This (somewhat tongue-in-cheek-humorous) one-page book report –– about “which quotes REALLY DID originate from Einstein, and which ones are attributed falsely to him?” [attached] is worth sharing with all GEITP’ers. Beyond his towering contributions to Physics, Albert Einstein was an avid commentator on Education, Marriage, Money, the Nature of Genius, Music-Making, Politics, and more. His insights were legendary, as we are reminded by the recent publication of Volume 15 in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Even the website of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service enshrines his words (as quoted by his accountant): “The hardest thing in the world to understand … is the income tax.”
“There appears to be a bottomless pit of quotable gems to be mined from Einstein’s enormous archives,” notes Alice Calaprice, editor of The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (2011), but there might be a hint of despair in her comment. Indeed –– Einstein could be the “most quoted scientist in history”. The website Wikiquote has many more entries attributed to Einstein –– than for Aristotle, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, or Stephen Hawking, and even more than Einstein’s opinionated contemporaries Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw. However, how much of this super-abundance actually emanated with certainty from Einstein? See the attached article to find out. 🙂
Nature 3 May 2o18 557: 30