composers. His music teacher once said of him, “As a composer, he is hopeless.” Wernher von Braun, the world-renowned mathematician, flunked ninth-grade algebra. Agatha Christie, the world’s best-known mystery writer and all-time bestselling author other than William Shakespeare of any genre, struggled to learn to read because of dyslexia. Winston Churchill, famous English prime minister, failed the sixth grade.

The brain best remembers things that are repeated, rhythmic, rhyming, structured, and above all easily visualized. The principles that the oral bards discovered, as they sharpened their stories through telling and retelling, were the same basic mnemonic principles that psychologists rediscovered when they began conducting their first scientific experiments on memory around the turn of the twentieth century: Words that rhyme are much more memorable than words that don’t; concrete nouns are easier to remember than abstract nouns; dynamic images are more memorable than static images; alliteration aids memory. A striped skunk making a slam dunk is a stickier thought than a patterned mustelid engaging in athletic activity.

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) was not only an extraordinary physicist, but also an extraordinary figure, a swash-buckling personality the likes of which theoretical physics has not seen before or hence. Occasionally theoretical physicists will while away an idle moment comparing the contributions of Feynman and Schwinger, both nice Jewish boys from New York and almost exact contemporaries. This senseless discussion serves no purpose, but it is a fact that while Julian Schwinger was a shy and retiring person (but rather warm and good-hearted behind his apparent remoteness), Dick Feynman was an extreme extrovert, the stuff of legends. With his bongo drums, showgirls, and other trappings of a carefully cultivated image enthusiastically nurtured by a legion of idolaters, he is surely the best-loved theoretical physicist next to Einstein.

Finally, the greatest scientist of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was a pantheist. Of course Einstein is best known for his theory of relativity, but he frequently pronounced on political and ethical questions. Einstein made it plain that he did not believe in any kind of personal humanlike God who would work miracles and answer prayers in defiance of the laws of nature, and reward and punish us in the afterlife. For Einstein God was the order and harmony and law of the universe itself, and science was in that sense a religious quest. "I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.

I've read every letter that you've sent me these past two years. In return, I've sent you many form letters, with the hope of one day being able to give you the proper response you deserve. But the more letters you wrote to me, and the more of yourself you gave, the more daunting my task became. I'm sitting beneath a pear tree as I dictate this to you, overlooking the orchards of a friend's estate. I've spent the past few days here, recovering from some medical treatment that has left me physically and emotionally depleted. As I moped about this morning, feeling sorry for myself, it occurred to me, like a simple solution to an impossible problem: today is the day I've been waiting for. You asked me in your first letter if you could be my protege. I don't know about that, but I would be happy to have you join me in Cambridge for a few days. I could introduce you to my colleagues, treat you to the best curry outside India, and show you just how boring the life of an astrophysicist can be. You can have a bright future in the sciences, Oskar. I would be happy to do anything possible to facilitate such a path. It's wonderful to think what would happen if you put your imagination toward scientific ends. But Oskar, intelligent people write to me all the time. In your fifth letter you asked, "What if I never stop inventing?" That question has stuck with me. I wish I were a poet. I've never confessed that to anyone, and I'm confessing it to you, because you've given me reason to feel that I can trust you. I've spent my life observing the universe, mostly in my mind's eye. It's been a tremendously rewarding life, a wonderful life. I've been able to explore the origins of time and space with some of the great living thinkers.But I wish I were a poet. Albert Einstein, a hero of mine, once wrote, "Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open." I'm sure I don't have to tell you that the vast majority of the universe is composed of dark matter. The fragile balance depends on things we'll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Life itself depends on them. What's real? What isn't real? Maybe those aren't the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on? I wish I had made things for life to depend on. What if you never stop inventing? Maybe you're not inventing at all. I'm being called in for breakfast, so I'll have to end this letter here. There's more I want to tell you, and more I want to hear from you. It's a shame we live on different continents. One shame of many. It's so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won't be awake for another five hours, but I can't help feeling that we're sharing this clear and beautiful morning. Your friend, Stephen Hawking

