Quincy Jones and Michael Caine are 77 today.
Jones has 79 Grammy nominations and 27 wins to his credit. He produced “Thriller,” which has sold more than 100 million copies.
Caine has six Oscar nominations and two wins, both for best supporting actor — Hannah and Her Sisters and Cider House Rules. His first best actor nomination was for Alfie in 1967; his most recent for The Quiet American 36 years later.
Albert Einstein was born on this date in 1879. The following is from his New York Times obituary in 1955.
In 1904, Albert Einstein, then an obscure young man of 25, could be seen daily in the late afternoon wheeling a baby carriage on the streets of Bern, Switzerland, halting now and then, unmindful of the traffic around him, to scribble down some mathematical symbols in a notebook that shared the carriage with his infant son, also named Albert.
Out of those symbols came the most explosive ideas in the age-old strivings of man to fathom the mystery of his universe. Out of them, incidentally, came the atomic bomb, which, viewed from the long-range perspective of mankind’s intellectual and spiritual history may turn out, Einstein fervently hoped, to have been just a minor by-product.
With those symbols Dr. Einstein was building his theory of relativity. In that baby carriage with his infant son was Dr. Einstein’s universe-in-the-making, a vast, finite-infinite four-dimensional universe, in which the conventional universe–existing in absolute three-dimensional space and in absolute three-dimensional time of past, present and future–vanished into a mere subjective shadow.
Dr. Einstein was then building his universe in his spare time, on the completion of his day’s routine work as a humble, $600-a-year examiner in the Government Patent Office in Bern.
A few months later, in 1905, the entries in the notebook were published in four epoch-making scientific papers. In the first he described a method for determining molecular dimensions. In the second he explained the photo-electric effect, the basis of electronics, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1921. In the third, he presented a molecular kinetic theory of heat. The fourth and last paper that year, entitled “Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” a short article of thirty-one pages, was the first presentation of what became known as the Special Relativity Theory.
One thing that has annoyed me among many, many things in modern popular culture, is that in recent years they always show the picture of Einstein sticking his tongue out ala Gene Simmons. Enough already with the tongue schtick!