Tag: krista tippet’

Wonder

 - by KitchenPantryScientist

I’m reading “Einstein’s God” by Krista Tippet right now, and came upon this great autobiographical account by Albert Einstein.  It seems that he had a childlike wonder about the world that lasted well into adulthood and helped him to become a great thinker. 

“Why do we come, sometimes spontaneously, to wonder about something?  I think that wondering to one’s self occurs when an experience conflicts with our fixed ways of seeing the world.  I had one such experience of wondering when I was a child of four or five and my father showed me a compass.  This needle behaved in such a determined way and did not fit into the usual explanation of how the world works.  That is that you must touch something to move it.  I still remember now, or I believe that I remember, that this experience made a deep and lasting impression on me.  There must be something deeply hidden behind everything.”

Krista then writes, “After seeing that compass, Einstein became mesmerized in turn by light and gravity.  He spent his life seeking to comprehend the order “deeply hidden behind everything” and to describe it mathematically.”

What have you wondered about lately?