Einstein on Falling in Love |
No, this trick won’t work. The same trick does not work twice. How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?
Actually, it was a comment to Thomas Morgan, a Nobel laureate, who was trying to explain him that how he was working from the perspective of physics and chemistry to resolve the problems of biology. And to which Einstein gave this snappy reply, as recollected by Henry Borsok, who was with them, at Cal Tech, where Morgan and Borsok work together.
Though it said in zest. But it gave us an access to the Einstein’s world, and how he thinks, especially when it comes to human endeavors like love.
During his short visit to England in 1933, and just before leaving Europe to US, he received a letter from an anonymous man (featured in Albert Einstein, the Human Side – New Glimpses From his Archives) discussing about the gravity and rotation of the Earth, how the Earth moves so fast that it seems to be rigid. He went on, in his all seriousness, that because of gravity a person on the spherical earth is sometimes upright, sometimes standing on his head, sometimes sticking out at right angles to the earth and sometimes, as he put it, “at left angles”. He then asks if perhaps it was while upside down, standing on their heads, that people fell in love and did other foolish things? Though Einstein didn’t reply to the man, but he jotted something in German.
Falling in love is not at all the most stupid thing that people do — but gravitation cannot be held responsible for it.
Now what does Einstein mean by these words, I think you know it. Einstein simply explains there is no reason for falling in love. You fall in love because you will fall in love somehow.
When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.
Einstein in jest spoke these words to his secretary Helen Dukas explaining the Theory of Relativity. But more than the theory, Einstein simply explains, a man can do anything for the woman he love, and even when how stupid or crazy it sounds. Quoted in The New Quotable Einstein