A Little Irreverence …
… is sometimes a good thing.
This is a little anecdote about two great minds of their age: Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. In 1927, inarguably the 127 best scientists in the world had gathered at the Solvay Conference to talk about photons and electrons. Possibly the most important scientific gathering of the last century. It was there that this famous exchange took place: Einstein, no great admirer of the Heidelberg’s Uncertainty Principle had snapped to the proponent, “God does not play dice”, and Niels Bohr had playfully rebuked him: “Don’t tell God what to do.”
(Other luminaries include Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli,Werner Heisenberg, William Lawrence Bragg, Paul Dirac, Max Planck, Marie Curie.)
The two great men were having a stroll in the gardens of the centre after breakfast, when they had this conversation:
Bohr: My dear colleague, after your Relativity Theory, what new frontiers are you preparing to cross?
Einstein: I am glad you asked. Ever since I was four, every morning when I am emptying my bowels, this conundrum preoccupies me no end. How to wipe myself clean without getting my thumb covered in excrement? And I don’t seem to have got anywhere.
