Quotes are always an interesting stuff. They are funny, motivational, inspirational and can be many other things that goes well along with your different moods. Indeed they are one of the best ways through which you can keep yourself informed, involved, inspired, loved, excited and everything emotionally possible. On a different note some quotes can make us feel dumb as they are too hard for us to understand that they get over our head every time we read it. In many other conditions, quotes can be from a particular domain knowledge, for instance physics, that needs the reader to know about the subject to understand it, yet it would sound so intriguing for anyone to know what it means. We will be going through four such quotes (the number looks less though) that may spin some heads or make look mousy and clueless.
“Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted”-Albert Einstein
The arrangement or the sequence of similar sounding words makes it confusing. Otherwise this is one of the easiest quotes that can be comprehended with little effort. What Sir Einstein wants to say with this quote is whatever you think important may not be truly important and whatever you think as least significant may be truly significant. For instance, consider an atom. It is the basic building block of everything around and including as.
But do we consider it as something great? In fact, we consider it something very smaller in size and hence less significant. But in reality it is the most significant of everything. Similarly, to the converse, consider wealth. Even though it is considered as the most superior thing by many, it is not the most essential thing in life.
“I have six locks on my door. When I go out, I lock every other one. I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they are always locking three”- Elayne Boosler
This is supposedly a funny quote. To many the meaning could be quite obvious on their first read, but not to everyone. And there is not much philosophy or meta-physics attached to this quote. Someone has six locks in their main door at the entrance of her house and everyday she locks three of them as mentioned as ‘every other one’ in the quote.
Thus, in case if a burglar tries to break in, he may try unlocking all the six that makes him lock the three, which was kept unlocked by her.
Even if the burglar knows that three of them are unlocked, it is necessary to know exactly the locks which are unlocked to break in. Thus the order of locks can confuse the burglar further. Do not attack this quote with all your logic as there seems to be probably some slip-ups. Yet, this is one of the most confused quote to be understood.
“Schrodinger’s cat walks into a bar and doesn’t”
This is one of the most famous science jokes, possibly made popular by Brian Malow. To understand this quote it is necessary to know what a Schrodinger’s cat is. It was an experimental cat that was put inside an opaque steel box with a vial consisting of hydrocyanic acid, which is a radioactive element. The set up is arranged in such a way that even if one atom of the radioactive element decays, it is going to operate a hammer mechanism that kills the cat.
The probability of the cat being alive and dead is equal. An atom of hydrocyanic acid may or may not decay. The observer outside the box doesn’t know if the cat is alive or not, until the box is opened. Thus for an observer, the cat is both alive and dead, as the state is not clearly known.
This superposition of states (dead and alive in this case) is called the observer’s paradox. Also, this quote is the last one used among a series of other elements entering into a bar as used by Malow. One of the joke he normally uses to start with is a virus walking into a bar. The bartender refuses by saying ‘We don’t serve viruses’.
The virus takes over the bartender completely by entering into his body and says ‘Now we do serve viruses’. In fact the nature of viruses is to replace a normal mechanism with its own and hence it is a science joke! Now so a Schrodinger’s cat walks into a bar and doesn’t, because it is not sure if the Schrodinger’s cat is alive or not!
“What you seek is seeking you”- Rumi
This one could be the toughest of all as it may seem easy to understand but when trying to fit it into real life events, it becomes completely abstruse. The essence of the quote is to say that we are all a part of singularity. You are not different from the one what is seeking you and hence what you seek and what seeks you are both the same thing- the singularity.
Simply put, everything in this universe including space, water, vacuum, air, jet planes, you, I and everything came out from a single source of energy. The energy that makes me is not different from the one that makes you and every other thing that is a part of this universe.
As the energy is one, so must be its behavior in seeking, whether it is you or any other entity of this universe.
Image Source: Vox
Leave a Reply