It is the best of times in physics. Physicists are on the verge of obtaining the long-sought theory of everything. In a few elegant equations, perhaps concise enough to be emblazoned on a T-shirt, this theory will reveal how the universe began and how it will end. The key insight is that the smallest constituents of the world are not particles, as had been supposed since ancient times, but “strings”—tiny strands of energy. By vibrating in different ways, these strings produce the essential phenomena of nature, the way violin strings produce musical notes. String theory isn’t just powerful; it’s also mathematically beautiful. All that remains to be done is to write down the actual equations. This is taking a little longer than expected. But, with almost the entire theoretical-physics community working on the problem—presided over by a sage in Princeton, New Jersey—the millennia-old dream of a final theory is sure to be realized before long. It is the worst of times in physics. For more than a generation, physicists have been chasing a will-o’-the-wisp called string theory. The beginning of this chase marked the end of what had been three-quarters of a century of progress. Dozens of string-theory conferences have been held, hundreds of new Ph.D.’s have been minted, and thousands of papers have been written. Yet, for all this activity, not a single new testable prediction has been made; not a single theoretical puzzle has been solved. In fact, there is no theory so far—just a set of hunches and calculations suggesting that a theory might exist. And, even if it does, this theory will come in such a bewildering number of versions that it will be of no practical use: a theory of nothing. Yet the physics establishment promotes string theory with irrational fervor, ruthlessly weeding dissenting physicists from the profession. Meanwhile, physics is stuck in a paradigm doomed to barrenness.

The inertia pushing the water up the wall was caused by its rotation with respect to the metric field, which Einstein now reincarnated as an ether. As a result, he had to face the possibility that general relativity did not necessarily eliminate the concept of absolute motion, at least with respect to the metric of spacetime.26 It was not exactly a retreat, nor was it a return to the nineteenth-century concept of the ether. But it was a more conservative way of looking at the universe, and it represented a break from the radicalism of Mach that Einstein had once embraced. This clearly made Einstein uncomfortable. The best way to eliminate the need for an ether that existed separately from matter, he concluded, would be to find his elusive unified field theory. What a glory that would be! “The contrast between ether and matter would fade away,” he said, “and, through the general theory of relativity, the whole of physics would become a complete system of thought.

Heisenberg’s more famous and disruptive contribution came two years later, in 1927. It is, to the general public, one of the best known and most baffling aspects of quantum physics: the uncertainty principle. It is impossible to know, Heisenberg declared, the precise position of a particle, such as a moving electron, and its precise momentum (its velocity times its mass) at the same instant. The more precisely the position of the particle is measured, the less precisely it is possible to measure its momentum. And the formula that describes the trade-off involves (no surprise) Planck’s constant. The very act of observing something—of allowing photons or electrons or any other particles or waves of energy to strike the object—affects the observation. But Heisenberg’s theory went beyond that. An electron does not have a definite position or path until we observe it. This is a feature of our universe, he said, not merely some defect in our observing or measuring abilities.

Everyone matters, Elena.” “But don’t some people matter more than others?” I asked. “I mean, if we’re talking about saving humanity, doesn’t it make sense to save the best and brightest of us?” Freddie’s laughter had faded. “So you’re saying it’s better to save a world-famous physicist than say, a modest merchant who was a partner in a bed feathers company.” “That’s a really odd comparison, but yeah.” “Except no,” Freddie said. “That merchant and his wife would go on to birth and raise Albert Einstein.” She paused dramatically. “Hermann and Pauline Einstein might not have seemed like anyone special at the time, but their son changed how we look at the universe.” “That’s one example.” “Here’s another. Who should you save? A genius mathematician admitted to Harvard at sixteen or a single mom living on welfare?” “This is a trick question.” “Are you allergic to answering questions, or what?” “The mathematician,” I said. “Ted Kaczynski. Otherwise known as the Unabomber. And that single mom would go on to write Harry Potter.

