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.)

A brief bit about my field site using only the thousand most common English words

To say a lot with a little is harder than you may think. 

Words are important, but what if you only had
a small number of known words with which to speak?

Chris Trivedi (right) and Graham Lau (left) at Borup Fiord Pass in 2014.

The Up-Goer Five Text Editor, created by Theo Sanderson, is a web-app that challenges you to type using only the one thousand most common words in the English language. It's intriguingly far trickier than you may think. I gave it a go, in an attempt to explain the reason that my colleagues and I went to Borup Fiord Pass to conduct our field research in 2014. What d'ya think?

On the top of the round world where we live, lies a land with ice and cold. In this land there is a piece of ice, long and thick, and covered in a color that does not seem right in such a place. This color let us know that something important was on or in or around that colored ice. We went to that place to find the colored ice and learn more about what made the color, to learn about why this place is just so cool. In the ice I found something important about fire's friend in the book of one god. This friend of fire as spoke upon before, was to be found in new forms within the ice, and of this I wrote with my friends. Now we know more about the stuff that causes the colors of the ice in that land with ice and cold that lies so far to the top of the round world where we live.

Cosmobiology and Cosmobiota

An image from the Spitzer Space Telescope. A cloud rich with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons is illuminated by starlight (the cloud is false-colored green).

When I first started writing this blog nearly five years ago, I was a bit pressed to come up with a name that fit my interests. I wanted to give it a name that reflected my career pursuits in astrobiology along with my intention of considering philosophy, culture, language, mathematics, and the human mind in my writings. The name "An Astrobiologist's Dream" came to me. That to me meant that it was a consideration of the world and our future through the eyes of an astrobiologist. 

However, the Blogger URL using "astrobiologist" was already taken. Bummer, right. That's when I had the idea of using the word "cosmobiologist" instead. There have been astronauts and cosmonauts, so why not use cosmobiologist in place of astrobiologist? The prefix "astro-" usually implies that something has to do with the stars (from Greek "aster"), while the prefix "cosmo-" implies that something is related to the cosmos (indeed, hailing from the Greek word "cosmos"). So, for me, "cosmobiologist" sounded right. 

Indeed, it even felt like maybe "cosmobiologist" meant something more than just a word that is synonymous with "astrobiologist". I decided to think a little more about it and that's when I realized that the words "cosmobiology" and even "cosmobiota" needed to become regular usage for me (and anyone else who is interested). Nothing wrong with coining new words, right? Well, in the case of cosmobiota, I haven't heard anyone else use it before so I think that one is a neologism on my part. As for cosmobiology, well, it turns out someone had already tried using that for something else. Indeed, cosmobiology as a word has been used for a certain form of astrology that's been around since the 1920s. However, I don't see anything wrong with me using the word in a different way. It will only matter if people don't understand what I'm talking about, and I haven't had that problem yet. So, let me tell you in this post what the words cosmobiology and cosmobiota mean to me and why I now call myself a cosmobiologist.

(art by Miguel-Santos at Deviant Art)

Cosmobiology

Even though the word cosmobiology has been used previously for a form of astrology, I personally use the word in a much different sense. Much as astrobiology is the scientific study of the origins, evolution, and radiation of life in the universe, cosmobiology is the philosophical side of that study of such origins, evolution, and radiation of life with a focus on the role that life plays in the cosmos. Astrobiology has become a diverse realm of study, encompassing large parts of chemistry and biology, physics and geology, oceanography and climate science, astronomy and computer science. However, when I think of the philosophical and perhaps even sociological side of astrobiology, that's when the word cosmobiology pops into my mind. That might sound trivial, but I think it feels right, and that's why I'm sticking with it.

Cosmobiota

It wasn't long after choosing the word "cosmobiologist" for myself and my blog that I thought of the word "cosmobiota". Much as the word biota is defined as the living material or organisms of a specific region or time, cosmobiota is the living material of the universe. Cosmobiota, to me, implies the life of either a certain point in space and/or time or could even imply all life in the cosmos. It's not a word that can be used often, but it has allowed me to generalize some thoughts about life in a more universal sense.

Although these words, cosmobiology and cosmobiota, are not likely to become part of modern parlance, I find them attractive and intriguing and will continue to use them in my own manner. If others wish to use them as well in the same sense, I would be quite tickled and honored by that.