Some of the very same politicians calling for an end to our presence in Iraq can offer no thoughts on how this might truly be accomplished. Even the Professor has trouble finding the beginnings of a plan that would be effective and fast, leave us in good standing and not lead to complete disintegration of Iraq in our absence. Now with physics, even when the road taken would turn out to be the wrong one, it never seemed so hard at least to begin to formulate the beginnings of a new possibility and then to start down that road. How come there are always avenues to explore regarding the nature of the cosmos yet political avenues seem hidden? “That is simple, my friend” the Professor responded, “because politics is more difficult than physics.”
Teacher-Astronaut to Fly Decades After Challenger
WASHINGTON, Aug. 6 — Barbara R. Morgan was the backup to the first teacher in space, Christa McAuliffe, who died in the Challenger explosion. She is now a professional astronaut heading into space this week for the first time. She stated that she would be approaching her mission “with the mind, eyes, ears and heart of a teacher” “That’s what I am at my core.”
She intends to use this experience when she returns. “The main part of the educational program will happen when we return to earth,” she said. She plans to make a series of video “teachable moments” while in space that will later be used in lessons, and she is taking 10 million basil seeds that will be distributed to students to raise in growth chambers that they will design. “The educational activities we’ve designed are interactive and interesting, fun activities they can get into,” she said, “It’s not about teachers standing up and talking in front of a blackboard.”
I applaud the intention to give education an emotional “rocket boost.” The Professor has said, “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” As for a little bon voyage, “you should try to remember that a dedicated teacher is a valuable messenger from the past, and can be an escort to your future.”
Einstein often risked life and limb to observe nature first hand, and often did not complicate the process by taking proper precautions. He’d applaud the risk taking for the sake of gaining a greater understanding of our Universe, but he would not so liberal when others displayed his “forgetfulness” regarding precautions… Safe returns.
Ipod, Iphone, I Crash: Multitaskers, Stop reading in Traffic!
Multiple research projects evidence the limits of multitasking. People would be wise to limit multitasking in an office, home, study hall, and especially while driving a car. The experts advise refraining from checking e-mail messages more than once an hour. Soothing background music may actually improve concentration, but be careful, songs with lyrics as well as attention grabbers such as TV or instant messaging lower performance.
Einstein lived a life of ultimate simplicity in order to keep his thoughts free from distraction, external or internal! All of this complicated research does nothing but confirm what should have been obvious. Either you know what is important, or you get the overload of information we endure today while pretending we can handle it. Perhaps having no clue of what matters, we are terrified of missing anything. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.” Einstein is quoted as having said this, although no one source can be found. He certainly said things to support this sentiment (after all, he found socks and shaving cream to be wonderful but not worth the complication to his life necessary to keep them in stock and to remember to use them). Of the 3 “Rules of Work” attributed to the Professor, the only one that truly related to his own original words is “Out of clutter, find simplicity.”
As for the finding that “Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes” and “disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.” as stated by David E. Meyer, the director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan, it is the beginning of what I’ll call the “absent minded professor syndrome” which is all based on parodies of Albert Einstein. Have you ever noticed that every fictional genius has a “photographic memory” while every real genius depicted in the media is absent minded to some degree? This is because a writer can write thoughts on his/her own level, or below it. If you could go through the thought processes of someone more intelligent than yourself, you’d have to be that smart, so you couldn’t! To make up for this two things are done. 1) The fictional genius makes conclusions out of thin air through a process we must attribute to the inner workings of genius. They turn out to be correct because the writer made them up and wrote that they are correct. Perhaps the writer made up a scenario then worked backwards from an answer that is correct and fits the clues given, but could not possibly be found from only those clues. How the genius did it is left to the imagination. So how does this writer show off the genius in action? 2) Photographic memory.
