Carpe Diem

Lucky draw

Barry Neil Shrum — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:45:07 +0000

Faced with the enormous sum of lucky draws behind the success of the evolutionary game, one may “legitimately wonder to what extent this success is actually written into the fabric of the universe. -Christian de Duve

Distrust the future

Barry Neil Shrum — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 17:12:54 +0000

While we speak, envious time will have {already} fled, Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future.

-Quintus Horatius Flaccus (“Horace”) from the Latin poem Odes 1.11

Music of the spheres

Barry Neil Shrum — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:39:51 +0000

What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.

-Einstein to Joseph Lewis, Apr. 18, 1953

They (atheists) are creatures who can’t hear the music of the spheres.*

-The Expanded Quotable Einstein, p. 214

*some have speculated that by this, Einstein was referring to the “spherical standing wave structure of matter in space.”

Beautiful & profound

Barry Neil Shrum — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:33:15 +0000

The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.

Albert Einstein – The Merging of Spirit and Science

A subtle, illimitable spirit

Barry Neil Shrum — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:22:44 +0000

If there is any such concept as a God, it is a subtle spirit, not an image of a man that so many have fixed in their minds. In essence, my religion consists of a humble admiration for this illimitable superior spirit that reveals itself in the slight details that we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds .

-From The Private Albert Einstein, Buckly & Weakland, pp. 85-87.

Such a leap

Barry Neil Shrum — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:16:07 +0000

There comes a point where the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap.

-Einstein: The Life and Times, Ronald W. Clark, p. 662

Eternal Mystery

Barry Neil Shrum — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:01:19 +0000

The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility…The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.

—Albert Einstein
quoted in The Quotable Einstein, Calaprice, p. 197

The Mysterious – part 2

Barry Neil Shrum — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:59:57 +0000

It was the experience of mystery . . . that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms–it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.

The World as I See It – Einstein

The Mysterious – part 1

Barry Neil Shrum — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:56:31 +0000

The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.

In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.

-Einstein in a 1932 speech to the German League of Human Rights in Berlin, documented in the Appendix to Einstein: A Life in Science, White & Gribbon, p 262.

The thoughts of God

Barry Neil Shrum — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:49:17 +0000

I want to know how God created this world. I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.

— From E. Salaman, “A Talk With Einstein,” The Listener 54 (1955), pp. 370-371, quoted in Jammer, p. 123.