PhysMath Central Blog

Life stories

I've written before about the Peoples Archive - now it is the turn of The Observer, one of the more respected Sunday newspapers in the UK. 

'Now I would like to tell you a few stories,' says the late Hungarian physicist Edward Teller, who goes on to describe a late-era Einstein lecture he attended in Berlin at 21. 'I listened carefully and I understood everything... for the first 30 seconds.' Later, he bemoans his stupidity to a friend, who tells him: 'Yes, stupidity is a general human property.' 'The point that I did not know then but I know now,' Teller says, 'is that among the people who did not understand what Einstein was saying was Einstein himself.'

 More stories from Freeman Dyson, Benoit Mandelbrot, John Wheeler, Murray Gell-Mann and many others here.

Posted by Chris Leonard at 13:53    Comments (0)

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