ALBERT EINSTEIN

One of the many things Albert Einstein may have regretted was his unwitting role in spreading the popular use of the phrase, "It's all relative." We use it to express the sense that nothing's as clear-cut as it seems, or as we might wish it to be.

Along with Kurt Gödel, Einstein helped do away with the Victorian expectation that all knowledge would sooner or later be amassed, and undid Newtonian certitude. Also like Gödel, he made many profoundly non-scientific comments, though he was less afraid to proclaim them in public. Above all, Albert Einstein's life was dedicated to integrating the complexities of existence and trying to embrace, not avoid, the mutual, simultaneous interdependence of consciousness and its object, a notion taught by Gotama Buddha 2,500 years earlier.

The baby-boomer generation wasn't the first to hear of Einstein and his theory of relativity, but it was the first to take it for granted. It played its part alongside a plethora of social changes in helping to undermine the certainty our war-weary parents tried desperately to instill in us. The result was one of history's most profound generation gaps. It spread throughout the Western world, changed forever our sense of civilization and set many of us on an archetypal quest for meaning

LIVING QUOTES

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

"The only real valuable thing is intuition."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead."