The statements have no meaning, and there is no proof that Einstein studied astrology, unlike his many clever quotes. I recall reading an article in the Astrological Journal about ten years ago that confirmed that this remark was a fraud.
What was Einstein’s take on astrology?
Albert Einstein was a prolific commenter on a variety of topics, including education, marriage, money, the nature of brilliance, music, politics, and more. The publication of volume 15 of Albert Einstein’s Collected Papers this month reminds us of his many insights. Even the US Internal Revenue Service’s website bears his words (as stated by his accountant): “The income tax is the most difficult thing in the world to grasp.”
According to Alice Calaprice, editor of The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (2011), “there appears to be a limitless pit of quotable jewels to be mined from Einstein’s massive archives; one feels a hint of dread.” Einstein is, without a doubt, the most referenced scientist in history. Aristotle, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Stephen Hawking, and even Einstein’s opinionated contemporaries Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw have far less entries on Wikiquote than Einstein.
But how much of this overabundance came from the physicist himself? Take this for example: “Astrology is a science in and of itself, with a vast body of knowledge.” It taught me a lot, and I owe it a huge debt of gratitude. The publication Skeptical Inquirer uncovered these lines, which were published on certain astrology websites as Einstein’s, as an evident fraud in 2007. The real source was the prologue to a republished book, Manuel d’astrologie (1965), by Swiss-Canadian astrologer Werner Hirsig, which was first published in 1950. In a 1943 letter to Eugene Simon, Einstein made the following astrological remark:
“I completely agree with you on astrology’s pseudoscience. The intriguing aspect is that this type of belief is so tenacious that it has survived for decades.
Many of the hundreds of lines misattributed to Einstein, according to Calaprice, are subtly questionable. To refine or neaten the original, some are modified or paraphrased. “Everything should be made as simple as possible,” Calaprice says, paraphrasing Einstein’s lecture from 1933: “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to sacrifice the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” The origin of “The most unfathomable thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible” is more certain. “The perpetual mystery of the world is its comprehensibility,” says a paragraph from a 1936 article in the Journal of the Franklin Institute. It is a marvel that it is understandable.
Even Einstein’s most famous phrase, “God does not play dice,” isn’t exactly his words. It comes from a letter addressed in German to his friend and sparring partner, theoretical physicist Max Born, in December 1926. It’s included in a new book of Einstein’s works, which includes a note from the editors about its “many translations since the 1920s.” “Quantum mechanics… provides a lot, but it doesn’t really get us any closer to the Old One’s secret,” they say. At the very least, I’m confident He doesn’t play dice. ‘The Old One,’ rather than ‘God,’ is how Einstein refers to God (Gott) (Der Alte). This denotes a “personification of nature,” according to the dictionary. Leon Lederman, physicist and Nobel Laureate, says (author of The God Particle, 1993).
Since his death, Einstein’s name has been attached to a number of quotations. “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” according to Einstein archivist Barbara Wolff, can be linked to US novelist Rita Mae Brown’s Sudden Death (1983). In his book Informal Sociology, sociologist William Bruce Cameron wrote, “Not everything that can be tallied counts, and not everything that counts can be counted” (1963).
This universe of true, manipulated, and manufactured quotes reflects Einstein’s status. His legacy lives on more than 60 years after his death. I believe there are at least four reasons why we continue to be enthralled with him.
One is that Einstein’s findings are fundamental and existential, bringing together ideas such as space and time, mass and energy, and forces. They altered our perception of reality. And he went out of his way to explain them to the non-physicist. As a result, during his first visit to the United States in 1921, he made a half-joking summation of relativity to the eager press: “It was originally believed that if all material objects faded out of the cosmos, time and space would be left.” However, according to relativity theory, time and space vanish along with the things.
There is also universal admiration for Einstein’s tenacity in the face of adversity. His performance in his German school was satisfactory but not outstanding; he despised the school’s regimentation and eventually dropped out. He was unable to secure an academic employment after graduating from university, in part due to his mockery of his physics professors. He recognized the significance of not conforming in 1901, while being semi-starved. “Impudence was his “guardian angel,” he wrote to his fiance. It would be his compass for the rest of his life.
Einstein was also politically and socially active, and he was frequently in the public eye. He supported the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine, assisted in the founding of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was given the presidency of Israel in 1952. “My sense of the core nature of Judaism rejects the idea of a Jewish state with boundaries, an army, and a measure of temporal power,” he said in a lecture in 1938. He had publicly opposed Nazi Germany in 1933, fleeing to the United States via Britain, despite the threat of assassination. Despite supporting US President Franklin D. Roosevelt to construct an atomic bomb in 1939, he was appalled when it was used in Japan in 1945. In the United States, he stood out against racial and ethnic injustice. He was pursued for deportation as a Soviet agent by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover until his death in 1955, and he vehemently opposed the thermonuclear bomb and McCarthyism in the 1950s.
Then there’s Einstein’s incomparable wit. This aphorism, written for a friend in 1930 (really: I checked with the Einstein Archives in Jerusalem), encapsulates it: “To punish me for my disrespect for authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.”
Is it true that scientists believe in astrology?
Astrology is a collection of belief systems that assert that there is a connection between astrological phenomena and events or personality traits in the human world. The scientific community has dismissed astrology as having no explanatory power for describing the universe. Scientific testing has discovered no evidence to back up the astrological traditions’ premises or alleged effects.