Humanity, Technology, and an "Einstein Quote" that Einstein Never Said.

From the film Powder (1995). #film #movie #quote #powder #jeffgoldblum #seanpatrickflanery #EinsteinNeverSaidThat #humanity #technology #spirituality #lightning

A post shared by Graham Lau (@cosmobiologist) on Nov 17, 2017 at 6:18pm PST

I was recently thinking about the film Powder. Released in 1995 and starring Sean Patrick Flannery, Mary Steenburgen, Jeff Goldblum, and Lance Henriksen, Powder was about a young albino man, nicknamed Powder, with unique capabilities of intellect, telepathy, and paranormal ability. The man is an outcast due to his differences, and the film explores some of his interactions with others. The tagline for the film was "An extraordinary encounter with another human being!". Here's the trailer for the film:

It's definitely worth a watch. I remember being quite moved by it when I was a kid (I was 12 when the film came out). There's one scene in particular that stuck with me and comes up in my thoughts from time-to-time. Jeff Goldblum's character, Donald Ripley, is supportive of Powder and awed by Powder's abilities. In the scene that I still remember so well, the following exchange is had between the two of them:

Donald Ripley: “It’s become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity.”

Powder: “Albert Einstein.”

Donald Ripley: “I look at you, and I think that someday our humanity might actually surpass our technology.”

Beautiful, right?! I loved that scene as a kid, and I still love it now. However, something very interesting that I just learned is that the first part of the quote ("It's become appallingly clear...") isn't actually a quote from Albert Einstein!

Folks at Quote Investigator and Snopes have tried to track down this claimed Einstein quote and have found that the first instance of the quote in known history actually is the movie Powder! The quote was written into the script as being from Einstein even though it wasn't actually an Einstein quote. Later, due to the film, others began using the quote and misattributing it to Einstein (such as DeAnna Emerson’s "Mars/Earth Enigma: A Sacred Message to Mankind" in 1996 and Nina L. Diamond's "Voices of Truth: Conversations with Scientists, Thinkers, and Healers" in 2000).

It's still a great quote and a moving sentiment. It reminds me of what I found to be the most powerful line in Martin Luther King Jr.'s essay "The World House":

"When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men."

Of course, the quote from Powder sounds like something that Albert Einstein would have said. And, even though I think it's good to be aware of things like misattribution, there's also something interesting about how we often will begin building legends around famous people from our past (and even present) and can slowly attribute talents, spoken words, and acts to those legends that may not have been true of the actual people the legends are based on. 
Maybe it doesn't matter that Einstein never actually said that. Maybe part of the legend of Einstein, the myth of the man, is that we build him up and attribute sayings and deeds to him that weren't really his. Even though I prefer knowing the truth in this instance, it might just be part of our human nature that we build our legends up in such ways. It's definitely something to ponder.


I'll leave you here with a quote that is pretty surely actually from Einstein:

"The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks."

(Of course, many have shortened the quote to say "The value of an education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think". Oh well.)

FAN-O-RAMA looks like it's going to be all kinds of fun

Some people are putting together a live action fan film for Futurama, and it looks awesome! Here's the teaser trailer:

Find out more at their website: fan-o-rama.com

10 Star Wars Movie Mistakes You Missed - from Screen Rant

Star Wars: The Force Awakens has brought the Star Wars Universe back into public awareness (especially since Disney has been throwing the Star Wars brand on just about everything). Surely, there will be plenty of dialogue about the strengths and weaknesses of newest installment in Star Wars films for years to come, but for those of us who are still die hard fans of the original series (that's episodes 4, 5, and 6, naturally) we've pretty much figured out all there is to know with regard to those films. For instance, in the following video Screen Rant breaks down 10 of the lesser discussed mistakes in the original series films. How many of these did you already know about?

Young Einstein (1988)

Albert Einstein: Dad, I want to be a physicist.

Mr. Einstein: What do they grow, son?

Albert Einstein: They don't grow anything.

Mr. Einstein: Well what's the use of them then?

In 1988, a then little-known Australian man who had his name changed to Yahoo Serious came to short-lived fame globally due to the release of a film he wrote, directed, and starred in. That film was Young Einstein and it remains my favorite film to this day. 

Young Einstein is an imagined myth of the life of Albert Einstein, but, in this tale, Einstein is a young Tasmanian apple farmer's son who discovers the theory of relativity while figuring out how to split a "Tasmanian beer atom" (to put bubbles into beer, ya know) and who falls in love with Marie Curie (in the end saving Curie and many others from gruesome deaths due to a massive atomic bomb, which Einstein has to defuse by playing roll-and-rock music). Okay, I know that sounds like a bit much. Maybe you'd dig the trailer for the film. Check it out:

Okay, so it's an older film now and the trailer doesn't really do it justice. The film is definitely visually stunning for the time when it was produced. The overall story isn't going to drive anyone to tears or impact your life greatly (unless you see it as a child and think that Albert Einstein was really a Tasmanian who split beer atoms - as has been the case for some people). However, the wittiness of the film and the awesome 80s rock score will certainly keep any of us who are past our tweens amused. You should definitely check out Young Einstein. It won't be the worst 1.5 hours of your life. Maybe drink while you watch it, though.

I personally love Young Einstein. It's the first film that I fully remember seeing. I was 5 years old when it came out. My parents took me to the theater to see it. I went home that night and tried to build a guitar (which didn't pan out, but later my mom helped me build a shoebox guitar which actually worked a bit). Young Einstein impacted me as a young person as it helped me to wonder about how we can re-imagine the lives of great scientists and inventors while having some fun along the way. It helped me to formulate my earliest stories. I still watch it at least once a year. Surely due to the nostalgia, but also because it's a really fun movie.
I'll close with this, the dedication to the real Albert Einstein that is offered at the very end of the film, just before the credits roll:

Young Einstein is dedicated to a genius, a rebel, a pacifist, an eccentric with a clowning sense of humour who once remarked about his own theories:

"...I never thought that others would take 

them so much more seriously than I did." 

Albert Einstein 1879-1955

"You Have No Respect for Logic"

A Movie Clip Worth Sharing

"Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; 

and if it were so, it would be; 

but as it isn't, it ain't. 

That's logic."

-Lewis Carroll                 

It's late and I'm feeling a tad snarky, so why the hell not share this awesome video clip of one of my favorite scenes from the 1988 movie Twins?

This scene describes how I feel pretty often when reading public commentary on the internet.