know that taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation. It turned out that he wanted me to write a biography of him. I had recently published one on Benjamin Franklin and was writing one about Albert Einstein, and my initial reaction was to wonder, half jokingly, whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence. Because I assumed that he was still in the middle of an oscillating career that had many more ups and downs left, I demurred. Not now, I said. Maybe in a decade or two, when you retire. I had known him since 1984, when he came to Manhattan to have lunch with Time’s editors and extol his new Macintosh. He was petulant even then, attacking a Time correspondent for having wounded him with a story that was too revealing. But talking to him afterward, I found myself rather captivated, as so many others have been over the years, by his engaging intensity. We stayed in touch, even after he was ousted from Apple. When he had something to pitch, such as a NeXT computer or Pixar movie, the beam of his charm would suddenly refocus on me, and he would take me to a sushi restaurant in Lower Manhattan to tell me that whatever he was touting was the best thing he had ever produced. I liked him. When he was restored to the throne at Apple, we put him on the cover of Time, and soon thereafter he began offering me his ideas for a series we were doing on the most influential people of the century. He had launched his “Think Different” campaign, featuring iconic photos of some of the same people we were considering, and he found the endeavor of assessing historic influence fascinating. After I had deflected his suggestion that I write a biography of him, I heard from him every now and then. At one point I emailed to ask if it was true, as my daughter had told me, that the Apple logo was an homage to Alan Turing, the British computer pioneer who broke the German wartime codes and then committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-laced apple. He replied that he wished he had thought of that, but hadn’t. That started an exchange about the early history of Apple, and I found myself gathering string on the subject, just in case I ever decided to do such a book. When my Einstein biography came out, he came to a book event in Palo Alto and

The earliest memory treatises described two types of recollection: memoria rerum and memoria verborum, memory for things and memory for words. When approaching a text or a speech, one could try to remember the gist, or one could try to remember verbatim. The Roman rhetoric teacher Quintilian looked down on memoria verborum on the grounds that creating such a vast number of images was not only inefficient, since it would require a gargantuan memory palace, but also unstable. If your memory for a speech hinged on knowing every word, then not only did you have a lot more to remember, but if you forgot a single word, you could end up trapped in a room of your memory palace staring at a blank wall, lost and unable to move on. Cicero agreed that the best way to memorize a speech is point by point, not word by word, by employing memoria rerum. In his De Oratore, he suggests that an orator delivering a speech should make one image for each major topic he wants to cover, and place each of those images at a locus. Indeed, the word “topic” comes from the Greek word topos, or place. (The phrase “in the first place” is a vestige from the art of memory.)

Saint John Paul II wrote, “when its concepts and conclusions can be integrated into the wider human culture and its concerns for ultimate meaning and value.”7 Religion, too, develops best when its doctrines are not abstract and fixed in an ancient past but integrated into the wider stream of life. Albert Einstein once said that “science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind.”8 So too, John Paul II wrote: “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”9 Teilhard de Chardin saw that dialogue alone between the disciplines is insufficient; what we need is a new synthesis of science and religion, drawing insights from each discipline into a new unity. In a remarkable letter to the director of the Vatican Observatory, John Paul II wrote: The church does not propose that science should become religion or religion science. On the contrary, unity always presupposes the diversity and integrity of its elements. Each of these members should become not less itself but more itself in a dynamic interchange, for a unity in which one of the elements is reduced to the other is destructive, false in its promises of harmony, and ruinous of the integrity of its components. We are asked to become one. We are not asked to become each other. . . . Unity involves the drive of the human mind towards understanding and the desire of the human spirit for love. When human beings seek to understand the multiplicities that surround them, when they seek to make sense of experience, they do so by bringing many factors into a common vision. Understanding is achieved when many data are unified by a common structure. The one illuminates the many: it makes sense of the whole. . . . We move towards unity as we move towards meaning in our lives. Unity is also the consequence of love. If love is genuine, it moves not towards the assimilation of the other but towards union with the other. Human community begins in desire when that union has not been achieved, and it is completed in joy when those who have been apart are now united.10 The words of the late pope highlight the core of catholicity: consciousness of belonging to a whole and unity as a consequence of love.

It was in postwar Paris that Mandelbrot began this quest in earnest. Uncle Szolem urged him to attend the École Normale Supérieure, France’s most rarefied institution of higher learning, where Mandelbrot had earned entry at the age of twenty (one of only twenty Frenchmen to do so). But the aridly abstract style of mathematics practiced there was uncongenial to him. At the time, the École Normale—dite normale, prétendue supérieure, says the wag—was dominated in mathematics by a semisecret cabal called Bourbaki. (The name Bourbaki was jocularly taken from a hapless nineteenth-century French general who once tried to shoot himself in the head but missed.) Its leader was André Weil, one of the supreme mathematicians of the twentieth century (and the brother of Simone Weil). The aim of Bourbaki was to purify mathematics, to rebuild it on perfectly logical foundations untainted by physical or geometric intuition. Mandelbrot found the Bourbaki cult, and Weil in particular, “positively repellent.” The Bourbakistes seemed to cut off mathematics from natural science, to make it into a sort of logical theology. They regarded geometry, so integral to Mandelbrot’s Keplerian dream, as a dead branch of mathematics, fit for children at best.

