9 Aha! Moments that blow Oprah off the Screen
1907: Albert Einstein
The creator of quantam mechanics and relativity was working for the Swiss bureaucracy in Bern in a dead-end job totally unrelated to physics: he was a patent examiner. But Einstein was not a busy worker-bee; he day-dreamed. And one day in November, at the age of 28, a thought came out of the blue: if a person were in free-fall, he or she would not feel their own weight.
By linking acceleration and gravity, Einstein had come up with the equivalence principle, a cornerstone of his General Theory of Relativity. It describes gravity as a property of space-time rather than an external force. As Einstein put it: “Matter tells space how to bend and space tells matter how to move.” He pictured space as a 3-D version of a thin rubber sheet. Put a heavy object on the sheet, and it makes a dent. An object’s path is affected by that dent. Planets orbit heavy objects like stars because the space around them is curved like a funnel or a basin.
One of the predictions of the general theory is that the universe is expanding, the main basis for the ‘big bang’ theory of creation. It also helps explain black holes.
IN HIS OWN WORDS, Einstein's Aha! Moment:
One day at work in November, 1907, Einstein had what he called “the happiest thought in my life.”
I was sitting on a chair in my patent office in Bern. Suddenly a thought struck me: if a man falls freely, he would not feel his weight. I was taken aback. This simple thought experiment made a deep impression on me. It was what led me to the theory of gravity.
NEXT: Ramana Maharshi, 1896
Not knowing is an aha moment, too. I am not sure about Katie. She calls what she does The Work. That descriptive phrase belongs to Gurdjieff if you ask me. He shoulda trademarked it. Life is only real when I am, he said,and I am paraphrasing him a tad.
Let’s face it. People begin as genuinely as they can and if they stay at it long enough, they become genuine fakes, a la Alan Watts. I watch O for the entertainment value. True inner work is not done by buying a bestseller, a pack of Postit notes and a highlighter (that according to a wisecracking friend of mine). Or by watching YouTubes of the masters. Oy.