"One cannot help but be in awe, when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, life, and the marvelous structure of reality."
When he was young Albert Einstein often thought about light moving through space and time. He knew the speed of light is measured at 300,000 kilometres per second. Years later he discovered the speed doesn't change, even if its source, or the person measuring, is moving. In a thought experiment, Einstein used this always constant speed of light to show a person on a moving train will see a lightning strike at a different time than a person standing still. This showed the speed of time is not constant, it changes as a function of your speed of motion through space. His time dilation equation, t' = t / √(1-(v2/c2)), shows anyone can speed into the future, if they can move at more than half the speed of light.
In 1905 he wrote a paper on the photoelectric-effect where he showed light not only acts like a wave, but also like a particle, with energy: E=hf. He called these photons of light “Quanta”, which was the precursor to Quantum Mechanics. Later that year he wrote another paper where his equation E=mc2, mathematically proved matter is energy. In another thought experiment involving a falling elevator, he equated gravity with acceleration by showing they have identical effects on objects. This is why time dilation can occur whether you accelerate fast enough, or are in a strong enough gravitational field.
Einstein was also the first person to discover how gravity works. He saw space isn't a void, but it can curve and stretch and is warped by mass. Mass bends space like a weight on a trampoline. If you roll a ball near the weight, the ball will roll around it. All celestial objects from moons to galaxy clusters orbit because space curves around some larger mass. The ability of space to curve lead to the discovery of black holes, the Big Bang Theory and the real possibility of wormholes through space and time.
Albert Einstein was a physicist, mathematician, and philosopher.
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
Everyone has experienced that he has been in doubt whether he has actually experienced something with his senses or has simply dreamt about it.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reasons for existing.
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
We all appear here involuntarily and uninvited for a short stay without knowing why. To me it's enough to wonder at the secrets.
Out yonder, there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great eternal riddle...The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation...
The most incomprehensible thing about the universe, is that it is comprehensible.
People do not grow old no matter how long we live. We never cease to stand like curious children before the great Mystery into which we were born.
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings, admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science.
Once you accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.
What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.
The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a print shop.
Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.
GOD may be subtle, but not malicious.
The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism.
Unquestionably. No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life. How different, for instance, is the impression which we receive from an account of legendary heroes of antiquity like Theseus. Theseus and other heroes of his type lack the authentic vitality of Jesus. No man, can deny the fact that Jesus existed, nor that his sayings are beautiful. Even if some them have been said before, no one has expressed them so divinely as he.
It is only to the individual that the soul is given.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.
A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his 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.
How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?
One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.
Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.
Before God we are all equally wise and equally foolish.
Never regard study as a hard duty but as an enviable opportunity to learn, to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later works belong.
Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty.
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.
Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
I wished to show that space-time is not necessarily something to which one can ascribe a separate existence, independently of the actual objects of physical reality. Physical objects are not in space, but are spatially extended. In this way the concept "empty space" loses its meaning.
Gravity - An object marks its place in the fabric of space-time with a dent, a pocket, into which other objects that pass within its sphere must fall.
Relative Motion - Motion from the point of view of possible experience always appears as the relative motion of one object with respect to another ... Motion is never observable as "motion with respect to space" or, as it has been expressed, "absolute motion."
Law of Inertia - A body removed sufficiently far from other bodies continues in a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line.
Time Dilation - As judged from K, the clock is moving with the velocity v as judged from this reference-body, the time which elapses between two strokes of the clock is not one second, but 1 / √(1-(v2/c2)) seconds, i.e. a somewhat larger time. As a consequence of its motion the clock goes more slowly than when at rest. Here also the velocity c plays the part of an unattainable limiting velocity.
Field - The field is the sole governing agency of the particle.
There is no place in this new kind of physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.
Kinetic Energy - In accordance with the theory of relativity the kinetic engery of a material point of mass m is no longer given by the well-known expression m(v2/2) , but by the expression K.E. = (mc2) / √(1-(v2/c2)). This expression approaches infinity as the velocity v approaches the velocity of light c. The velocity must therefore always remain less than c, however great may be the energies used to produce the acceleration.
If a man who is fabulously rich never spent or gave away a cent, then no one could tell how rich he was or even whether he had any money at all. It is the same with matter. So long as none of the energy is given off externally, it cannot be observed.
For the present we shall assume the 'truth' of the geometrical propositions, then at a later stage (in the general theory, of relativity) we shall see that this 'truth' is limited, and we shall consider the extent of its limitation.
The world in which we live is a four-dimensional space-time continuum.
Space is a three-dimensional continuum. By this we mean that it is possible to describe the position of a point (at rest) by means of three numbers (co-ordinates) x, y, z, and that there is an indefinite number of points.
Relative Motion - Every motion must be considered only as a relative motion.
Electrostatics is contained in electrodynamics as a limiting case.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.
If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than 5 minutes.
Peace cannot be kept by force, it can only be achieved by understanding.
Nothing that I can do will change the structure of the universe. But maybe, by raising my voice I can help the greatest of all causes – goodwill among men and peace on earth.
"How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though sometimes he thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. 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 have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.
My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and need for solitude...
My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the lead must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality...The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.
This topic brings me to the worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor...This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only in this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."
Book: Relativity - The Special and the General Theory, by Albert Einstein
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