Showing posts with label Albert Einstein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Albert Einstein. Show all posts

Saturday, August 18, 2018

Albert Einstein / Two things




TWO THINGS
by Albert Einstein

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.



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Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Marilyn Stafford's best photograph: Albert Einstein in his lounge


 ‘It was my first ever photograph’ … Albert Einstein at home in New Jersey in 1948. Photograph: Marilyn Stafford

Marilyn Stafford's best photograph: Albert Einstein in his lounge

‘It was a little after the Hiroshima bombing. Einstein sat in his lounge wearing baggy tracksuit trousers – and spoke out against atomic weapons’

Interview by Kim Willsher
Wed 3 Jan 2018 17.07 GMT
I
n 1948, I was living in New York, hoping to break into acting. I’d been part of the Cleveland Play House’s first children’s group, along with Paul Newman and Joel Grey. Shirley Temple was famous and mothers all wanted their daughters to be stars.

One weekend, two friends making a documentary told me they were driving to New Jersey to interview Albert Einstein, hoping he’d say something against nuclear bombs. This was not long after Hiroshima. On the way, they gave me a 35mm camera and told me to take pictures while they filmed. I’d no idea what I was doing. I’d never used a 35mm before so they had to give me a quick lesson in the back of the car.
Einstein was wonderful. He came to the door in baggy tracksuit trousers and sweatshirt. He was so at ease he made us all feel relaxed, too. My friends filmed and I took pictures. Afterwards, I handed over the film, they sent me a couple of prints, and I didn’t think much more of it. The pictures appear grainy but they really capture the atmosphere that day in Einstein’s lounge, as he spoke out strongly against atomic weapons.
A few months later, I went to Paris with a friend and worked as a singer at Chez Carrère, an exclusive dining club off the Champs Élysées. Edith Piaf would arrive with her huge entourage, which included Charles Aznavour, and we’d all go back to her house in the Bois de Boulogne for breakfast.
It was a fantastic time to be in Paris. I met so many people. One evening at Chez Carrère I was invited to join Eleanor Roosevelt’s table. Another time, Bing Crosby asked me to the races at Longchamp. It was the start of a great friendship.
I’d take a camera with me everywhere and do “happy snaps”, but even then it didn’t cross my mind to become a professional photographer until I lost my voice and realised I couldn’t go on singing. I hinted to Robert Capa, who I’d been introduced to with Henri Cartier-Bresson, that I’d love to try my hand. I was a bit shy about asking: they were gods. Capa suggested I do some war photography.
I really didn’t want to go to war, though. So, at Cartier-Bresson’s suggestion, I began taking pictures in the streets. I discovered a slum near the Bastille and took a lot of photos there and also did some fashion work. I wasn’t much interested in the clothes but I loved taking the models out into the streets. That simply wasn’t done back then.
I’ve had a wonderful life and have wonderful memories. These days, I want to help other young female photographers, which is why I started theMarilyn Stafford FotoReportage award. There were only 10 female photographers on Fleet Street when I came to England and, although there are more now, the balance is still unequal.
This was the very first picture I ever took. So it was quite by accident, and thanks to Albert Einstein, that I became a photographer.

Marilyn Stafford in Paris in the 1950s. Photograph: Gene Fenn


Marilyn Stafford’s CV

Born: 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.
Trained: Mentored by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa.
Influences: Dust bowl photographs by Dorothea Lange; the work of Cartier-Bresson and Capa; Life magazine.
Low point: “The imbalance of women to men in documentary photography.”
High points: “My first front page in 1958 with Algerian refugees; and meeting Albert Einstein.”
Top tip: “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.”

THE GUARDIAN

2016

2017

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Saturday, November 28, 2015

My hero / Albert Einstein by Graham Farmelo


Albert Einstein

My hero: Albert Einstein by Graham Farmelo


It’s 100 years since Einstein completed his theory of relativity, transforming our understanding of the universe

 Graham Farmelo
Saturday 28 November 2015


T
ime magazine chose well when it named Albert Einstein as the most influential person of the 20th century. As well as being a peerless scientist, he showed great wisdom and integrity – he was an outstanding humanitarian. One hundred years ago, he completed his theory of relativity, setting out a theory of gravity that would surpass Isaac Newton’s and which continues to shape our understanding of the universe today.

Einstein had emerged 10 years earlier, apparently from nowhere, to give the world’s leading scientists a series of physics lessons they would never forget. During his 20-year golden streak, ending in 1925, he did more than anyone else to reshape the understanding of space, time, energy, matter and gravity. He pioneered the crucial idea that symmetry is at the heart of fundamental laws of nature. He could be practically minded, too: with his Hungarian friend Leo Szilard, he came up with an innovative design for a fridge, which they patented in 1930.

Although he valued his solitude – he once said he would happily live in a lighthouse – he was a considerate colleague and friend. His astonishing insight into nature was matched by his understanding of human affairs, and his quotations and popular essays still reward re-reading. Deeply engaged with politics, he spoke out against hypernationalism and fought against the persecution of Jews and other minorities. His friend and colleague in the 1950s, Nándor Balázs, once told me that Einstein’s main weakness was his impatience with people beating a path to his door. On one occasion, a young woman travelled all the way from Bombay to Princeton, simply to talk to him. He reluctantly agreed, groaning: “I suppose I have to go and play God again.” When I asked Balázs whether Einstein was a saint, he shot back: “No, he was better than that – he was human.”

THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016
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Thursday, October 29, 2015

Albert Einstein / Not everything


Albert Einstein
NOT EVERYTHING

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.



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Sunday, August 16, 2015

Albert Einstein’s Love Letters

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein’s Love Letters
By: 
“How was I able to live alone before, my little everything? Without you I lack self-confidence, passion for work, and enjoyment of life — in short, without you, my life is no life.”
Under the tyranny of our present productivity-fetishism, we measure the value of everything by the final product rather than by the richness of the process — its rewards, its stimulating challenges, the aliveness of presence with which we fill every moment of it. In contemporary culture, if a marriage ends in divorce — however many happy years it may have granted the couple, however many wonderful children it may have produced — we deem it a failed marriage. What is true on the scale of personal history is triply true on the scale of cultural history, and few public marriages have been subjected to a more unnuanced verdict than that of Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić. The twenty years between the time they met as first-year university students and the time of their final legal separation get compressed into one blunt word itself emptied of dimension: divorce. And yet those were the years in which Einstein did his most groundbreaking work, forever changing the course of modern science; years which produced the only progeny of the quintessential modern genius; years filled with enormous, all-consuming love, which comes to life in Albert Einstein / Mileva Marić: The Love Letters (public library) — a collection of fifty-four missives exchanged between the beginning of their romance in 1897 and their marriage in 1903.
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