I love this because even if geniuses possesed the trait involved, all writers and readers have been using the wrong term for this ability, due no doubt to their own lower-than-genius intellectual limits. Remembering words and events instantly is accomplished by an didactic memory, the photographic kind is only used to draw detailed pictures after a short viewing of an object. It is also more a trait of limited intelligence. It is the equivalent of a hard drive that overloads itself by storing everything, every time it is exposed, with no clearing the clutter and no organization. Very little useful info is stored, and one has to go through the entire drive to find anything. Worse, within this clutter there is all the consideration given to the stored material as done by a tape recorder. No, a genius ignores all the drivel, quickly figures out what truly counts and considers this type of information only, organizes it to make quick and amazing associations between all facts that truly count, then plays out all the possibilities in “thought out” inner run-throughs (thought experiments… what a great name for a play!). A true Sherlock Holmes would not remember every detail of a crime scene, he’d nudge into walls while going after the fraction of a percent of the “pixels” of real content that matter, even things that nobody else would manage to notice in the “glare” of the entire scene, or would even see as being important had Sherlock hit them over the head with it. A line attributed to Albert, for good reason despite the fact he likely never said it, is “the levels of intelligence are Smart, intelligent, brilliant, genius, simple!”
Putting the original article about the research down one thing is so obvious it is funny. Why is everyone using so much of these new techno-toys so much of the time, many of which serve to either give pleasure and peacefulness (our own background soundtrack with us at all times) or to make our work easier (almost every other distraction listed in the studies) and deriving nothing but more stress and unhappiness from it? It is more true now than when the following was painfully obvious to the great thinker stuck in the middle of a new techno-filled-and-dependent world nearly a century ago, ironically enough seeded by the fruit of his own thoughts done under purely simple circumstances. “Why does this magnificent applied science which saves work and makes life easier bring us so little happiness? The simple answer: because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it.”
Mega Millions Play Mega Millions
All of a sudden the physics of spacetime has become the main thing on everyones’ minds. It is worded differently in each case, but it always boils down to something like this: “If only I could break the space-time continuum by a few hours, I could see the winning numbers in time to play them.”
Perhaps you literally want a crystal ball for viewing, or maybe you’ll just pay a psychic. I figure any psychic who saw the numbers wouldn’t sell them for a few bucks, so even if the idea of a psychic makes sense, the “PLOTLINE” loses believability. Some people make deals with their deity, some with their devil. And some just wish that they could violate the “Prime Directive” long enough to use advanced technology to win the lottery. The winnings could then be used to fund the research to develop the advanced technology in the first place. Now that makes sense!
There are really three fascinating questions raised by all of this. The first is one for the Professor, “Is it possible to travel through time, or at least to send a message back a few hours?” The other two questions fascinate the professor, for they are about intriguing aspects of human nature. Why do people need to convince themselves that there are special ways around the sheer-chance aspect of buying a ticket, and why do people focus on such materialistic wealth to begin with?
Einstein would appreciate the freedom a large reserve of cash would provide. With it one could do their thinking without having to waste tiime in order to feed their stomachs, and without having to be beholden to a benefactor. However, 355 Million dollars goes a bit beyond this. You could buy a lot of things to complicate your life, which would detract from the truest joy, intellectual discovery. In the end it becomes so much to live with and so little to live for. The Professor reminded me, “The banal goals of human strivings–possesions, superficial success, luxury — have always seemed contemptible to me.” I pointed out that most people not only can’t soar to the heights of intellectual discovery he routinely experienced, few can even grasp the joy of it. I added that many people judge themselves by their success, and success is most often defined by money. In a certain way, winning 355 Million justifies their existence as valuable people. Of course Albert retorted that I should tell them “Try to become not a man of success, but a man of value.”
Well 355 million is a lot of value. And there might be a connection between this and the answer to the next question. 100s of miliions of people buy tickets and pray to god to win, then by chance, sooner or later, someone wins. He or she now not only has money, to him/her this is now proof of god’s love. They have value to god! Their winning is also proof of god’s existence. The 100s of millions of losers somehow don’t prove god doesn’t exist, nor does this indicate they aren’t each God’s one and only favorite.
If God wants to use the lottery to prove God exists, God should simply arrange just once for eveybody who asks for divine intervention to win. Of course then every ticket would pay back less than it cost and God would have a lot of disgruntled believers to deal with.
As for the big question, the physics of it all. Time is an illusion, but it saves us from the confusion of having everything happen at once. Time is a physical dimension similar to the other 3 obvious spatial dimensions, and although we can’t steer through it as directly, there is no reason it can’t be travelled any which way. In that sense it is possible. On the other hand, is there any way that actually could work? There are many possibilities, and many reasons that might prevent each, or at least make each highly impractical. In that sense, it might be impossible. I’d continue, but it’s time to see if my own attempt at bridging the gap by a few hours has paid off…
But the good news is…
It has been discovered at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab that exo-planets (meaning not in our solar system) with the romantic names HD 189733b and HD 209458b are warm and waterless, and just plain not what planets are expected to be. HD 179733b is 360 trillion miles from Earth while HD 209458b is about 900 trillion miles away.
