Quoted in "Cartoonist Alizadeh, translating world into humor" in Press TV (23 April 2009) http://edition.presstv.ir/detail/92323.html
“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 1955Related quotes
“Einstein's theory of relativity”
From the Author's Preface to First Edition (1918)
Space—Time—Matter (1952)
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.
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
p, 125
The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology (1949)
Lecture 1: Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse? Part I.
The Early Universe (2012)
“Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.”
Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 43
“Jesus could not have imagined such an idea as Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.”
Source: Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (1991), p. 25
page 18, 2nd edition https://books.google.com/books?id=Qd0MEtsBr7oC&pg=PA18
Dreams of a Final Theory (1992; 2nd edition 1994)