Arcades

Arcades and Thoughts about Einstein
The Arcade on Marktgasse

This one's on Munstergasse. I liked the pretzel on the flag.


All these quotes are from the latest biography about Albert Einstein, titled Einstein: His Life and Universe, written by Walter Isaacson. The numbers to the side are the page numbers.

5 "His fingerprints are all over today's technologies. Photoelectric cells and lasers, nuclear power and fiber optics, space travel and even semi-conductors all trace back to his theories.

He made imaginative leaps and discerned great principles through thought experiments rather than my methodical inductions based on experimental data. The theories that resulted were at times astonishing, mysterious, and counterintuitive, yet they contained notions that could capture the popular imaginations: the relativity of space en time, E=mc2, the bending of light beams, and the warping of space.

7 [His] outlook made Einstein a rebel with a reverence for the harmony of nature, one who had just the right blend of imagination and wisdom to transform our understanding of the universe.

8-9 His slow development was combined with a cheeky rebelliousness toward authority, which led one schoolmaster to send him packing and another to amuse history by declaring that he would never amount to much. These traits made Albert Einstein the patron saint of distracted school kids everywhere. But they also helped to make him, or so he later surmised, the most creative scientific genius of modern times.
His cocky contempt for authority led him to question received wisdom in ways that well-trained acolytes in the academy never contemplated. And as for his slow verbal development, he came to believe that it allowed him to oversee with wonder the everyday phenomena that others took for granted. "When I ask myself how it happened that I in particular discovered the relativity theory, it seemed to like in the following circumstance," Einstein once explained. "The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time. But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and times only when I was already grown up. Consequently, I probed more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child would have."

14 Music was no mere diversion. On the contrary, it helped him think. "Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or faced a difficult challenge in his work," said his son Hans Albert, "he would take refuge in music and that would solve all his difficulties," The violin thus proved useful during the years he lived alone in Berlin, wrestling with general relativity. "He would often play his violin in his kitchen late at night, improvising melodies while he pondered complicated problems," a friend recalled. "Then, suddenly, in the middle of playing, he would announce excitedly, 'I've got it!' As if by inspiration, the answer to the problem would have come to him in the midst of music."

36 [Einstein] was also influenced by reading a lesser-known theorist, August Föppl, who in 1894 had written a popular text. . . . The only way to define motion, Föppl notes, is relative to another body.

37 Music continued to beguile Einstein. It was not so much an escape as it was a connection: to the harmony underling the universe, to the creative genius of the great composers, and to other people who felt comfortable bonding with more than just words. He was awed, both in music and in physics, by the beauty of harmonies.
69 The Second Law of Thermodynamics has many equivalent formulations. It says that heat flows naturally from hot to cold, but not the reverse. Another way to describe the Second Law is in terms of entropy, the degree of disorder and randomness in a system. Any spontaneous process tends to increase the entropy of a system. For example, perfume molecules drift out of an open bottle and into a room, but don't, at least in our common experience, spontaneously gather themselves together and all drift back into the bottle.

94 At the heart of Einstein's paper were questions that were bedeviling physics at the turn of the century, and in fact have done so from the time of the ancient Greeks until today: Is the universe made up of particles, such as atoms and electrons? Or is it an unbroken continuum, as a gravitational or electromagnetic field seems to be? And if both methods of describing things are valid at times, what happens when they intersect?

123-3 [On the Eurodynamics of Moving Bodies]. . . there is no absolute time. Instead all moving reference frames have their own relative time.

128 As he later put it, "There is no audible tick-tock everywhere in the world that can be considered as time,"

220 Space and time become players in the evolving cosmos. They come alive. Matter here causes space to warp there, which causes matter over here to move, which causes space way over there to warp even more, and so on. General relativity provide the choreography for an entwined cosmic dance of space, time, matter and energy. –Brian Greene

224 [After he finished delivering the four papers that would mathematically "prove" the General Theory of Relativity, he wrote a letter to Besso.] He signed himself, "contented but kaput."