Maybe Einstein Uses a “Four-Dimensional” Language (Jun, 1939)
Maybe Einstein Uses a “Four-Dimensional” Language
Your magazine is tops with me because of the way it takes scientific topics and projects and makes them accessible and understandable to the layman. It would be tragic if the layman were forced to gather all his scientific knowledge by deciphering the language of the scientist of today. Even the average college professor cannot fully comprehend the following words of Einstein: “The empirical quantum of the gravitational equation bridges the corpuscles of the material eschatology by subliminal energy evolved counterclockwise out of analogous infinities.” More power to the editor!—S.A.S., Moorhead, Minn.
That’s not an actual Einstein quote!
I’ve often wondered what was in the ‘Letters to the Editor’.
If this is a representative letter, I’ll have to rethink that
“The Greatest Generation” appellation.
Why can’t the scientists just say what they MEAN??
Oh.
Yes! Damn those ivory-tower eggheads and their “language!” If I can’t understand it they must be just making junk up!
The original letter was written in crayon.
“Plans that is currently helpful will for the new originating out of a functioning action necessarily generate a domestic discernible pattern of purpose…”
That’s a quote from an old Pat Paulsen bit on the old Smothers Brothers TV show. Why I can recall it after 40 years is anyone’s guess.
That Einstein quote can’t be real. It doesn’t make sense. “Eschatology” is what clinches it. (Look it up.)
(I’m a linguistics professor. They pay me to know what words mean.)
Absolutely; the quote does not make sense. Did the letter-writer make it up, or did he quote it from some misleading source?
Google Books turns up a reference, from 1936, three years earlier, in the Motion Picture Herald, for this quote, claiming it was in the newspaper – so it’s entirely possible that some newspaper reporter made it up as a joke.