Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Telling Your Version of the Story

The physicist, Leo Szilard, once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary:

“I don’t intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.”

“Don’t you think God knows the facts?” Bethe asked.

“Yes,” said Szilard. “He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.”

Source: Hans Christian von Beyer, Taming the Atom (London: Viking, 1993). This is printed on the quote page in Bill Bryson, A Short History of Almost Everything (Great Britain: Doubleday, 2003).

Image: The Hungarian physicist, Leo Szilard.