Einstein

(From a Science@NASA article by Dr. Tony Phillips)

Einstein didn't resist being told what to do, not so much, but he hated being told what was true.

In 1905, Einstein had just received his Ph.D. He wasn't beholden to a thesis advisor or any other authority figure." His mind was free to roam accordingly.

In Einstein's day, if you tried to say that light was made of particles, you found yourself disagreeing with physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Nobody wanted to do that. Maxwell's equations were enormously successful, unifying the physics of electricity, magnetism and optics. Maxwell had proved beyond any doubt that light was an electromagnetic wave. Maxwell was an Authority Figure.

... (It was because Einstein didn't care for authority, that he boldly got to solutions for problems like photo electric effect, before more experirnced Physicists like Max Planck did.)

In retrospect, Maxwell was right. Light is a wave. But Einstein was right, too. Light is a particle. This bizarre duality baffles Physics 101 students today just as it baffled Einstein in 1905. How can light be both? Einstein had no idea.

That didn't slow him down. Disdaining caution, Einstein adopted the intuitive leap as a basic tool. "I believe in intuition and inspiration," he wrote in 1931. "At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason."

...
"I have no special talents," Einstein claimed, "I am only passionately curious." And again: "The contrast between the popular assessment of my powers ... and the reality is simply grotesque." Einstein credited his discoveries to imagination and pesky questioning more so than orthodox intelligence.

Einstein: "The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious," he said. "It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science."

Why?

"Why?" is perhaps the most meaningless question in the universe.

It's a short-coming of the human mind, that it needs a reason for everything. 'Cause and Effect' is the single most important tenet of human thinking. Yet, it could be utterly irrelevant, or worse, counter-productive, when applied to the fundamentals of the universe itself. The ToE or God (or whatever is your favorite omnipotent, omniscient entity - OOE, we'll call it) doesn't need a reason to do things (or not do things). We humans, somehow, always do. Not only do we do, but it's the only way we can comprehend.

"Why did the OOE make us this way?", is a good question, indeed!

Badri Srirangam's Random Walk Thru Life

What the heck? I'll allow myself some vanity, and publish my opinions for all to read (or ignore).