Comments on: Einstein never said that…

By: kristyna_g

kristyna_g — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:51:50 +0000

Much appreciated… I strongly suspected this was NOT a quote of his – as I frequently refer to his sayings. Im glad I didn't have to dig as much as you in order to prove my point to a fellow misquoter.

By: benshoemate

benshoemate — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:18:58 +0000

Thanks for the info! I think we are close enough to an answer to call
this one for Leo Cherne – someone should add this source to wikipedia

By: benshoemate

benshoemate — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:18:58 +0000

Thanks for the info! I think we are close enough to an answer to call
this one for Leo Cherne – someone should add this source to wikipedia

By: David

David — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:24:59 +0000

The end of the following article attributes the pseudo-Einstein quote to Leo Cherne in 1968; if accurate, it may be earlier than the 1969 Advances in Instrumentation quote -- one would have to determine when the authors of the latter article wrote it.
( http://www.jstor.org/stable/20373101?seq=2 ):
Computer Science: A Neglected Area in Schools of Education
Gary D. Brooks
The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Oct., 1971), pp. 121-122

The citation is: Remarks by Leo Cherne at the Discover America Meeting, Brussels, June 27, 1968.

I have not yet found further references to that meeting.

By: DeboraBrod

DeboraBrod — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:13:32 +0000

I don't think that BlogJet is the best to try webs on. I'd rather tell you to try Drupal solutions because they manage sites, either they belong to Rupert Murdoch or to anyone. And of course Einstein never said that... because he wouldn't agree with internet first of all.

By: nash xioh

nash xioh — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 23:45:28 +0000

any information that you want to look about einstein is in google.try wikipedia

By: stevestart

stevestart — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:28:47 +0000

I found the book. I am using it in a paper. It can be obtained from The University of Michigan. Here's how I am writing it up for a research paper - and I agree with you. Anyone who attributes the quote to Einstein is a fool...
-------------------
Albert Einstein is alleged by a number of websites to have said, “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.” The only problem with this attribution is that it has no foundation. There are no references to scholarly articles, books or even speeches proving that Einstein ever said it. Conversely, in the late 1960’s two engineers wrote “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. On the other hand, a well trained operator as compared with a computer is incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant.” The authors don’t speculate what happens when the two are placed together other than to note that the combination may result in “intelligent override” of the “control system.”

References:
1. http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/29628.html
2. Couture, H. D. and Keyes, M.A. (1969). A paper industry application of systems engineering and direct digital control. Journal of Advances in Instrumentation, V. 24, Part 4, p. 691-4.

By: itjobs1

itjobs1 — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:14:01 +0000

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.
thank you

By: classic video games

classic video games — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:39:00 +0000

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

By: benshoemate

benshoemate — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:44:50 +0000

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

By: Akilli

Akilli — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:37:03 +0000

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.

By: srinidhi

srinidhi — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:50:53 +0000

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

Srinidhi

www.lenvica.in
www.lenvica.com

By: how to become a ninja

how to become a ninja — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 05:32:18 +0000

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

By: majjam

majjam — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:42:34 +0000

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.

By: benshoemate

benshoemate — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:09:16 +0000

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

By: rhian

rhian — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:46:49 +0000

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

By: Ben Shoemate

Ben Shoemate — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 21:42:34 +0000

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.

By: Peter S Magnusson

Peter S Magnusson — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 21:26:38 +0000

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”.

By: Ben Shoemate

Ben Shoemate — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 23:13:36 +0000

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.

By: Jose HC

Jose HC — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:57:12 +0000

Cheers.