Einstein's mother introduced him to the violin at the age of 6 in an attempt to counteract his academic failures. Einstein eventually became an accomplished amateur violinist, taking particular pleasure in performing Mozart and discussing the parallels between music and mathematics. His son, Hans Albert, recalled that “whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music, and that would usually resolve all the difficulties.”
“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 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.” —Albert Einstein
I'm sure there are many scientists today who have no clue what Einstein meant when he wrote this. He was one of the most intelligent people to ever live in this world. I think it is worth reading again... There is so much hidden between the lines.
This is what Hanoch Gutfreund, a theoretical physicist and former president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem said about Einstein. “All these stand as the pillars of modern science”:
- “His work on Brownian motion gave rise to statistical mechanics.
- His work on the explanation of the photoelectric effect is one of the bases of quantum theory.
- His work on special relativity is proved beyond any doubt and reflected in many branches of physics.
- And maybe the most sophisticated intellectual achievement, his general theory of relativity—which has revolutionized the Newtonian picture of space, matter, and gravitation—has been the basis of the present theories of the universe, cosmology, [and] the black-hole phenomenon.”
I add some quotes from others only to remind you of Einstein's true genius when you read all of this. If you are a hard-core realist who doesn't believe in anything out of the norm, you might be surprised by some of Einstein's thoughts. But because of who he was, and remains to this day, you cannot pooh-pooh it away as rubbish! Einstein didn't open his mouth to utter concepts until he was nearly 4 or 5 years old. This is because of how he thought in images, not words. “He once suggested to Benjamin Lee Whorf, who studied and wrote about these language differences, that it might be easier to describe the discoveries of modern physics in the Hopi language than in English. In Hopi we would not face the contradictions of a world made at once of particle-things and wave-actions, of matter-things and energy-actions, never having separated things from actions in the first place.” Source: Elisabet Sahtouris, PhD. Web site: Ratical.org When Einstein was asked how he would approach the problem of avoiding the end of the world if he had 1 hour to solve it, he said he'd spend 55 minutes identifying the problem and the last 5 minutes solving it, “for the formulation of a problem is often far more essential than its solution.” This reminds me of the other famous quote of his: “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” When I visited the Einstein exhibit in Princeton, they showed the sign hanging in Einstein's office, which he wrote: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”