So why bother investing in one's memory in the age of externalized memories? The best answer I can give is the one that I received unwittingly from EP, whose memory had been so completely lost that he could not place himself rin time or space, or relative to other people. That is: How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We're all just a bundle of of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks or our memory. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. Or ability to find humour in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values ad source of our character. [...] That's what Ed had been trying to impart to me from the beginning: that memory training is not just fro the sake of performing partyb tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.

Perhaps Einstein himself said it best when he said, “I have no special talents.… I am only passionately curious.” In fact, Einstein would confess that he had to struggle with mathematics in his youth. To one group of schoolchildren, he once confided, “No matter what difficulties you may have with mathematics, mine were greater.” So why was Einstein Einstein? First, Einstein spent most of his time thinking via “thought experiments.” He was a theoretical physicist, not an experimental one, so he was continually running sophisticated simulations of the future in his head. In other words, his laboratory was his mind. Second, he was known to spend up to ten years or more on a single thought experiment. From the age of sixteen to twenty-six, he focused on the problem of light and whether it was possible to outrace a light beam. This led to the birth of special relativity, which eventually revealed the secret of the stars and gave us the atomic bomb. From the age of twenty-six to thirty-six, he focused on a theory of gravity, which eventually gave us black holes and the big-bang theory of the universe. And then from the age of thirty-six to the end of his life, he tried to find a theory of everything to unify all of physics. Clearly, the ability to spend ten or more years on a single problem showed the tenacity with which he would simulate experiments in his head.

My best friend growing up was a boy named Barry,” Buzan recalled, sitting outside on his patio with his pink shirt unbuttoned and a pair of large, wraparound geriatric sunglasses protecting his eyes. “He was always in the 1-D classes, while I was in 1-A. One-A was for the bright kids, D for the dunces. But when we went out into nature, Barry could identify things by the way they flew over the horizon. Just from their flight patterns, he could distinguish between a red admiral, a painted thrush, and a blackbird, which are all very similar. So I knew he was a genius. And I got a top mark in an exam on nature, a perfect mark, answering questions like ‘Name two fish you can find living in an English stream.’ There are a hundred and three. But when I got back my perfect mark on the test, I suddenly realized that the kid sitting down the hall in the dunces’ class, my best friend, Barry, knew more than I knew—much more than I knew—in the subject in which I was supposedly number one. And therefore, he was number one, and I was not number one. “And suddenly, I realized the system that I was in did not know what intelligence was, didn’t know how to identify smart and not smart. They called me the best, when I knew I wasn’t, and they called him the worst, when he was the best. I mean, there could be no more antipodal environment. So I began to question: What is intelligence? Who says? Who says you’re smart? Who says you’re not smart? And what do they mean by that?” Those questions, at least according to Buzan’s tidy personal narrative, dogged him until he got to college. Buzan’s introduction

Nine months later, on September 1, 1939, Oppenheimer and a different collaborator—yet another student, Hartland Snyder—published a paper titled “On Continued Gravitational Contraction.” Historically, of course, the date is best known for Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the start of World War II. But in its quiet way, this publication was also a momentous event. The physicist and science historian Jeremy Bernstein calls it “one of the great papers in twentieth-century physics.” At the time, it attracted little attention. Only decades later would physicists understand that in 1939 Oppenheimer and Snyder had opened the door to twenty-first-century physics. They began their paper by asking what would happen to a massive star that has begun to burn itself out, having exhausted its fuel. Their calculations suggested that instead of collapsing into a white dwarf star, a star with a core beyond a certain mass—now believed to be two to three solar masses—would continue to contract indefinitely under the force of its own gravity. Relying on Einstein’s theory of general relativity, they argued that such a star would be crushed with such “singularity” that not even light waves would be able to escape the pull of its all-encompassing gravity. Seen from afar, such a star would literally disappear, closing itself off from the rest of the universe. “Only its gravitation field persists,” Oppenheimer and Snyder wrote. That is, though they themselves did not use the term, it would become a black hole. It was an intriguing but bizarre notion—and the paper was ignored, with its calculations long regarded as a mere mathematical curiosity.

