Wisdom from Einstein, born on this day in 1879.
Einstein
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For Einstein’s birthday today, be a fly on the wall of his legendary conversation with Indian philosopher Tagore, debating Truth and Beauty at the intersection of science and spirituality.
I had the pleasure of discussing the “Modulor” at some length with Professor Albert Einstein at Princeton. I was then passing through a period of great uncertainty and stress; I expressed myself badly, I explained the “Modulor” badly, I got bogged down in the morass of “cause and effect”… At one point, Einstein took a pencil and began to calculate. Stupidly, I interrupted him, the conversation turned to other things, the calculation remained unfinished. The friend who had brought me was in the depths of despair. In a letter written to me the same evening, Einstein had the kindness to say this of the “Modulor”: “It is a scale of proportions which makes the bad difficult and the good easy.” There are some who think this judgement is unscientific. For my part, I think it is extraordinarily clear-sighted. It is a gesture of friendship made by a great scientist towards us who are not scientists but soldiers on the field of battle. The scientist tells us: “This weapon shoots straight: in the matter of dimensioning, i.e. of proportions, it makes tour task more certain.”
Le Corbusier meets Albert Einstein at Princeton in 1946, traveling to New York to present at the United Nations his project for the UN Headquarters. Complement with this beautiful definition of science as “systematic wonder.”
Researchers examine newly released photos of Einstein’s brain to understand what physical features might have been behind his genius.
After Einstein’s death, pathologist Thomas Harvey removed his brain, preserved it in formalin, and took dozens of black-and-white photos of it before cutting it up into 240 blocks. He then took tissue samples from each block, mounted them onto microscope slides, and distributed the slides to some of the world’s best neuropathologists.
And still, as Einstein himself might have agreed, there’s more to “Truth and Beauty” than biology and wiring.
Minute Physics, who have previously illuminated such fascinations as why the past is different from the future and why the color pink doesn’t really exist, explain why E=mc² is incomplete.
