Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Revelation from Einstein's brain

A Wired magazine reporter explains to NPR radio:
INSKEEP: So as you're talking, I'm thinking about cloud computing, the Internet cloud. And many of us are getting used to this idea that if we have an email account, it might not be saved in the machine where we are at; it's going off somewhere. But once you actually got in to look at one of these places and hear it, feel it, did it change your perceptions of what's going on in the world when you went back to your computer screen at home?

LEVY: It actually did. You know, many, many years ago I went on a journalistic quest for Einstein's brain, which was lost then. And I felt if I saw it, it might be an anticlimax. But when I actually did see it, it really opened up my eyes; it was a revelation. This is where, you know, the power of the atom came from and relativity and all those other things. And I had the same kind of experience inside that Google data center. Here was the ephemeral made real, you know, the cloud really was something and it was something quite remarkable and breathtaking.

INSKEEP: Steven Levy, thanks very much.
Is this a sarcastic joke? He looked at a 50-year-old jar of chopped up brain tissue, and had a revelation about it being the source of "the power of the atom came from and relativity and all those other things"?

No, Einstein's brain was not the source of any of those things. This is crazy idol worship, as I explain in my book and this blog.

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