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Einstein Sleuthing

by Nancy Rosenbaum, associate producer

I stumbled upon a perplexing puzzle as we were fine-tuning our upcoming show with Buddhist teacher and author Matthieu Ricard. Krista had included a quote in the script by Albert Einstein that needed to be fact checked. This seemed pretty straightforward…at first.

Albert Einstein is one of those famous people who gets quoted a lot, sometimes inaccurately. My colleagues at SOF were already familiar with this from producing two companion programs about Einstein back in 2007.

Following is the quote from Einstein as it appears in The Quantum and the Lotus, a book Matthieu Ricard wrote together with astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan:

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Plug this quote into Google and you get hits galore, including references to this 1972 New York Times article. But if you look at the typed version at the beginning of this post, you’ll notice some differences — specifically the last two sentences. So where did the quote come from exactly, and in what context did Einstein originally write or say these words?

My search led me to Dear Professor Einstein, a collection of Einstein’s correspondence that features a version of the quote in question, which closely matches the copy we obtained from the Albert Einstein Archives at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Through Facebook, I contacted the book’s editor, Alice Calaprice, who explained that Einstein had penned his famous words in 1950 to Robert S. Marcus, a man who was distraught over the death of his young son from polio. Calaprice concurred that people often misquote Einstein — and that primary sources are the key to setting the record straight. “When we don’t have originals to prove otherwise,” wrote Calaprice, “falsehoods are sometimes inadvertently repeated even by scholars.”

To that end, Barbara Wolff, an archivist at the Albert Einstein Archives, sent us the actual image of the handwritten versions of Einstein’s letter in German and English below. I wonder about who translated Einstein’s words and whether some meaning may have gotten lost.

As I’ve resurfaced from all this Einstein sleuthing, I’ve been pondering my responsibility as producer to verify the quote’s accuracy. But, as I look at Einstein’s handwritten letter with its scrawls and cross outs, I’m reminded that language and ideas are not fixed like cement. Still, it’s my job to get it right.

What’s funny is that after all this effort, we debated ditching the quote altogether. Matthieu Ricard is such a rich voice, did we really need to bring Einstein into the conversation? In the end though, we corrected the quote, and kept Einstein, “sounding more than a little bit Buddhist,” as Krista put it, in the final script read.

Special thanks to Barbara Wolff and the Albert Einstein Archives at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, which holds copyright for these archival materials.

stuffedstuff:

The Teaching Specimen

I spotted this in the Oxford Museum of Natural History, while I was there doing some research. I’m not quite sure I think about it, except that it struck my contemporary eyes as being both weird and sad.

I’m going to guess it dates from Victorian times - the “Heyday of Natural History” - when shooting as many things as possible and then displaying them in this seemingly detached, objective way was seen as the height of scientific nature appreciation. In a way, they were trying to classify themselves as scientists as much as they were classifying the animals.

One thing that’s strange about this is that it’s somewhere between a pressed flower and taxidermy. It’s just a little sample of a specimen on a display card. But those sad, dull eyes have been deliberately added by a taxidermist, so that instead of being a straightforward fragment of an organism (as a skull might be) it is able to stare blankly back out at us. There’s something about the angle of it, too. You may not be able to tell from the picture, but it’s attached at around 45˚ - not laid flat (like a nearby duck’s head), nor upright as it would have been in life. It makes me want to tilt it up a bit, just to give it some dignity back.

This was clearly intended as a teaching specimen. But all I can learn about the bird from this piece is its Linnaean classification and that it had a hooked beak for tearing prey. Instead, what I really end up uncovering are some of my own emotional responses to taxidermy and its history.

owsposters:

Student Loan Debt (updated)

Download the poster pack

Author’s note: If even Rachel Maddow has to issue a correction from time-to-time, I suppose we should be permitted just one after nearly three months of operation, issuing as we have from one to three posters per day over that time. At any rate, kudos go to Rebecca Leber, a bright young research assistant at thinkprogress.org, for pointing out better tabulated figures than we included in the original edition of this poster. Can we have a research assistant, too? :-) But whether this poster version or the prior one, both get the core point across: that student loan debt has very far outpaced population growth, and overall has accumulated into what should be a real fright for every American. While many analysts voice concern over an American lost decade, the outsized growth of student debt goes beyond that. It foretells of the dearth of the American Dream for millions, and not just a lost decade but largely a lost generation, and likely even beyond, as the children of current indebted college graduates inherit scant to no head start from their parents, thus perpetuating a cycle.