How it happened that I in particular discovered the relativity theory, it seemed to lie in the following circumstance. The normal adult never bothers his head about space-time problems. Everything there is to be thought about it, in his opinion, has already been done in early childhood. I, on the contrary, developed so slowly that I only began to wonder about space and time when I was already grown up. In consequence I probed deeper into the problem than an ordinary child would have done.
Albert EinsteinRelated topics
adult begin child childhood circumstance consequence contrary done early everything following head lie normal opinion ordinary particular problem relativity space theory thought time wonder space-timeRelated quotes
It is a question of going beyond the description of mechanisms of interaction between locations and activities, in order to discover the structural laws of the production and functioning of the spatial forms studied... There is no specific theory of space, but quite simply a deployment and specification of the theory of social structure, in order to account for the characteristics of the particular social form, space and its articulation with other historically given, form and processes.
Manuel Castells
We tend to think of Freud as a great innovator, but the truth is that he himself rested, like a ship on an iceberg, on a huge body of theory and knowledge which had accumulated before his time. Even the famous Unconscious had made its appearance at least seven decades earlier. As for such supposedly modern phenomena as multiple personalities, the vogue for them began in the first half of the nineteenth century; and the first case in which the perpetrator of a murder pleaded amnesia, and got off, was in the eighteen eighties.
Margaret Atwood
The work of the sculptors of my age & somewhat older – Brancusi – Arp – Lipschitz – Laurens – Giacometti – has gradually approached a freedom & moved into space, compared with the sculptors of earlier period – Rodin – Maillol [. And] & the young sculptors of today all have the tendency to work with space – to model rather than carve – but it is very necessary in my opinion to have been able to get the refinement & completeness of a single form before going on to space form with no body.
Henry Moore
By his theory of relativity Albert Einstein has provoked a revolution of thought in physical science. ...Physical space and time are found to be closely bound... with... motion of the observer; and only an amorphous combination of the two is left... It is my aim to give an account of this work without introducing anything very technical in... mathematics, physics, or philosophy. ...[T]he task is one of interpreting a clear-cut theory... although perhaps not everyone would accept the author's views of its meaning.
Arthur Eddington
In fact, the science of thermodynamics began with an analysis, by the great engineer Sadi Carnot, of the problem of how to build the best and most efficient engine, and this constitutes one of the few famous cases in which engineering has contributed to fundamental physical theory. Another example that comes to mind is the more recent analysis of information theory by Claude Shannon. These two analyses, incidentally, turn out to be closely related.
Richard Feynman
