Einstein was contradictory about his support for Israel with his, “Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.”

Wonderful! Thanks for that.

- Greg

As it seems for all great teachers, he went well beyond just teaching his core subject, no matter what it was. I never did get to any of his “Physics X” ‘courses’, sort of an open microphone for approaching and understanding physics in its bewildering variety. Friends who did tell me that, no matter whether the questions came from freshmen or full professors, or whom he dragged in to tag-team on a question, he kept it lively, fun, and understandable for folks across a range of abilities.

Like many great teachers, he truly enjoyed being out front and bringing people along on the journey of learning. Most of my exposure to Feynman was through his “Lectures” book series and through the theater. (!) He’d do cameos in many of Caltech’s musicals through the last several years of his life — I narrowly missed being in a “chorus-line of janitors” with him when we put on “How to Succeed at Business (Without Really Trying)” — and even backstage he’d be there, helping a student learn to puzzle out some concept in calculus, or egging a graduate student on to really think through the consequences of assumptions made in her research work.

Above all, he resparked and fanned the wonder we all had/have. That I think is what marked him to us as one of the truly great teachers.

I think most of the confusion about Einsteins faith stems from the fact that he himself was quite ambiguous. As the letters you referred to show, he was indifferent, and sometimes hostile, to the concept of organized religion.

His feelings toward Zionism typified why there is so much confusion. Initially, he was against the idea for a state of Israel, but later became a supporter and was even offered the post of President. In truth, he was closest to Spinoza’s conception. He believed in a unifying force and order to the universe, but probably not a God that intervened in the world.

This was the basis of his skepticism towards Quantum Mechanics of which he said “God does not play dice with he universe.”

“Einstein, stop telling God what to do!” Niels Bohr replied.

- Greg

Thanks for commenting and thanks for sharing you blog post with me. I would like to raise an interesting point that you might not have known:

When Duncan Watts first started thinking about Social Networks, he thought back to the Isaac Asimov books he loved so much as a kid. To solve the riddle of how everybody could be 6 handshakes away from the president, he thought of two extreme examples, cavemen who whose connections all knew each other and spacemen who only communicated remotely.

The latter example, of course, came from The Naked Sun – the same book you referred to in your post! The mathematical model he created became the foundation of modern network theory.

- Greg

Another point is that Feynman was a very gifted and very successful teacher, who said that teaching wasn’t something that he could live without. Einstein never really taught.

- Greg

http://www.inbound-marketing-automation.ca/blog/2009/11/24/the-evolution-of-our-digital-senses/

Whereas Einstein couldn’t care less about delivery. He used to say that if he could make a ten-year old understand what he was trying to say his communication performance would be more than satisfactory.

You’re right, Greg, at the confluence between the disappearing Sephardi ‘domination’ and the take over of western Europe by Ashkenazim (and when culturally, Kakania was at its peak) Einstein preferred abstractions as a way of escaping to safer levels from the tumultuous reality of his time (as Kurt Lewin would explain in his field analysis); hence the ‘comfortable’ job at the patent office. Although he was not religious, Einstein was seeking spirituality (true, like Spinoza, who considered that his conversion in itself was no reason to consider that he had lost his core beliefs). It is less known that Einstein even said a couple of times (at parties) that astrology is more honest than organized religion (Hear, hear Bill Maher!)

I think that ‘Feynstein’ himself would have liked a job at the patent office in order to encounter all kinds of oddities uttered by people with ‘original thinking’ and be highly amused if not mentally aroused. There nothing greater in business life than marketing someone’s (unfinished) great idea. Of course, I don’t refer to Bill Gates.

Ooof, what a rant!