What Einstein Really Believed Happens When You Die — The Answer Came From Spinoza
The Spinoza Substance
90,540 views
What Einstein Really Believed Happens When You Die — The Answer Came From Spinoza
Four documents. Real ones, with dates, written by the same man over twenty-six years. The last one was written by a dying man about a friend who had just died, three weeks before his own death.
April 1929. A rabbi in New York sends a telegram: "Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid, fifty words." Einstein answers in fewer than thirty, and names a seventeenth century philosopher who had been cursed by his own community and whose books were banned across Europe.
January 1936. A sixth-grade girl asks him whether scientists pray. He writes back and tells her, gently, that everything is determined by the laws of nature — including the actions of people.
January 1954. A private letter that later sold for nearly three million dollars, in which he calls the word God the product of human weakness. Most people know this letter and misread it, because they have not read the first one.
March 21, 1955. Michele Besso, the friend he had argued relativity with for fifty years, is dead. Einstein writes to the family: "Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
He died twenty-eight days later.
In this video we read all four, plus the 1930 essay where he names the three stages of religious feeling and says which one Spinoza had. We cover why he fought quantum mechanics for thirty years and lost. And we trace every document back to the proposition in the Ethics it came from.
20 Comments
What Einstein Really Believed Happens When You Die — The Answer Came From Spinoza
The Spinoza Substance
90,540 views
What Einstein Really Believed Happens When You Die — The Answer Came From Spinoza
Four documents. Real ones, with dates, written by the same man over twenty-six years. The last one was written by a dying man about a friend who had just died, three weeks before his own death.
April 1929. A rabbi in New York sends a telegram: "Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid, fifty words." Einstein answers in fewer than thirty, and names a seventeenth century philosopher who had been cursed by his own community and whose books were banned across Europe.
January 1936. A sixth-grade girl asks him whether scientists pray. He writes back and tells her, gently, that everything is determined by the laws of nature — including the actions of people.
January 1954. A private letter that later sold for nearly three million dollars, in which he calls the word God the product of human weakness. Most people know this letter and misread it, because they have not read the first one.
March 21, 1955. Michele Besso, the friend he had argued relativity with for fifty years, is dead. Einstein writes to the family: "Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
He died twenty-eight days later.
In this video we read all four, plus the 1930 essay where he names the three stages of religious feeling and says which one Spinoza had. We cover why he fought quantum mechanics for thirty years and lost. And we trace every document back to the proposition in the Ethics it came from.