“The Weather today on 209458 is hot, dry, probably cloudy with a chance of wind,” study team leader Mark Swain said in a Wednesday teleconference. 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit to be exact. As Johnny Carson would say, “The good news is, it’s a dry heat.” And with winds between 500 and 2,000 mph, the wind chill factor makes it feel downright chilly.
The truly amazing thing is simply that we are measuring these things at all on planets that far away. Or that we can even “see” planets that far away. People think nothing of this “reality” anymore, which deprives them of sensing something truly astounding. Most people just think you make the telescope bigger and see farther. It would take a lot of education to get people to the point where they’d know enough to begin to figure it must be impossible, and then a lot more education to get them to understand how we do it. Then they could be appropriately awestruck.
Sadly, it is taken for granted that scientists do what we need thanklessly, and most people assume on some level that once you are privy to some secret of scientists the rest must be easy. That is the only way to explain how with 99.99% of our modern lives being based on and dependent upon the fruits of science, sceintific advancement is never a big deal to most people –except for the newest gizmo provided by it down the line, if they even remember there is a connection. Research is at best tolerated, but the fruits of the results are taken for granted. Researching energy sources or cancer cures isn’t that big a deal, not like hitting a ball or making a bad sitcom or something else deserving numerous award shows every year. Scientists themselves really only come to the forefront when there is something the scientists can’t make perfect for us, so we need to acknowledge them in order to have them to blame. Fortunately, “The scientist finds his reward in what Henri Poincare’ calls the joy of comprehension, and not in the possibilities of application to which any discovery may lead.” May I add to The Professor’s words that it’s best if the true scientist looks only for this joy and not for recognition from the masses. Of course that was not prominent in Einstein’s thoughts, because he couldn’t imagine any real scientist looking for recognition, and his own peculiar position as a pop-star of his day meant he lost time with the joy of discovery because of the duties and responsibilities of world recognition.
The Professor finds the tehcniques used to investigate exo-planets to be fascinating and indeed artistically elegant. I put it to him that we have come so far that the entry level equipment necessary to make advancements is so far beyond the grasp of an individual scientist that his idealized independent man of science can no longer exist in practicality. He reiterated his philosohy, “Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn a living at it. One should earn one’s living by work of which one is sure one is capable. Only when we do not have to be accountable to anyone can we find joy in scientific endeavor.” He understands those who do the practical work in this way because it’s the only way to do it. In fact he honors the ability so many scientists display to uphold standards in the face of pressure to produce results that must come along with the funding. He, however, would prefer not to be practical and instead to stay simple, and continue to do all of his experiments with the same old equipment: Brains.
We kid ourselves that there is something awesome on the ballfield, or in special effects in movies (especially space scenes!), in video games or music videos. A little bit of comprehension of what is out there, what “out there” itself actually is, and how we figure these things out is the definition of awe inspiring.
Star Trek shows the way again: How we view our future meets how we view our past
In the middle of last year NBC announced that it was finally owning up in a small way to a mistake of historical proportions. And to be fair, it only took four decades: Compared to how long Galileo had to wait for a Pope to act, this was quick redemption indeed. Yes, for the first time since Star Trek was the future, NBC was going to have something to do with it. They were going to clean up the original masters and it was going to be special!
The announcement served NBC well for some headline publicity, then we waited. Several cable networks added original ST episodes to their lineups in the months that followed, were these the cleaned up versions? They looked, just like I remembered them. They could not compare to the job the Deep Space 9 team did with a gorgeous external shot of the original Enterprise that they spliced into one of their episodes. It was cleaned up and shown in detail that had never been broadcast before.
NBC must be using Romulan cloaking technology. After the big announcement they waited much longer than they led us to believe would be the case, then secretly started airing these episodes Mondays at 3 AM. (If you’re setting your Tivo, that means have it ready Sunday night!) The results are amazing. They not only cleaned things up, it looks like the elves added some CGI magic. Now this has caused controversy with purists when it was done to some newer movies that had stunning effects to begin with, and people may not like it on older movies that they feel need to look a certain, grainy, way. However, with Star Trek this is just right. They were the beginning of trying to show things clearly, but the very, shoestring budget, beginning. Watching the Enterprise battle a doomsday device that has texture and presence is worth seeing it for the thousandth time. It’s no longer a Thanksgiving style horn-of-plenty eating planets, it’s a genuine mother-of-all-Deathstars doomsday device.
