Einstein and Mythology

I had the great pleasure today of listening to a talk by Dr. S. James Gates, a prominent theoretical physicist here for the "Celebrating Einstein" event. He gave a talk about Einstein geared at the general public and gave me several things to think about.

First of all, the talk was entitled "Legacies of Einstein's Concerti & Opus", in which he equated Einstein to a composer, an artist with numbers. During the talk, he also referred many times to Einstein as an author writing a novel; like every book has characters that are described by words, Einstein made characters described by equations.

The truly incredible thing is that using one equation, Einstein (and those who expanded on his theories) were able to take this equation and predict almost everything about gravity with it. Black holes come about as a solution of this equation. This equation makes your car GPS work. This theory is amazing, and it all came about purely of geometry; Einstein simply used the language of mathematics to create a story that has been able to predict the real world.

SCIENCE!

Near the end of his talk, Dr. Gates seemed to be echoing the very creation myth that I did in class; the story of the Big Bang. He talked about how everything that ever is, was, and will be was once compressed down into a single point, then inflation and the cooling of the universe. He ended his talk with this quote:

"Everything in this universe... so many possibilities, and when it comes down to it, all these unique combinations of elements and such made in stars have only been able to create one copy of you."

I am made of star stuff. Of all the possible atomic configurations, the universe chose mine. Me. Sitting here, relating the story of the universe. Completely infinitesimal to the scale of the universe, yet special.