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Book: Einstein: His Life and Universe
Quotes of Book: Einstein: His Life and

Walter Isaacson _ Einstein: His Life and
Visual understanding is the essential and only true means of teaching how to judge things correctly," Pestalozzi wrote, and "the learning of numbers and language must be definitely subordinated." 58
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Walter Isaacson _ Einstein: His Life and
It was a perfect school for Einstein. The teaching was based on the philosophy of a Swiss educational reformer of the early nineteenth century, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who believed in encouraging students to visualize images. He also thought it important to nurture the "inner dignity" and individuality of each child. Students should be allowed to reach their own conclusions, Pestalozzi preached, by using a series of steps that began with hands-on observations and then proceeded to intuitions, conceptual thinking, and visual imagery. 56 It was even possible to learn-and truly understand-the laws of math and physics that way. Rote drills, memorization, and force-fed facts were avoided.
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Walter Isaacson _ Einstein: His Life and
We thus arrive at the important result: Events that are simultaneous with reference to the embankment are not simultaneous with respect to the train," said Einstein. The principle of relativity says that there is no way to decree that the embankment is "at rest" and the train "in motion." We can say only that they are in motion relative to each other. So there is no "real" or "right" answer. There is no way to say that any two events are "absolutely" or "really" simultaneous.43 This is a simple insight, but also a radical one. It means that there is no absolute time. Instead, all moving reference frames have their own relative time. Although Einstein refrained from saying that this leap was as truly "revolutionary" as the one he made about light quanta, it did in fact transform science. "This was a change in the very foundation of physics, an unexpected and very radical change that required all the courage of a young and revolutionary genius," noted Werner Heisenberg, who later contributed to a similar feat with his principle of quantum uncertainty.
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Walter Isaacson _ Einstein: His Life and
The two great Semitic peoples," he said, "have a great common future." If the Jews did not assure that both sides lived in harmony, he warned friends in the Zionist movement, the struggle would haunt them in decades to come.78 Once again, he was labeled naïve.
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Walter Isaacson _ Einstein: His Life and
Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs," he wrote Weizmann in 1929, "then we have learned absolutely nothing during our 2,000 years of suffering.
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Walter Isaacson _ Einstein: His Life and
In it he argued that unrestrained capitalism produced great disparities of wealth, cycles of boom and depression, and festering levels of unemployment. The system encouraged selfishness instead of cooperation, and acquiring wealth rather than serving others. People were educated for careers rather than for a love of work and creativity. And political parties became corrupted by political contributions from owners of great capital.
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Walter Isaacson _ Einstein: His Life and
Everyone must, from time to time, make a sacrifice on the altar of stupidity, to please the deity and mankind.
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Walter Isaacson _ Einstein: His Life and
When shown his office, he was asked what equipment he might need. "A desk or table, a chair, paper and pencils," he replied. "Oh yes, and a large wastebasket, so I can throw away all my mistakes.
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Walter Isaacson _ Einstein: His Life and
Hubble then made an even more amazing discovery. By measuring the red shift of the stars' spectra {which is the light wave counterpart to the Doppler effect for sound waves}, he realized that the galaxies were moving away from us. There were at least two possible explanations for the fact that distant stars in all directions seemed to be flying away from us: {1} because we are the center of the universe, something that since the time of Copernicus only our teenage children believe; {2} because the entire metric of the universe was expanding, which meant that everything was stretching out in all directions so that all galaxies were getting farther away from one another. It became clear that the second explanation was the case when Hubble confirmed that, in general, the galaxies were moving away from us at a speed that was proportional to their distance from us. Those twice as far moved away twice as fast, and those three times as far moved away three times as fast. One way to understand this is to imagine a grid of dots that are each spaced an inch apart on the elastic surface of a balloon. Then assume that the balloon is inflated so that the surface expands to twice its original dimensions. The dots are now two inches away from each other. So during the expansion, a dot that was originally one inch away moved another one inch away. And during that same time period, a dot that was originally two inches away moved another two inches away, one that was three inches away moved another three inches away, and one that was ten inches away moved another ten inches away. The farther away each dot was originally, the faster it receded from our dot. And that would be true from the vantage point of each and every dot on the balloon. All of which is a simple way to say that the galaxies are not merely flying away from us, but instead, the entire metric of space, or the fabric of the cosmos, is expanding. To envision this in 3-D, imagine that the dots are raisins in a cake that is baking and expanding in all directions. On
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Walter Isaacson _ Einstein: His Life and
Striving for social justice is the most valuable thing to do in life."27
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Walter Isaacson _ Einstein: His Life and
Einstein had a mild form of echolalia, causing him to repeat phrases to himself, two or three times, especially if they amused him.
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Walter Isaacson _ Einstein: His Life and
We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.
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