Annus Mirabilis

When I read about Albert Einstein’s miracle year of 1905 (when he published the four articles that changed everything), I hear the Fifth Dimension singing “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius” in my mind. It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like to have your entire world view, over two hundred years in the making, overturned by a patent clerk with wild hair. The before and after picture would be unrecognizable from either perspective.

These days, my media feed is filled with articles about quantum anomalies, faint blue galaxies, and strange attractors. I do my best to understand the physics for dummies explanations, but it’s all a bit beyond my Latin. What I can discern is that our understanding of the sequential nature of time is undergoing a change, or at least a reinterpretation. I’ve watched an array of the TED and BigThink video clips and still can’t get my mind around it. How do I think about time when my language, my mindset, and whatever is below that, are all based on the idea that time is linear? Then it hits me. It’s 1904. The year before Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis.

Ask yourself what changes when your understanding of time changes. The implications for innovation may not be beyond our imagination. Science fiction writers continue to give us ideas. But as for real explanations, I can only hope that the new Einstein’s will give us a little more than a few letters and numbers to make sense of this whole thing. I guess we will have to wait and see. But if time is no longer one-dimensional, that may be just another problem. It will take me more than a miracle year for me to understand it all.

#MondayMotivation #InnovationInTimesofUncertainty