Did Einstein say: “If the bees disappear from the face of the earth, there will be four years left for humanity”?

On the Internet, this gloomy prediction of Einstein is very popular. We decided to check the correct attribution of this quote.

A quote about the death of mankind after the disappearance of the bees attributed to Albert Einstein, has been walking on the Internet for more than a dozen years. She pops up not only in public in "VKontakte" And Livejournalbut also in media publications, for example "Rossiya newspaper", "Komsomolskaya Pravda", Newsru.com, "Knife" and others. In 2013, the quote appeared even in a press release from the French Ministry of Agriculture (now the page has already been deleted).

There is not a single more or less reliable evidence that Einstein has ever said something like that. Search for the largest Archive Albert Einstein's works at the University of Jerusalem, to whom the scientist bequeathed to transfer all his notes after his death, did not give results. IN collection Einstein’s quotes published by Princeton University, this phrase is located in the section “attributed to Einstein”. The compiler suggests that perhaps someone distorted one of the real quotes of physics beyond recognition.

Authoritative Facticsching Project Snopes also asked The question of whether Einstein said something like that, and found out that for the first time this quote attributed to physics appeared in the news about the protests of the Brussels beekeepers in 1994. Having studied Einstein’s works, selection of quotes and archives, facteckeepers came to the conclusion that he never said like that.

The Quote Investigator project dedicated to checking the correctness of the attribution of quotes, Found An even earlier case of attributing to Einstein a quote about the disappearance of bees, and then humanity. In 1965, in the French magazine La Vie des bêtes et l'ami des bêtes, an article was published about the environmental harm of the fight against mosquitoes, where the author brought that very quote in support of his words. However, Quote Investigator also did not find any reliable evidence that Einstein had ever said something like that.

The authors of Snopes and Quote Investigator believe that, most likely, this is the case when a thought is invested in the mouth of a respected person in order to attract the attention of the public.

Incorrect attribution of quote

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

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2. Is it true that the phrase that in the fourth world war people will fight stones and sticks belong to Einstein?