BRUCE LICHT
FOUNDER OF MY ELEVATOR PITCH FOR GOD, ENTREPRENEUR, AND AUTHOR
Bruce grew up in Lafayette, California, and later received a B.A. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as a Graduate Gemologist degree from the Gemological Institute of America in Los Angeles. After graduating, Bruce operated his family’s century-old retail fine jewelry business for twenty-two years before selling his share of the company in 2001.
Bruce had a passion for computers and graphic arts, so he went into business with his friend at a national technical publishing company. He served as the company’s publisher for seventeen years. The company pioneered the modern labor law poster industry, including inventing the first “all-on-one labor law poster” and “labor law poster compliance plan” before Bruce and his partner sold the company in 2018.
In addition to being the founder of the website, My Elevator Pitch for God, Bruce is the author of the book, My Elevator Pitch for God, co-editor of Elevator Pitches for God: Volume 1, and author of the cookbook Immediate Chef: No Previous Experience Required.
Visitors to My Elevator Pitch for God(www.mepfg.com) can read many wonderful, inspirational, and thought-provoking one-page essays by thought leaders with the widest breadth of backgrounds and experiences from all around the world.
Bruce’s mission is to introduce more people to God and strengthen the faith of those who already believe. He aims to bring people together, find common ground between different faiths, create meaning in people’s lives, and start to move the world in a better direction.
You can help by sending this website to friends and family and posting it on social media!
You can also connect with the website project’s LinkedIn page by clicking the link below:
The Illusion of Time
BRUCE LICHT
Albert Einstein peacefully passed at 1:15 AM on April 18, 1955 at Princeton Hospital in New Jersey at the age of 76. Unfortunately, his final sentiments remain permanently lost because the on-duty night nurse(1) could not make sense of them, making the final thoughts from the greatest scientist of the 20th century an unsolved mystery.
Documented extensively by his close friend, Otto Nathan, and personal physician, Dr. Guy K. Dean,(2) Einstein consciously declined a life-prolonging surgical intervention for a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm that was bleeding internally.
Einstein's close companions and physicians say that he chose to let nature take its course and die naturally with dignity. Although not a historically verified record, accounts by his biographer and doctor report him as saying within close proximity to his passing, “I want to go. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share. It is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”(3)
Just weeks before his own death, Einstein wrote a famous condolence letter in March 1955 to the family of his lifelong friend, Michele Besso, who had recently passed away.(4) Within this correspondence, Einstein said something unexpected about death. While describing his view of mortality, he reflected on space-time continuity and the subjective nature of temporal flow, saying, “Now [Michele] has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Einstein spent decades working on a physics theory that demonstrated that time was not linear as our ordinary experience suggests. As opposed to flowing in a one-way movement like a river, he postulated that the past, present, and future exist simultaneously in the four-dimensional structure of space-time. What we call death—the ending of a particular sequence of moments—is actually not the ending of those moments.
His complicated mathematical formulas of the structure of space-time that he had spent much of his life developing, led him to have a similar view of existence as most religious traditions had been asserting for centuries. What appears to end does notactually perish. What seems to disappear remains embedded in a larger structure.(5)
So, the man who changed our understanding of time passed away without fearing death because physics informed him of something many people spend their lives trying to believe. Einstein’s convergence of mathematics and mysticism revealed a deeper truth: Nothing that has existed stops existing. It just moves beyond the moment we can perceive it.
Although Einstein was a pantheist and explicitly subscribed to Spinoza's God,(6) his realization echoed the spiritual beliefs of other religions concerning eternity. These religions believe that the universe's past, present, and future are contained within a structure beyond our limited human perception, and this sophisticated design points to an Architect.(7) They believe that the nature of reality suggests that creation is held together by an eternal consciousness, reinforcing their position in the existence of God.
Footnotes:
1) Alberta Rozsel (sometimes spelled Roszel) was the on-duty night nurse. While it is a highly popular urban legend that Einstein's final words were spoken in German and lost because the nurse did not understand them, this is historically unverified. Alberta Rozsel noted that he mumbled dynamically and passed away peacefully.
2) Einstein’s personal physician was Dr. Guy K. Dean; however, his physicians at Princeton Hospital included Dr. John K. Hampton (who also performed the autopsy), who was accompanied by consulting physicians like Dr. Frank Glenn.
3) This is not an exact quote, but his reported sentiments.
4) The letter is preserved in the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
5) While Einstein's deterministic block universe view (derived from special and general relativity) implies that past and future events coexist statically in a four-dimensional space-time continuum, the text's specific leap—that this physics scientifically proves consciousness or individual moments persist after death in a spiritual sense—is an interpretive philosophical extrapolation rather than a consensus scientific fact.
6) Einstein, being a pantheist, did not believe in a theistic God and explicitly rejected the concept of a personal God who intervenes in human affairs. He subscribed to Spinoza's God—an impersonal entity identical to the harmony of the universe. Instead of viewing God as a separate person or creator outside of the world, pantheism views the divine as the physical and spiritual totality of all existence.
7) To be clear, the idea of there being a God who was the Supreme Architect is a concept held by many traditional religions however not one held by Einstein.