Albert Einstein
BY FRANK
PELLEGRINI
Everything's
relative.
Speed, mass,
space and time are all subjective. Light has weight. Space has curves. And
coiled within a pound of
matter is the explosive power of 14 million tons of TNT.
We know all this,
because of Albert Einstein.
The light came on in 1905.
Preternaturally
confident and suitably unkempt, the 26-year-old Einstein sent three papers, papers scrawled
in his spare time, to the premier journal, "Annalen der Physik," to
be published "if there is
room." They all made the same issue, and they changed the world. One was an update of Max Planck's
quantum theory of radiation. Another concerned Brownian motion, an until-then unexplained
phenomenon involving bouncing molecules. The third, wrote Einstein
matter-of factly in a letter to a
friend, "modifies the theory of space and time." Its import:
Everything's relative. He
could have retired right then and still been the savior of science in the 20th
century.
In 1939,
Einstein warned
Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a letter that the Germans were nearing the nuclear age. America had
better get there first. It did. By 1945 Einstein's epiphany and the Manhattan Project would
wreak, the most horrible destruction of our age in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Einstein knew
what he and his visions had done - Pacifist, deep-thinking Einstein, who loved children, was the
father of the bomb. after the war he made a tearful apology to visiting
Japanese physicist Hideki
Yukawa.
At Princeton,
He was more like
a kindly uncle. When he arrived in 1935, and was asked what he would require for his study, he
replied: "A desk, some pads and a pencil, and a large waste-basket -- to
hold all of my
mistakes." His salary had to be raised by Princeton administrators to
avoid embarrassment.
He played the
violin, helped children with their homework, and did indeed have some trouble remembering his
address.
Once, Uncle
Einstein sent this reply, along with a page full of diagrams, to a 15-year-old
girl who had written for
help on a homework assignment: "Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics; I
can assure you that mine are much greater." Everything's relative.
Religion
Einstein, though
not religious, was a believer. "I want to know how God created this
world... I want to know his
thoughts; the rest are details." And he had a good idea of what those
thoughts were. Subtle but
not malicious, non-interventionist but certainly present, Einstein's God didn't "play dice
with the universe."
"Stop
telling God what to do," Niels Bohr told him.
Einstein got us
closer to nature's truths than anyone had before, and he knew how much he had left unsolved.
With just a pen and paper, he peeked behind Nature's curtain.
Now, when we
think of genius, we see his face.
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Today (25 November 2015) marks 100 years of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. This excellent article was published in the TIME magazine in the year 2000, when it chose Albert Einstein as the Person of Century.
I just love this small piece, the way it has been written.
