So I just finished reading My Einstein, and I have to say it was a great read. The book consists of 24 essays by the “World’s Leading Thinkers”, some of which were outstanding, others mediocre, others eh…

Anyways, join me as I share my favorite quotes from the books.

My Three Einsteins by Corey S. Powell

Yet his snipe against mysticism told only half the story, since the outspokenly atheistic Einstein frequently adopted the language of theology.

“What I see in Nature is a grand design that we can understand only imperfectly, one which a responsible person must look at with humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling and has nothing to do with mysticism.” - A. Einstein

Einstein’s cosmos leaves no place for a literal heaven, no physical realm where our earthly laws of physics do not apply. But in religion as in science, when Einstein overthrew the old order he exposed a new, deeper order. He found a religious interpretation of this deeper order in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and came to regard physical law itself as divine. “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of human beings,” he said.

He acknowledged that a truly universal theory of physics has theological implications; at the same time, he worried intensely about the destructive power of religions whose adherents imagine they can pray for their success or for others’ failure.

Einstein and Absolute Reality by Anton Zeilinger

The discovery that (trivial exceptions aside) quantum physics makes only probabilistic predictions is certainly one of the deepest philosophical discoveries of science. After all, the program of science over the centuries has been investigatio causarum, the investigation of causes. And after centuries of digging deeper and deeper along the causal chain, we finally came to a stop. The individual quantum events happen by chance. There is no hidden cause, no hidden reason. But fundamental randomness is unbearable to us. Whenever something, anything, happens, we always ask for the reason — why it happened just this way and not that way. We don’t give up until we find comfort in settling on some cause, no matter how implausible it might be. And now, suddenly, quantum physics tells us of events that just happen — happen without any specific cause. Einstein was disturbed by this.

I just want to point out that Janna Levin’s piece was written so brilliantly that I have the desire to seek out more writings by her. Her choice of words and subsequent flow is so beautiful that it creates such a jealous tendency in me. I wish I could write like her!

The Greatest Discovery Einstein Didn’t Make by Rocky Kolb

If your first thought of the day is the seeming insignificance of a single human life in the enormity of space and time, you might be tempted to pull the covers over your head and go back to sleep. But instead of being intimidated by the enormity of the universe, some people get out of bed and dedicate their lives to trying to understand its origin, evolution, and fate.

Einstein in the Twilight Zone by Lawrence M. Krauss

It is an interesting sociological fact that societies associate artists with their art in different ways; the ancient Greeks, for example, viewed the products of human creativity as separate from those who produced them. Thus, unlike in the present era, there was no obsessive cult of personality surrounding celebrity.

Finally, I would just like to say - if you have some spare time and $15 for this book, it’s a great read. I thoroughly enjoyed it.