Though it’s best not to be born a chicken at all, it is especially bad luck to be born a cockerel. From the perspective of the poultry farmer, male chickens are useless. They can’t lay eggs, their meat is stringy, and they’re ornery to the hens that do all the hard work of putting food on our tables. Commercial hatcheries tend to treat male chicks like fabric cutoffs or scrap metal: the wasteful but necessary by-product of an industrial process. The sooner they can be disposed of—often they’re ground into animal feed—the better. But a costly problem has vexed egg farmers for millennia: It’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between male and female chickens until they’re four to six weeks old, when they begin to grow distinctive feathers and secondary sex characteristics like the rooster’s comb. Until then, they’re all just indistinguishable fluff balls that have to be housed and fed—at considerable expense. Somehow it took until the 1920s before anyone figured out a solution to this costly dilemma. The momentous discovery was made by a group of Japanese veterinary scientists, who realized that just inside the chick’s rear end there is a constellation of folds, marks, spots, and bumps that to the untrained eye appear arbitrary, but when properly read, can divulge the sex of a day-old bird. When this discovery was unveiled at the 1927 World Poultry Congress in Ottawa, it revolutionized the global hatchery industry and eventually lowered the price of eggs worldwide. The professional chicken sexer, equipped with a skill that took years to master, became one of the most valuable workers in agriculture. The best of the best were graduates of the two-year Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School, whose standards were so rigorous that only 5 to 10 percent of students received accreditation. But those who did graduate earned as much as five hundred dollars a day and were shuttled around the world from hatchery to hatchery like top-flight business consultants. A diaspora of Japanese chicken sexers spilled across the globe. Chicken sexing is a delicate art, requiring Zen-like concentration and a brain surgeon’s dexterity. The bird is cradled in the left hand and given a gentle squeeze that causes it to evacuate its intestines (too tight and the intestines will turn inside out, killing the bird and rendering its gender irrelevant). With his thumb and forefinger, the sexer flips the bird over and parts a small flap on its hindquarters to expose the cloaca, a tiny vent where both the genitals and anus are situated, and peers deep inside. To do this properly, his fingernails have to be precisely trimmed. In the simple cases—the ones that the sexer can actually explain—he’s looking for a barely perceptible protuberance called the “bead,” about the size of a pinhead. If the bead is convex, the bird is a boy, and gets thrown to the left; concave or flat and it’s a girl, sent down a chute to the right.

he importance and influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection can scarcely be exaggerated. A century after Darwin’s death, the great evolutionary biologist and historian of science, Ernst Mayr, wrote, ‘The worldview formed by any thinking person in the Western world after 1859, when On the Origin of Species was published, was by necessity quite different from a worldview formed prior to 1859… The intellectual revolution generated by Darwin went far beyond the confines of biology, causing the overthrow of some of the most basic beliefs of his age.’1 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s biographers, contend, ‘Darwin is arguably the best known scientist in history. More than any modern thinker—even Freud or Marx—this affable old-world naturalist from the minor Shropshire gentry has transformed the way we see ourselves on the planet.’2 In the words of the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, ‘Almost no one is indifferent to Darwin, and no one should be. The Darwinian theory is a scientific theory, and a great one, but that is not all it is… Darwin’s dangerous idea cuts much deeper into the fabric of our most fundamental beliefs than many of its sophisticated apologists have yet admitted, even to themselves.’3 Dennett goes on to add, ‘If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and 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.’4 The editors of the Cambridge Companion to Darwin begin their introduction by stating, ‘Some scientific thinkers, while not themselves philosophers, make philosophers necessary. Charles Darwin is an obvious case. His conclusions about the history and diversity of life—including the evolutionary origin of humans—have seemed to bear on fundamental questions about being, knowledge, virtue and justice.’5 Among the fundamental questions raised by Darwin’s work, which are still being debated by philosophers (and others) are these: ‘Are we different in kind from other animals? Do our apparently unique capacities for language, reason and morality point to a divine spark within us, or to ancestral animal legacies still in evidence in our simian relatives? What forms of social life are we naturally disposed towards—competitive and selfish forms, or cooperative and altruistic ones?’6 As the editors of the volume point out, virtually the entire corpus of the foundational works of Western philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes to Kant to Hegel, has had to be re-examined in the light of Darwin’s work. Darwin continues to be read, discussed, interpreted, used, abused—and misused—to this day. As the philosopher and historian of science, Jean Gayon, puts it, ‘[T]his persistent positioning of new developments in relation to a single, pioneering figure is quite exceptional in the history of modern natural science.

