Happy Birthday Albert Einstein

Born on π day! 

Albert Einstein during lecture in Vienna, 1921 by F. Schmutzer

"The cult of individual personalities is always, in my view, unjustified. To be sure, nature distributes her gifts variously among her children. But there are plenty of the well-endowed ones too, thank God, and I am firmly convinced that most of them live quiet, unregarded lives. It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few of them for boundless admiration, attributing superhuman powers of mind and character to them. This has been my fate, and the contrast between the popular estimate of my powers and achievements and the reality is simply grotesque." - Albert Einstein, 14 March 1879 - 18 April 1955

Year 2015 marks a very special anniversary. Hundred years ago, in 1915, Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity. This theory described gravity as a fundamental quality of space-time. It provides foundation for our current view of the expanding universe.  

Image source here

A Time Traveller Sends a Postcard

By Israel Weinstein

 

I found this card in ruins of a tourist trap, above a volcano.  

The air reeks of sulfur, but the view -   

storm-gray rocks and lava trails  to violent sea - 

magnificent desolation.  

What year this is, I cannot say,  

those readouts have burned out long ago.  

Once I charted the eons  

by light pollution or the ice caps  

but now I am content to leap  

like a child trusting his father will catch him.  

When will this find you? The day of your birth?  

Double feature at the drive in? 

The night we watched  bombs shed the night’s skin? 

The fall  day when rain finally stopped 

and you said  this is no way to live?  

You were right,  or will be. 

The water’s edge tints red.  

An algal bloom or some chemical morass.   

Rocks melt in the silence.  

I will investigate.  

Yours. 

 

 

Poem source here

Image source here