The story goes that a reporter asked Albert Einstein for his phone number (no, this didn’t take place in a bar), and Einstein had to look it up in a phone directory. When the reporter expressed surprise that the twentieth-century’s greatest physicist didn’t know his own phone number, Einstein replied, “Never memorize what you can look up in a book.”
If there was any validity to Einstein’s comment when he said it many decades ago, then it’s even more valid now: Google lets me look up information much more quickly and easily than even the most nimble-fingered research librarian can find it in a book.
But should we really follow Einstein’s advice about memorization? After all, the man couldn’t even comb his own hair, and he seems to have had trouble knowing what to do with his tongue. Continue reading Remembering Versus Googling — Mark Morton