Stephen Downes

Ray Monk was the author of one of my favourite books, a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein (The Duty of Genius). In this article he reviews Diana Kormos Buchwald and Michael D. Gordin's biography of Albert Einstein. That provides a platform on which Monk can relate the two seminal figures of twentieth century thought: "for Einstein, the attempt to grasp the world consists in the search not for the right words but for the right picture, a picture that would order other picture... Einstein echoes Wittgenstein, who emphasised in his later work that his aim was to provide 'the understanding that consists in seeing connections'...  to burrow beneath conscious thoughts, typically expressed in words, to the images that lie behind them and shape them, images of which we are often unaware." Despite Einstein, even to this day people are still unwilling - or unable - to abandon "fundamental intuitions about space, time, mass, motion and gravity." And yet - we've always known these are inventions, created in language, not found in nature.