A Very Small Cause, Which

Einstein Does Not Remain Attached To The Classical Principles, And When Presented With A Problem In Physics He Quickly Envisages All Of Its Possibilities. This Leads Immediately In His Mind To The Prediction Of New Phenomena Which May One Day Be Verified By Experiment.

It Is Often Said That Experiments Should Be Made Without Preconceived Ideas. That Is Impossible. Not Only Would It Make Every Experiment Fruitless, But Even If We Wished To Do So, It Could Not Be Done. Every Man Has His Own Conception Of The World, And This He Cannot So Easily Lay Aside. We Must, Example, Use Language, And Our Language Is Necessarily Steeped In Preconceived Ideas. Only They Are Unconscious Preconceived Ideas, Which Are A Thousand Times The Most Dangerous Of All.

It Is By Logic We Prove. It Is By Intuition We Discover.

I Entered An Omnibus To Go To Some Place Or Other. At That Moment When I Put My Foot On The Step The Idea Came To Me, Without Anything In My Former Thoughts Seeming To Have Paved The Way For It, That The Transformations I Had Used To Define The Fuchsian Functions Were Identical With Non-euclidean Geometry.

The Mathematical Facts Worthy Of Being Studied Are Those Which, By Their Analogy With Other Facts, Are Capable Of Leading Us To The Knowledge Of A Physical Law. They Reveal The Kinship Between Other Facts, Long Known, But Wrongly Believed To Be Strangers To One Another.