DISQUS

Dmitry Chestnykh · 11 months ago

Wow, that's the incredible fact checking! Thanks for doing research, and sorry for spreading the lie. I'll make a blog post about this soon.

Thanks again!

Ben Shoemate · 11 months ago

I went around the web and posted comments to about 10 blogs that had this quote including blogjet to ask them to change it. I fear the genie is out of the bottle now though. The internet allows truth to be both created and destroyed. Created in rumors and destroyed through research. The scary thing is that both fact and fiction can live together so peacefully.

Marisa Duma · 11 months ago

What an irony.

Computers, or internet as we know it, could simply process the sum of "12,100 results" and present an affirming notion that, yes it was Einstein's words, and it's a "fact". However, humans acquire the intuition, and driving motivation, in order to sense the depth of human behavior -- for instance understanding "quotes as a way to strengthen position" -- later on, to investigate the truth.

Thanks! ;)

Jose HC · 11 months ago

Hi Ben,
How long did this investigation take? Wow!
Great post... but you know after doing all this you might deserve taking the credit for the quote ;)
... I was one of those sites you left a comment at and followed the link here. Thanks for the info.

Cheers.

Ben Shoemate · 11 months ago

Thanks, please help spread the word - I think it will be a neat experiment to see how easily a worldwide misconception can be corrected. I think 2006 was the peak of people misquoting Einstein on this particular issue (or I could be wrong - its harder to prove that someone never said something than that they did). I'll revisit this in 3 months and again 1 year to see if it is possible to put the genie back in the bottle. If fewer books and websites attribute this to Einstein in 2009 then I think there may be hope for the internet yet. The goal is to shrink the number of web results found from 21,000. :)

I read that the time it takes for ideas to spread is approaching zero - compared to the hundreds of years it used to take for new ideas to travel from places like China to Europe and beyond.

Peter S Magnusson · 10 months ago

Thanks Ben! I was just embarking on the same avenue of research on this quote (which I didn't buy either, for the same reasons as you), but you just did the work. And in a splendid fashion!

Ironically, the quote is incorrectly used by a conference I plan to attend subtitled "Leading Collective Wisdom". :-)

Ben Shoemate · 10 months ago

Peter - That is ironic. It seems in this case, that collective wisdom leads most people to believe what they want to believe (or perhaps what is convenient to believe). The trouble is, despite the power of the internet, there is an inherent weakness caused by the fact that we *believe* the internet is comprehensive if not always accurate. We believe that if we keep looking, that somewhere - amongst the billions of pages, the answer must be there, somewhere. The truth is, even once Google completes its mission of indexing every book, magazine, newspaper, and candy wrapper, there will *still* be missing knowledge - that which is unknown, unknowable, or known incorrectly (in order of increasing danger to society). The "nothing new under the sun" misnomer keeps most smart people searching when they should be inventing, discovering, or thinking for themselves.

Some people need to search more, others need to search less. My rule of thumb for small stuff like this is give it 1 hour of Google searching across all their knowledge domains - if you can not find the information scent in 1 hour, hit the lab, the garage, or the workshop because what you are looking for either doesn't exist, or its sufficiently obscured that it will benefit from your unique point of view and research.

rhian · 9 months ago

Ben, I am having pretty much the same oproblem as you did, trying to cite a quote from Einstein . In the quotable einstein, i cant even find reference to it although countless times i see this quote referenced to Einstein 'Any intellegent fool can make things bigger......
do you know if he really sid that and when???
please help
rhian

benshoemate · 9 months ago

Try Google Book search...look for earliest version of that quote...someone
must have cited the source

majjam · 7 months ago

Did you try some local libraries to find out if there is a copy of Advances in Instrumentation in your area? I notice you are in Houston. The University of Houston has the issue you need. You can do searches in www.worldcat.org to find libraries who have books and articles. You can put in your zipcode and get results back for libraries closest to you.

how to become a ninja · 2 months ago

Thanks for doing research, and sorry for spreading the lie. I'll make a blog post about this soon.

Sweet_Home_Improvement · 2 months ago

Thanks for sharing the information. I am very amazed at the confidence level of you guys, so i have to refer your blog to my friends because it’s really a help full blog.
Good Day

Cheers,
sweethomeimprove.com

srinidhi · 1 month ago

Nice research....who ever said it is absolutely perfect one..........

Srinidhi

www.lenvica.in
www.lenvica.com

Akilli · 1 week ago

Thanks for posting this. I just read this quote in an article on the Huffington Post : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-honore/in-pr... and I immediately thought that Einstein couldn't possibly have said it. The behemoths he might have been familiar with were being used to calculate missile trajectories - not even an area a pacifist like Einstein would have sullied himself. Even if the computers of his day were not the size of Walmart, his thinking, which was largely intuitive and visceral, would not have required them. None of his fundamental research was computationally dense, except in symbol manipulation.

benshoemate · 1 week ago

Thanks! I went to the site and set them straight. Stop the lies! :)

classic video games · 6 days ago

Hi Ben,
How long did this investigation take? Wow!
Great post... but you know after doing all this you might deserve taking the credit for the quote ;)
... I was one of those sites you left a comment at and followed the link here. Thanks for the info