In light of Hipparchus and Ptolemy’s extraordinarily successful predictive theories, the goal of astronomy was to find the right combination of circles to describe the motion of the heavenly bodies around the Earth. Contrary to expectations, it turned out that Earth was itself one of the heavenly bodies. After Copernicus, the goal appeared to be to find the right combination of moving spheres that would reproduce the motion of the planets around the Sun. Contrary to expectations, it turned out that abstract elliptical trajectories were better than spheres. After Newton, it seemed clear that the aim of physics was to find the forces acting on bodies. Contrary to this, it turned out that the world could be better described by dynamical fields rather than bodies. After Faraday and Maxwell, it was clear that physics had to find laws of motion in space, as time passes. Contrary to assumptions, it turned out that space and time are themselves dynamical. After Einstein, it became clear that physics must only search for the deterministic laws of Nature. But it turned out that we can at best give probabilistic laws. And so on. Here are some sliding definitions for what scientists have thought science to be: deduction of general laws from observed phenomena, finding out the ultimate constituents of Nature, accounting for regularities in empirical observations, finding provisional conceptual schemes for making sense of the world. (The last one is the one I like.) Science is not a project with a methodology written in stone, or a fixed conceptual structure. It is our ever-evolving endeavor to better understand the world. In the course of its development, it has repeatedly violated its own rules and its own stated methodological assumptions.

The Singaporean study also identified three specific conditions that promoted productive failure. First, failure is best when it promotes a sense of challenge and engagement versus frustration. Frustration, of course, is the feeling that you are going nowhere at top speed, so there has to be a sense of progress and achievement. You can’t just hand a child a calculus equation and expect productive failure. It has to be within their capabilities and they have to be able to see improvement.  Second, failure is best when learners have the opportunity to elaborate on what they are doing and thinking, as was done in a group setting during the study. When you can narrate what you’re doing, instead of toiling away in silence, it can help shed light on your efforts because you’re actively thinking about what you’re doing and analyzing it. Often, thinking out loud leads to solutions that wouldn’t have appeared otherwise. Third, failure is best when learners have the chance to compare solutions that work, and solutions that don’t. This is what happens when you aren’t shown the exact path every single time. You recognize the red flags of failure and gain intuition when something seems right or wrong.

Studies have shown that a concept known as spaced repetition is far more effective for learning and memory than daily rote memorization. This means the brain is like a muscle, and it simply needs time to recover and make neural connections for the information that you’ve consumed. It also means that if you overdo it and burn out, you are wasting time by attempting to learn more than your brain can handle at the time. Then, you encounter the phenomenon where you are reading the same paragraph over and over and don’t comprehend it. Finally, it places an emphasis on memorization versus understanding and analysis, the latter of which is what will help information stick in your brain the best. More isn’t better; smarter is better.

Deliberate practice was a term coined by John Hayes of Carnegie Mellon University. In short, it describes the best way to practice is to break your main goal down into numerous sub-skills that contribute to the goal. Then, instead of rehearsing the main goal, focus on each sub-skill and bring them to the point of proficiency, one at a time.

Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

I spoke of the 'real' mathematics of Fermat and other great mathematicians, the mathematics which has permanent aesthetic value, as for example the best Greek mathematics has, the mathematics which is eternal because the best of it may, like the best literature, continue to cause intense emotional satisfaction to thousands of people after thousands of years. These men were all primarily pure mathematicians; but I was not thinking only of pure mathematics. I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among 'real' mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are, at present at any rate, almost as 'useless' as the theory of numbers. It is the dull and elementary parts of applied mathematics, as it is the dull and elementary parts of pure mathematics, that work for good or ill.

Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.”           75

Albert Einstein was certainly the most important physicist of the twentieth century. Perhaps his greatest work was his discovery of general relativity, which is the best theory we have so far of space, time, motion, and gravitation. His profound insight was that gravity and motion are intimately related to each other and to the geometry of space and time. This idea broke with hundreds of years of thinking about the nature of space and time, which until then had been viewed as fixed and absolute. Being eternal and unchanging, they provided a background, which we used to define notions like position and energy.

11 Benefits of Asking Questions “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” – Albert Einstein 1. Builds rapport. 2. Nurtures creativity. 3. Grows your knowledge and awareness. 4. Exercises critical thinking and problem-solving skills. 5. Makes the other person feel valued. 6. Helps you make thoughtful decisions. 7. The better our questions, the better our answers. 8. Keeps you agile and open to new ideas. 9. Improves your memory and retention. 10. Helps you stay informed and relevant. 11. Enables you to discover a new world of possibilities you would not have known otherwise.

