Word: einstein
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...weapon. I wonder if you have learned to control the anarchy of popular authority. I wonder if you have figured out how to make the best use of the past. Have you learned that traditions and institutions are not all bad? After a century of Freud, Marx and Einstein, we are pretty shatterproof these days, in terms of not being shocked by being all shook up. But in the words of one of our favorite songwriters, Carole King, "Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?" Maybe you have finally figured out how to live where we have always tried...
Standing in an unstable universe where distances contract and clocks slow down, and time and space are plastic, Albert Einstein cast a wistful backward glance at Isaac Newton. "Fortunate Newton, happy childhood of science!" he wrote. "Nature to him was an open book, whose letters he could read without effort...
...experiments with spectrums established the nature of color and the heterogeneous components of sunlight), in mechanics (his three laws of motion changed the world) and with his understanding of gravity. The last explained the phenomena of heaven and earth in a single mathematical system--or did until Einstein arrived...
...mystery of the Causeless Cause (the ultimate secret, God), Newtonism located human intelligence in a cosmos of magnificently impassive reciprocities, celestial mechanics working by God's infinitely reliable and predictable cause and effect. Perhaps Newton merely codified what we intuitively knew (equal and opposite reactions, for example). As Einstein said, "The conceptions which he used to reduce the material of experience to order seemed to flow spontaneously from experience itself, from the beautiful experiments which he ranged in order like playthings...
...case, is pervasive. W.H. Auden in 1939 wrote lines that might have been composed about, say, Kosovo last winter: "I and the world know/ what every schoolboy learns./ Those to whom evil is done/ do evil in return." What is that but Newton's third law of motion? Einstein's image of Newton as a child occurred, oddly enough, to Newton himself. Maybe that's where Einstein got it. Just before he died, Newton remarked, "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy, playing...