Believe me, this makes the Professor chuckle. When these were new he might have repeated, “I never think about the future, it comes soon enough.” However, by that he really meant that he wouldn’t waste time worrying about what he can’t control. He certainly was an advocate of thinking about and preparing for what we can control. I’d like to think he’d agree that celebrating the wonder of the possibilities of the future is worth a bit of one’s time, it can fuel the inspiration that is so crucial to the type discovery to which he dedicated his life. He’d love the view of a future in which petty differences between peoples had been resolved. He’d wholeheartedly back a Federation obsessed with peaceful exploration. He advocated one world government, albeit as the least of all governmental evils, how outstanding would it be to have one galactic government, especially if it was well intentioned due to being run and populated by more civilized beings. He’d prefer an unarmed future, but he came to understand the importance of having the strength to stand up to evil forces, and the strength to protect and aid others. He’d love the episodes where they’d find what seems to be a monster and wind up reasoning with it instead of shooting. (I asked him to leave things like Faster Than Light travel for another discussion)
When these were new and they were the future, it was all that simple. Today, looking back at what the future used to be tells us a lot about the past. For a brief period people were more optimistic–tailfins on your car, anyone? You never know if it will be retrofitted with Jet engines in a couple years! Perhaps the popular ideals were more altruistic, or at least more secure and less defensive. Oh, and ideals were actually idealistic. Of course, all of this was happening at the same time as the Cold War, the Viet Nam War, civil unrest and… But we can look back, clean up the tapes, put in detail and special effects that were never there. We can even make a show about an Enterprise before the first Enterprise.
This last part is fascinating: The show that invented continuity and that in turn incubated fanatic followings that started the practice of obsessing over every detail tried to appeal to a new audience by rewriting or ignoring every scrap of its own history. Now history is always written by the victors, which in this case means a production team, and rewritten by the next set of anarchists, (again, productions teams) but alienating your own following by training them to be historians and then pulling the rug out from under that history is, not logical to say the least.
Einstein once said, “Children don’t heed the life experiences of their parents, and nations ignore history, Bad lessons always have to be learned anew.” So the producers ignored the lessons and repeated NBCs mistakes with the franchise. And presidents, Prime Ministers, Kings and Dictators, all ignore history except to rewrite it to support what they’re going to do anyway.
So now we have the originals to look at with rose colored glasses. The past of the future and the future of the past never looked so good. Illusion, reality, it’s all what we make it, as Albert said, “Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistant one.” To paraphrase Star Trek, “They have their illusion, and you have your reality. May you find your way as pleasant.”
The Toy Show Is In Town, N. Korea talks nukes, Women Like Men’s Sweat.
BIRDS OF A FEATHER
I knew the toy industry was having it’s big event next week, because I’m going. For those who have wished to get into this industry-only event and wondered what it was really like let me assure you, winning a trip to Willie Wonka’s Candy Factory has nothing on the toy show.
Before we go on, answer this question, for real. Out loud: Were you just reading along to see where this was going, or had you already wondered what this was doing in Albert Einstein’s Blog about important things? The only headline should have been about North Korea considering joining the world in not using nukes to blow it all up. That’s important. I can assure you that the Professor approves of reducing nukes. He once said “The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving pf an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.” He is fascinated that we managed to survive so long since the invention of the bomb without solving these existing problems that lead to wars, yet we have destroyed neither ourselves nor the nukes. The smart money Sixty years ago said it would have been one or the other a long time before now.
We could have discussed the announcement that a scientific study found that there are components of male sweat that can turn a woman on. In fact, it can even cause her production of cortisol to increase, a quality that might have clinical value in treating certain conditions.
Obviously this information about the value of maintaining a musky smell would be important to Albert in his “diversions,” but diversions don’t merit the front page here. I admit, the nuke story is important, but come on, we’re talking TOYS!
