Words of Wisdom from SharLeigh

A MAN OF REASON

The renowned physicist of the 20th Century, Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany in 1879. As a boy he lived in Munich and Milan and went to school in Switzerland, where he graduated in 1900 and earned his doctorate in 1905. By 1913 his theory of relativity and photoelectric effect had gained international attention. He was invited to the Prussian Academy of Sciences with the title of Professor of Physics and Director of Theoretical Physics at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, Germany. By 1921 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. Because he was Jewish, the Nazi Party confiscated his property in 1934 and deprived him of his German citizenship. Fortunately, he had already accepted a post at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he stayed until his death in 1955. He was a physicist, mathematician, philosopher of science and an ardent pacifist, but in 1939 he wrote a letter of urgency to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt concerning the possible use of atomic energy in bombs. He later said, “I made one great mistake in my life – when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made. But there was some justification – the danger that the Germans would make them.” As I researched this column, I was very impressed with Einstein’s quotations. I would like to share just a few of these quotes taken from The Columbia World of Quotations (1996):

“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.”

“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”

“If ‘A’ is a success in life, then ‘A’ equals x plus y plus z. Work is x, y is play and z is keeping your mouth shut.”

“A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.”

“I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.”