"The important thing is not to stop questioning," Einstein once said. "Curiosity has its own reason for existence."
Seventy-one years ago today, Albert Einstein died in Princeton. He was still questioning. Pages of equations sat at his bedside.
His genius was reasoning from first principles. A refusal to take the foundations on faith. A willingness to question inherited pictures of the world, and to begin again from the ground up when the old picture no longer fit.
He rebuilt physics from a patent office in Bern, thinking his way through the nature of space and time.
At Intelligent Internet, we believe the most important work in AI, and elsewhere, still comes from people willing to question the foundations rather than optimize the surface. Einstein is, for us, the clearest example of what that looks like.
A small tribute
To mark today, together with II-Agent, we built a site about Einstein. His papers, his letters, his quieter thinking on peace, education, and the ethics of science. The full shape of a person, not just the equations. The site is a small demonstration of what happens when an agent is given a life worth learning from.
You can explore it here: https://einstein.ii.inc/
Build your own with II-Agent: https://agent.ii.inc/
We also put together a short video:
What's ahead
We're sharing this today rather than on any other day partly out of sentiment and partly not.
Einstein worked in public but thought in private. In that spirit, we've been thinking in private for a while now, and there is work we'll be sharing in the weeks ahead. A system. Some papers. Things we've been careful with.
More soon.
For today, to Albert: thank you for showing us what a mind unafraid of starting from zero can do. And what it looks like to keep questioning until the end. The internet you never saw is better when it's built by people who think the way you did.
— The team at Intelligent Internet