What Albert Einstein really said!

 

All photos courtesy of Unsplash

Albert Einstein is supposed to have said, ‘Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.’ From these words, many people have got great comfort and encouragement, and rightly so. However, there’s every indication that this quotation is, in fact, a fake as far as Einstein is concerned. The quotation is not in any definitive, authenticated list of Einstein’s many sourced sayings or quotable quotes. Actually, the first written reference you can find to it is in a book written by Matthew Kelly, published in 2004, nearly half a century after Albert Einstein’s death in 1955. 

 

However, at the same time, there are quite a number of genuine Albert Einstein quotations about spiritual matters. Let’s have a look at some of them for a few minutes. The first area we’ll look at is Einstein’s view of the universe and its creator. 

Climate Change

 

All photos courtesy of Unsplash

I’m sure you’ve noticed that commenters on weather conditions in the UK over the last few years increasingly include such words as ‘brightest, coldest, driest, dullest, hottest, stillest, wettest, or windiest’. Even the most sceptical among us must surely recognise that extremes of weather are unmistakably the order of the day. 

 

Most people put this climate change down to global warming – currently running at about 1.5 degrees Celsius per century. Over the same time scale as this so-far relentless increase in temperature, the global carbon dioxide level has risen by over 22% and is still increasing, in fact, accelerating! As this is due to human activity, the story would seem clear – carbon dioxide is a so-called greenhouse gas that causes a temperature increase and that, in turn, results in a disturbance of the earth’s weather systems. Really, something should be done about it. However, some people are still not convinced. 

20% of people in the UK admit to loneliness!

I discovered recently that ‘1 A national commission investigating loneliness in the UK in January 2017 showed that a fifth of the population privately admits they are "always or often lonely”’.

Herbert Van Zeller, 1905-1984, once wrote ‘the soul hardly ever realises it, but whether he is believer or not, his loneliness is really a homesickness for God’. That’s quite a statement. Loneliness is deeper than a lack of company and it affects people in all stages of life.

They wouldn’t believe him!

Late on the night of the 14^th of April 1912, the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic - the largest ship then afloat - was steaming at almost full speed across the Atlantic when it collided with an iceberg. The damage caused by the collision was so extensive that in less than three hours the ship had broken in half and sunk. This ‘the Ship of Dreams’ became a nightmare, and over 1500 passengers and crew drowned in the dark freezing water, with only just over 700 being saved. 

The ship was equipped with the latest radios, operated by the Marconi International Marine Communication Company. These radios had a daytime range of 250 miles, but at night up to 2000 miles. The Marconi wireless operators on board - Jack Phillips and Harold Bride - began sending out desperate Morse code SOS radio messages to passing ships pleading with them to come and help.  

Meanwhile, 3000 miles away in the loft of his family’s water-powered corn mill in Pontllanfraith near Blackwood in south Wales, UK, 25-year-old Arthur Moore – Artie to his family and friends - was using his homemade, crude radio equipment, operated by a generator attached to the mill’s water wheel. Artie was already well known by the public because six months earlier he had picked up the Italian government’s Declaration Of War on Libya on his radio, and this had made the front page of the national newspaper The Daily Sketch. Artie was listening to his radio early on the fateful morning of the 15^th of April when around 5 a.m. he picked up faint Morse code radio signals from the Titanic: ‘Require immediate assistance. Come at once we have struck an iceberg. Sinking, we are putting the women off in the boats’. He continued decoding and writing down the signals he was receiving, hardly believing the words he was writing.