Smart Quote of the Day January 6, 2025

First quote of the year, dear Readers!

“When something vibrates, the electrons of the entire universe resonate with it. Everything is connected. The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness.” Albert Einstein

I’m starting the year off with one of my favorite historical figures because the man was not only a genius with physics, he was also a deep thinker. He brought science and philosophy together and showed how science cannot be all facts and figures, but must also take into consideration the laws that govern the universe.

The quote sent me down a rabbit hole of philosophy, metaphysics, and science. When it ventured into religion I backed off. I won’t pursue that here because religion is such a powerful trigger point for many, and honestly, we should all be free to believe what we choose.

Here are a few of the tidbits I came across.

Nearly twenty years after Einstein’s death, mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz came up with the Butterfly Effect, positing that a small change in one system (the flapping of butterfly wings) can have a large impact on a later system (the creation of a tornado), showing how everything is connected. Norton actually started with a seagull, but decided the butterfly would better capture people’s imagination.

In 1950, Alan Turing noted: "The displacement of a single electron by a billionth of a centimeter at one moment might make the difference between a man being killed by an avalanche a year later, or escaping.”

In 1800, before Einstein’s birth, Johann Gottlieb Fichte said, "You could not remove a single grain of sand from its place without thereby ... changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole.” (I think Turing played off this 150 years later.)

Ray Bradbury wrote a short story based on the Butterfly Effect before Norton’s Butterfly Effect was published. It was first published in Collier’s Magazine in 1952 and called A Sound of Thunder. In the story, three wealthy men time travel back to the Late Cretaceous period to hunt a T-Rex. They are warned not to change anything and must walk on a levitating path to avoid disrupting the environment. Spoiler Alert! Something goes wrong, and when they return to their time, everything is different because one of the hunters left the path and crushed a butterfly. Hmmm, I wonder if Norton Lorenz read A Sound of Thunder.

This could go on and in other directions, but I won’t. At least not today, although I might return to this and some of the other tidbits I came across while diving into this quote.

 Bottom line: I agree with dear Al on this. And because of that I try to pay attention to my actions and the impact I have on my world.