During the 1950s, perhaps earlier, and definitely lasting into the 1960s there was a certain toy on the market. It was (generally) shaped like a bird. It’s feet were actually specialized wheels, basically an X with suction cups at each tip. It was claimed to be able to roll its way up any smooth surface, but in reality it needed the perfect smoothness of a mirror. I had one, wished I had kept it.
Now I wasn’t the only kid who ever had such a toy. When I brought this up a friend told me he once had one, even thinks the name was something like “Li’l Orbie.” I’ve scoured the internet, called toy experts, museums, you name it. No luck. You see, one overgrown kid who loved playing with just such a toy was Professor Einstein. He found this particular toy to be so intriguing that he used it as a window into people. When a new person was brought into his home to be introduced to him, he would chat politely, but only briefly. If he thought this person might be worth getting to know the toy bird would appear. If the potential friend was in any way put-off or too grown up for such nonsense, Einstein could not waste much time on this person. On the other hand, if the visitor understood the wonder of the toy, and shared the joy of imagination and play, the guest received an invitation to really chat with the Professor. Welcome to the inner circle!
So, when I posed the question earlier, were you just cruising through? Stick around, we can work with you. Were you thinking “why is he talking about a toy of all things? Don’t panic, there’s hope for you. Maybe it was more like, “Let’s see how he justifies this toy talk…” In that case you gave me a chance, so I guess I should return the favor. If you were thinking, “I can’t believe he’s wasting time on stupid toy nonsense,” well then I may just be wasting time with you. Still, nobody needs “perspective-expansion” more, so as long as it doesn’t take any extra time on my part, or the Professor’s, stay with us.
Were you that rare bird who was thinking; “Finally, a serious blog on current events and world issues that is talking toys, this should be good!” If that’s you, welcome to the inner circle.
And if you have any info on that toy and how to find one, they would really appreciate that info at FrankEinstein.org
From Spaceflight to Attempted Murder Charge
“A NASA astronaut, Capt. Lisa Marie Nowak, has been charged with the attempted murder of a rival for the affections of a fellow astronaut.”
I could not resist bringing this to the Professor’s attention. It involved a person from the world of science and technology, a person of proven intelligence, and a person who, not unlike the Professor himself, liked to have fun with “distractions”. Were it not so seriously violent a situation then the fact that this was a female would cause the professor to chuckle. On the one hand he had an old world upbringing about things like “woman’s work.” On the other hand he was a great supporter of the efforts of individual women who chose to do “men’s work.” Einstein had fun “pressing people’s buttons” with all kinds of devil’s-advocates style comments when it came to things like these, but his actions always supported one idea: Humans, and human intellects, all eventually embody potentials for greatness and folly no matter what outer body houses that human mind.
After reading this article I reminded “him” (or the personification thereof as described in my opening postings) of something he once said: “Falling in love is not at all the most stupid thing that people do– but gravitation cannot be held responsible for it.”
His repsonse was along these lines: Now falling in love may not be stupid in and of itself, but it cetainly has caused people to do many stupid things, as in the case of this well educated, married mother of three! I have always been the expert witness defending any accusations against gravity as an accomplice in these acts. In this case it seems the woman may actually have fallen in love with a co-worker while in zero G, so along with the expert witness gravitation indeed has an alibi!!!
“A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth”
Albert Einstein was a great practitioner of keeping it simple. He did not bog down his life with anything that would complicate things, leaving him free to ponder what truly mattered. (There’s a pun in there). His alleged absent mindedness was because of this incredible fixation on what counted. He was actually oblivious to what he was filtering out, true absent mindedness would also lose attention from the subject at hand. There are many stories about his showing up with one sock or no socks or a mis-matched pair, and many fabled reasons for why. The truth is he thought shoes covered his feet and socks were a needless complication in his life. Likewise, he never used shaving cream. When he received some as a gift he raved about how much easier and less painful the shaving experience became, but when it ran out he did not replenish his supply. He was asked (paraphrasing) “We thought you liked it, why have you stopped?” He replied that having to keep it in stock is too much of a complication, even though it was wonderful while it lasted.
So let’s put a check in the wouldn’t-complicate-his-life-with-a-computer-when-a-pen-and-pad-will-do column.
On the other hand, when asked to be on game shows he responded that these are set up to see how many useless facts one has memorized, not how much depth of understanding one has. (Paraphrased) “Why should I waste effort committing to memory facts and constants I can look up when needed?” A computer is a wonderful resource for storing such facts, or for seeking them online. He would most assuredly appreciate this. He might also appreciate the ease of editing the many papers he was forced to write, and the ease with which he could have things checked by more worldly, diplomatic colleagues before getting himself into trouble. It is very likely he would not want to deal with any upkeep of the computer, perhaps he’d even have someone else use it to research facts for him. But we’d definitely have to put a check in the would-have-some-sort-of-access-to-a-computer file.
Okay, so I have the Professor agreeing to allow a computer to enter his workspace on a limited basis. As he was swamped (and mystified) by the attention/demands placed on him by the communication systems of the mid-20th century, he would not want to complicate things further by being too accessible. “I am a magnet for all the crackpots in the world, but they are of interest to me, too. A favorite pastime of mine is to reconstruct their thinking processes. I feel genuinely sorry for them, that’s why I try to help them.” If I may read between the lines a bit, (using many other quotes and stories to arrive at the following conclusion) the Professor doesn’t really resent the fact that people demand things of him because they are fascinated by him and by celebrity in general. His problem is that he is fascinated in turn, and it is a complication he cannot afford. He cannot say no, he gets very sidetracked, so it’s best to limit his exposure. There is a reason he surrounded himself with strong women to run his affairs who were good at saying no to the public and selectively turning down invitations.
Einstein wanted to connect the whole world, to take down borders and make one society of humankind. He would applaud the way the internet accommodates a borderless society. On the other hand, people put too much faith in things they hear and especially things they read. In his day he saw the repeating cycle of deceitful speakers being given public forums to stir up trouble, and resultant repeated world wide catastrophes. More open public forums give a chance to oppose these, but they also give every deceitful voice a public forum. As for the constant requests for him to contribute to the forums of his day, I believe he was quite to the point when he wrote this blurb: “Professor Einstein begs you to treat your publications for the time being as if he were already dead.”
So, it seems, Albert Einstein would not want to waste his time blogging, or giving opinions in general. On the other hand, he did say “The world needs heroes and it’s better they be harmless men like me than villains like Hitler.” He would feel it to be his duty to counter some dangerous words put out there, and he understood the power his celebrity lent to the cause, even if the human infatuation with celebrity itself made so little sense to him.
He will not blog, which is fine, since although he was alive when he asked to be treated as if he were already deceased, he is not alive to blog at the present time. He would, most likely, allow blogging to be done for him on a limited basis, if he saw a need. However, he would ask people to take his opinion as food for thought, and then please: THINK FOR YOURSELF.
Albert Einstein has received an invitation to Blog
I can definitely assure everyone that the Professor is taking this invitation to blog into consideration. I have explained to him all about blogging, and the online world in general, and he is in deep thought over the enitre concept. If he decides that there is a productive purpose, he will accept the invitation.
As for myself, I answer to the name Mark Hertzberg (among quite a few other stagenames, aliases, AKAs and nom de plumes) but the professor doesn’t like remembering irrelevant things like names, so that’s not important. After all, he is the man who forgot his own name once at the Swiss border. What is important is that I will be “mediating” his blog, a function I have become quite suited for. I have been Relatively immersed in all things Einstein for several years in order to write and produce a play, “Thought Experiments.” One key to its format is the Professor’s habit of personifying things in his head and letting the concepts speak for themselves in an internal dialogue. So, turnabout being fair play, I have reconstructed him as a personification for my own internal dialogue. He was a great help in the theatrical project and I have asked him to branch out.
There exists anecdotal evidence from reliable witnesses that the following scenario played out more than once: At a social gathering someone is introduced to Einstein and asks him what he thinks of some topic being discussed. Einstein would turn and walk to a corner without saying a word. Eventually he would find the person and give an answer. Unlike so many of us who can’t resist any chance to hear ourselves let everyone know what we SAY about something when asked what we think, he had too much respect for the process called thinking to answer. First he would go and think about it!
The few times in his life he was forced to speak before having proper time to think, he came to be unhappy with the consequences. He surely would never blog an opinion simply to see his words out there. That is why he would think through the invitation itself before responding.
In truth, I’m not sure he’d like the idea of blogging, or how he’d react to life on the internet in general. Would he even allow a computer to complicate his life? He’s thinking about it. Stay tuned for further developments…