I found myself in disagreement with Albert Einstein recently. Don’t worry, it wasn’t down in Dolly Harney’s. Well, not initially, and I hadn’t lost my marbles, not all of them, at any rate. The esteemed Albert said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking which we used to create them.”
At first hearing, or at first glance, it makes sense. But then you may slowly begin to notice things about it. It employs a touch of the scientific sleight of hand.
If the esteemed Albert were still amongst us, I would invite him down to Dolly Harney’s Select Lounge for a pint of his pleasure. But he isn’t, of course, so I wrote out his quote and put it in among my dwindling selection of euro-notes and took it with me to Dolly’s one evening the sun wasn’t shining at all even though it should have been, because it’s supposed to, because it’s summer time. But there you are, that’s what happens.
Rubin’s Vase is, of course, an optical illusion. You can see the vase, or a pair of faces, facing each other, but you can’t see them both together. The two-dimensional forms were developed by in Denmark by Edgar Rubin. Anyway, when all this was being thought into shape, so to speak, by that obscure Danish psychologist, there was a war on, the Great War that raged from 1914 into 1919.