Colorized 1931 photograph of Albert Einstein

“Personally, I experience the greatest degree of pleasure in having contact with works of art. They furnish me with happy feelings of an intensity that I cannot derive from other sources.”— Albert Einstein — Quoted by Moszkowski in Conversations with Einstein, 184

I was fascinated by my discovery of the above picture on the internet recently. The picture looks like it might have been taken yesterday, and yet it’s actually a colorized 1931 black and white photo of Albert Einstein being escorted by Charlie Chaplin at the premiere of Chaplin’s new film, City Lights.

Most of us know Einstein as a towering scientific genius, but he was also a devoted patron of the arts. A man of immerse scientific and mathematical knowledge, he felt that the human imagination and a wonder at the mysteries of life were two of the greatest motivational forces of the human spirit.

As Einstein knew, science, at best, can tell us the what about the world, but it’s only in the Arts and Humanities (which includes religion) that we can discover the why or meaning of our lives. As Einstein told a friend, “It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.”