The world as i see it
"The World as I See It" is a treasury of the thoughts and life observations of one of the greatest minds and hearts of our century. The Einstein who is revealed in these writings is charming, witty, shrewd, keenly perceptive, and deeply concerned for humanity. Abridged.
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- In school I came across `The World as I See It` by Albert Einstein.
It resonated with me on many levels and even made me actually think about things which I was somehow not thinking through just because no one questions them in general, especially in a country where patriotism is celebrated as a virtue. It is full of wonderful ideas and parts of it have been thought through in great depth.
Some excerpts which I really liked and have sort of stayed imprinted in my brain since:
> This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of the herd nature, the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed.
> I am convinced that the great men--those whose achievements, even though in a restricted sphere, set them above their fellows--are animated to an overwhelming extent by the same ideals. But they have little influence on the course of political events. It almost looks as if this domain, on which the fate of nations depends, had inevitably to be given over to violence and irresponsibility.
> What an extraordinary situation is that of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he feels it. But from the point of view of daily life, without going deeper, we exist for our fellow-men--in the first place for those on whose smiles and welfare all our happiness depends, and next for all those unknown to us personally with whose destinies we are bound up by the tie of sympathy.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_as_I_See_It_(book)
- As an aside, I think Einstein's religious attitudes are underreported and understudied.
There are a couple great sections in The World as I See it [1]:
> I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.
> A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - 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
> I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
> I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.
Here's a longer quote that is a little more substantive:
> there is found a third level of religious experience, even if it is seldom found in a pure form. I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those who do not experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance. Indications of this cosmic religious sense can be found even on earlier levels of development—for example, in the Psalms of David and in the Prophets. The cosmic element is much stronger in Buddhism, as, in particular, Schopenhauer's magnificent essays have shown us. The religious geniuses of all times have been distinguished by this cosmic religious sense, which recognizes neither dogmas nor God made in man's image. Consequently there cannot be a church whose chief doctrines are based on the cosmic religious experience. It comes about, therefore, that we find precisely among the heretics of all ages men who were inspired by this highest religious experience; often they appeared to their contemporaries as atheists, but sometimes also as saints.
This is the conception of Mysticism I've tried to describe a bit in the past [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_as_I_See_It_(book)
- Here is, apparently, Antonio Socci's blog: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.goo...
[Original Italian text sentences alternating with translated English sentences:]
Nel microscopico la grandezza della carica dell’elettrone ei rapporti col protone: “i valori di questi numeri” scrive Hawking “sembrano essere stati esattamente coordinati per rendere possibile lo sviluppo della vita”. In the microscopic size of the charge of electronics and proton relations with "the values of these numbers," Hawking writes, "seem to have been exactly coordinated to enable the development of life." E poi la velocità di espansione dell’universo: se un secondo dopo il Big Bang fosse stata un pochino superiore o appena inferiore sarebbe accaduta la catastrofe. And then the speed of expansion of the universe: if a second after the Big Bang had been slightly higher or lower would be just the disaster happened. Diceva Albert Einstein che nelle leggi della natura “si rivela una ragione così superiore che tutta la razionalità del pensiero e degli ordinamenti umani è al confronto un riflesso assolutamente insignificante”. Albert Einstein said that in the laws of nature "is one reason so superior that all rational thought and human systems is a reflection of a comparison is absolutely insignificant."
The rest of the blogpost is standard "the world is too perfect to be of natural origin" ID stuff. Are the quotes above what were in the book (Indagine su Gesù) regarding Einstein's and Hawking's alleged beliefs in God?
Apparently, the original Einstein quote in English was: http://www.google.com/search?q=einstein+%22utterly+insignifi...
But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.
This page http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/einstein_religion.html says the quote is from:
Albert Einstein, The World as I See It, Secaucus, New Jersey: The Citadel Press, 1999, pp. 24-29.
That page includes the book's preceding 11 paragraphs, in which Einstein states that belief in God is naive and childish.
- in the first chapter of the book (page 19), there is this paragraph [...] "Einstein said that the natural laws are revealing such a superior reason, that all of human thinking and ordering are only an insignificant reflection, compared to them."
Thank you. I included the actual Einstein quote, which is taken from his book The World as I See It, in my other reply: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462856
Here it is, again:
But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.
The quoted text appears in Einstein's book immediately after the paragraph in which Einstein states that belief in God is naive and childish. Einstein's book is online at Google Books. This link leads directly to the page with the quote: http://books.google.com/books?id=JFXWosy8ywYC&pg=PA38...
