The Importance of Not Being Arcovazzi

Los Angeles, United States: Protesters hold up banners depicting Albert Einstein with the hashtag ‘#refugeeswelcome’ as they march on International Migrants Day. Photo: Mike Nelson/EPA.

愛因斯坦環 (Einstein ring)

Artwork © Cymae

From Here to There and Everywhere

逻辑能让你从A 到B；想像力能带你去任何地方。 Luójí néng ràng nǐ cóng A dào B; xiǎngxiàng lì néng dài nǐ qù rènhé dìfāng. Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. 亚伯‧爱因斯坦 (Albert Einstein)

Confucius meditating his next move in a Go game, while Einstein is pondering his move in a chess game, both on the same board. Sculptures at the UTAR Campus, Kampar, Malaysia. Photo: harpoftenstrings.wordpress.com.

Reunion

In the introduction that Albert Einstein wrote for Jacques Hannak’s posthumous biography of Emanuel Lasker, “Emanuel Lasker, The Life of a Chess Master” (Berlin, 1952), the Nobel Prize in Physics briefly sketched some of the composite and multifaceted personality of the “philosopher” Lasker and also replied, for the first time, to his objections to the theory of relativity. As Piergiorgio Odifreddi writes in his article “The Ideal Chessplayer”:

As might be expected of a man of such breadth of mind, Lasker’s interests extended as far as philosophy, with which even his chess books are imbued. In a critical essay aimed at refuting the relativity of time, he objected that it could not be excluded that the velocity of light in a complete vacuum was infinite, since no experiments could be done in a really complete vacuum. Einstein replied that, albeit sensible, the objection forced us to assume that the velocity of light was infinite in a vacuum, but finite and constant in the presence of any (even minimal) traces of matter. And he concluded, in his usual oracular way: a strong mind cannot take place of delicate fingers. Idem to say: speculative theories cannot be separated from practical experiments. Thus spoke the greatest physicist in the history.

The original hand-written text (in German language) of Einstein’s introduction is kept in the Albert Einstein Archives:

Born in the Renaissance

On December 24, 1928 Albert Einstein wrote a birthday letter on Emanuel Lasker’s 60th birthday, in which he said: “Emanuel Lasker is one of the strongest minds I ever met in my life. A Renaissance man, gifted with an untamable urge for liberty; averse to any social bonds [...]. As a genuine individualist and self-willed soul, he loves deduction; and inductive research leaves him cold [...]. I love his writings, irrespective of their content of truth, as the fruits of a great original and free mind”.

Courtesy of Einstein Archives Online.