Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18, 1955)
Albert Einstein was 5 years old the first time he saw a compass. the needle captivated. whichever way
he twisted and shook the old contraption, trying to fool it into pointing off in a new direction, the compass needle always
found its way back to magnetic north. A wonder, he thought.
A wonder of this kind I experienced as a child of four or five years when my father showed me a compass. That this needle behaved in such a determined way did not at all fit in the kind of occurrences that could find a place in the unconscious world of concepts (efficacy produced by direct “touch”). I can still remember — or at least believe I can remember — that this experience made a deep and lasting impression upon me. Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.
Einstein liked to tell the story about that moment when he first sensed that “something deeply hidden” had to be behind things. The curious boy went on to study those hidden forces and became a great physicist who proved what defied explanation and identified what we couldn’t see—the mysterious connection between energy and matter, the unseen that determines the seen.
I have no doubt that our thinking goes on for the most part without use of signs (words) and beyond that to a considerable degree unconsciously. For how, otherwise, should it happen that we sometimes “wonder” quite spontaneously about some experience? This “wondering” appears to occur when an experience comes into conflict with a world of concepts already sufficiently fixed within us. Whenever such a conflict is experienced sharply and intensely it reacts back upon our world of thought in a decisive way. The development of this world of thought is in a certain sense a continuous flight from “wonder.”