<![CDATA[Have you ever heard Albert Einstein speak? I mean, I've seen plenty of photographs of the guy, and read several pieces of his work, but I've never heard him before, at least not until now.
This recording is from fall of 1941, “The Common Language of Science” to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and it’s really awesome. In this essay, Einstein talks about the incongruity of language and thought before putting emphasis on the matter of the two (language and thought) are not entirely deliberate, saying:
In solitude, and yet in cooperative effort as regards the final effect, they created the spiritual tools for the technical revolutions which have transformed the life of mankind in the last centuries. Their system of concepts has served as a guide in the bewildering chaos of perceptions so that we learned to grasp general truths from particular observations.
Einstein also touches on science as a means rather than as a goal, and it’s notable to think about this being something spoken around the happenings of World War II. It’s actually pretty cool though to see how his thoughts here are still totally relevant today, despite the words being spoken over 70 years ago. Fascinating.
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