Today, I am thankful for those who have insights that change the world.
On this day (Jan 6), many Christians celebrate the feast day of Epiphany. Also known as Three Kings Day, the holiday commemorates the visit of Maji to the Christ Child in the town of Bethlehem in 0 BC (or was it 1 AD?). For Eastern Christians, the epiphany also celebrates Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River by John the Baptist.
The event got me pondering about the power of epiphanies – those sudden realizations of some critical breakthrough in thought. Although epiphanies are routinely chronicled in religion and literature, today I wanted to give a shout-out to scientific epiphanies.
Like the one Archimedes of Syracuse had when he discovered that the volume of water displaced in his bath equals the volume of his submerged mass. Or like the one Isaac Newton had about the gravitational pull of earth, after witnessing an apple falling from a tree. Or like the one Albert Einstein had regarding relativity, when he realized that the clock tower in the distance would slow down, if the streetcar he was in traveled at the speed of light.
May you have some important revelation today, even if it does not lead to an earth-shattering theorem.
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