“I heard that in relativity theory, space and time are the same thing. Einstein discovered this when he kept showing up three miles late for his meetings.”

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Steven Wright 178
American actor and author 1955

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Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) German mathematician

From the Author's Preface to First Edition (1918)
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Context: Einstein's theory of relativity has advanced our ideas of the structure of the cosmos a step further. It is as if a wall which separated us from Truth has collapsed. Wider expanses and greater depths are now exposed to the searching eye of knowledge, regions of which we had not even a presentiment. It has brought us much nearer to grasping the plan that underlies all physical happening.

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“How it happened that I in particular discovered the relativity theory, it seemed to lie in the following circumstance. The normal adult never bothers his head about space-time problems. Everything there is to be thought about it, in his opinion, has already been done in early childhood. I, on the contrary, developed so slowly that I only began to wonder about space and time when I was already grown up. In consequence I probed deeper into the problem than an ordinary child would have done.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

In Carl Seelig's Albert Einstein: A Documentary Biography (1956), Seelig reports that Einstein said this to James Franck, p. 71 http://books.google.com/books?id=VCbPAAAAMAAJ&q=%22how+it+happened%22#search_anchor.
I sometimes ask myself how did it come that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up. Naturally, I could go deeper into the problem than a child with normal abilities.
Variant translation which appears in Einstein: The Life and Times by Ronald W. Clark (1971), p. 27 http://books.google.com/books?id=6IKVA0lY6MAC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA27#v=onepage&q&f=false
Attributed in posthumous publications

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“Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 43

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“Jesus could not have imagined such an idea as Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.”

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