In 1929, Einstein, who had once lived in Switzerland, wrote: When I came to Germany fifteen years ago I discovered for the first time that I was a Jew; and I owe this discovery more to Gentiles than to Jews…. I saw worthy Jews basely caricatured, and the sight made my heart bleed. I saw how schools, comic papers, and innumerable other forces of the Gentile majority undermined the confidence of even the best of my fellow Jews, and felt that this could not be allowed to continue.4

Monday does what it does best- it arrives quicker than any other day. Joshua is sure the physics behind that is something neither Albert Einstein nor Stephen Hawking could get a handle on.

Are [the arts and the sciences] really as distinct as we seem to assume? [...] Most universities will have distinct faculties of arts and sciences, for instance. But the division clearly has some artificiality. Suppose one assumed, for example, that the arts were about creativity while the sciences were about a rigorous application of technique and methods. This would be an oversimplification because all disciplines need both. The best science requires creative thinking. Someone has to see a problem, form a hypothesis about a solution, and then figure out how to test that hypothesis and implement its findings. That all requires creative thinking, which is often called innovation. The very best scientists display creative genius equal to any artist. [...] And let us also consider our artists. Creativity alone fails to deliver us anything of worth. A musician or painter must also learn a technique, sometimes as rigorous and precise as found in any science, in order that they can turn their thoughts into a work. They must attain mastery over their medium. Even a writer works within the rules of grammar to produce beauty. [...] The logical positivists, who were reconstructing David Hume’s general approach, looked at verifiability as the mark of science. But most of science cannot be verified. It mainly consists of theories that we retain as long as they work but which are often rejected. Science is theoretical rather than proven. Having seen this, Karl Popper proposed falsifiability as the criterion of science. While we cannot prove theories true, he argued, we can at least prove that some are false and this is what demonstrates the superiority of science. The rest is nonsense on his account. The same problems afflict Popper’s account, however. It is just as hard to prove a theory false as it is to prove one true. I am also in sympathy with the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus who says that far from being nonsense, the non-sciences are often the most meaningful things in our lives. I am not sure the relationship to truth is really what divides the arts and sciences. [...] The sciences get us what we want. They have plenty of extrinsic value. Medicine enables us to cure illness, for instance, and physics enables us to develop technology. I do not think, in contrast, that we pursue the arts for what they get us. They are usually ends in themselves. But I said this was only a vague distinction. Our greatest scientists are not merely looking to fix practical problems. Newton, Einstein and Darwin seemed primarily to be seeking understanding of the world for its own sake, motivated primarily by a sense of wonder. I would take this again as indicative of the arts and sciences not being as far apart as they are usually depicted. And nor do I see them as being opposed. The best in any field will have a mixture of creativity and discipline and to that extent the arts and sciences are complimentary.

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted. Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

Einstein said, “The weak revenge. The strong forgive. The intelligent ignore.” Fuck that. Einstein wasn’t always right. Revenge is a dish best served cold…

came away with a few metaphorically memorable concepts, including the bizarre proposition that two particles could become “entangled” at the quantum level in such a way that anything you did to one particle would happen to the other. Even if they were banished to opposite ends of the universe, they behaved like reciprocating voodoo dolls or invisibly conjoined twins bound to each other’s fate despite billions of light-years between them. Quantum entanglement was so weird that Einstein called it “spooky actions at a distance,

By 1905 he had his close friend and sounding board Besso at his elbow. Along with his top desk drawer, this constituted his department of theoretical physics. It turned out to be the best one in Europe.

Without the Nothing, nothing can exist in the world as we see it. Nothing is the medium of the Being. Without the Nonbeing, there is no Being. This coexistence and symbiosis produce something we may call, at best, an illusion of “curvature of space” since actual space remains uncurved and cannot be curved.

As someone once said (and no, it wasn’t Einstein), “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.” Let us never confuse the two.

He and his young colleague, the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel, had an understanding: they knew that either one of them might be so deeply absorbed in thought that any disturbance could prove fatal to whatever work was being done, and if there was no immediate response to an interruption—such as a knock—then it was best to retire quietly until another time.

But maybe the best way to describe Votto is that he’s baseball’s most cerebral hitter, the Einstein of the batter’s box.