James covers all things Einstein. How did he become a celebrity pinup? Does god play dice? And what happened to his brain?
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Mention the name "Einstein" and most
people will immediately picture
a wrinkly faced old man with
a massive shock of white hair.
However, there is much more
to this iconic thinker
than simply an interesting barnet.
For example - how did Einstein
become a celebrity pin-up?
What does E=mc2 actually mean?
And what happened to his brain?
Luckily for me, you don't have to be
a genius to figure out
the Things You Need To Know About
Einstein.
Right, let's kick off with
a really obvious question -
did Einstein spend seven years
as a cobbler?
Germany, 1879. Mr and Mrs Einstein
gaze upon their newborn baby -
concerned about his large,
misshapen head.
They needn't have worried.
This head contained one
of the greatest brains in history.
But as a young boy,
little Albert was slow to talk.
The maid even called him
"the dopey one."
So his parents took him
to see a doctor.
It turned out he just preferred
speaking in complete sentences.
Einstein, as a young boy,
started to query the world he was
living in.
He was fascinated by natural
phenomena.
One of these was when he was given
a compass at the age of five
and he was mesmerised by the needle
that would move around
and these mysterious forces
causing it to move.
The other thing that he loved
was his geometry book
which he was given when he was 12.
He devoured this book.
His understanding of science
was perhaps different
to most other children.
You'd think that for a budding
genius like young Einstein,
school would be an absolute doddle.
But you'd be wrong.
Einstein certainly wasn't
a dummy in the classroom.
But he didn't like being told
what to do
which often got him
in trouble with his teachers.
In fact, he called the schools
"barracks"
and the teachers "lieutenants".
To make matters worse,
when Einstein was just 15 years old,
his entire family moved to Italy -
leaving him behind in Munich.
So he got himself a doctor's note
and he quit school
more than a year early.
Private Einstein became a teenage
high school dropout.
He also flunked the entrance exam
to Zurich Polytech,
but tried again at 17 and aced it
only to become a bit of a rebel,
skipping classes
and arguing with teachers.
He would be not paying attention,
he would be questioning
some of the things that the teachers
would be telling him.
He didn't like rules,
and that doesn't go down well
in schools - still doesn't.
Or at least,
it didn't when I was at school!
One professor was so miffed
by Einstein's disobedience
that he did his best
to sabotage his academic career.
Which is why at the age of 22,
Einstein was unemployed,
with no prospects,
and a pregnant girlfriend.
Luckily, he landed a junior post
at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern,
doing the sort of work he referred
to as his cobbler's trade.
So, no. Einstein didn't spend seven
years mending stilettos.
But he DID do plenty of what
he loved best - thinking.
In fact, during his years
at the Patent Office,
this humble clerk did
some of the finest thinking in
the entire history of science,
which begs the question -
what was Einstein's big idea?
Imagine you're chasing after a bus.
It's doing 30 miles an hour,
but you only manage 29.
The bus is faster than you
by one mile an hour.
Speed up just a bit,
and you'll catch it.
But if the bus were a beam of light,
then no matter how much
you speed up,
it's always faster than you by the
same amount - the speed of light.
This doesn't seem to make much
sense,
but by the start
of the 20th century,
experiments had shown
that it was true.
What on earth was going on?
No matter whether you are moving
towards it or moving away from it,
you will always perceive light
to be moving at the same speed.
It's always 300,000km/s or
thereabouts,
and this is a little bit odd.
It's not what
we experience in everyday life.
That flies in the face
of common sense.
I mean, it sounds
like the statement of a lunatic.
It really is a ridiculous thing
to suggest.
It took one of Einstein's famous
"thought experiments"
to sort it out.
Let's say Mr and Mrs Einstein each
have identical "relativity" clocks.
These super-accurate timepieces work
by bouncing a photon of light
between two mirrors a few feet
apart.
Now, if Albert hurtles past
at near the speed of light,
Mrs Einstein would say that his
photon has to travel much further
between ticks than hers.
So to keep the clocks ticking
together,
his photon would have to speed up.
Except we already know that light
doesn't do that!
Einstein reasoned that time itself,
not light, changes speed.
He simply took this idea seriously -
that the speed of light IS constant
and that means that the very notion
of what space and time is
has to give.
So this meant that time itself was
no longer absolute.
It had to be relative,
and this is the big breakthrough
that Einstein made.
This fundamental shift in the way
we see the universe
meant that different clocks could
show different times
and still be right.
Relative to Mrs Einstein, Albert's
clock ticks slower than hers.
The faster he goes,
the slower it ticks
until, at the speed of light,
it would stop altogether.
Bingo! Einstein had shown how
nothing travels faster than light -
not even celebrity gossip!
Einstein published his
universe-shattering theory in 1905,
followed by a small postscript.
This contained a tiny little
equation,
one that just about everybody knows,
but almost no-one fully
understands.
So what does E=mc2 actually mean?
The world's most famous equation
simply states that E,
or energy, equals mass - m,
times c - the speed of light,
times itself.
And because c squared is a really
big number,
even a really small piece of matter
like a paperclip equals
a lot of energy.
18 kilotons of TNT's worth
to be exact.
Or - one atom bomb.
It doesn't even matter what that
matter is.
Marmalade, moon-rock, or a monkey's
earwax - it's all atoms,
which, in theory, can be
converted to energy.
So why can't we power our cities
with paperclips
and heat our homes with earwax?
The problem is - releasing that
energy requires an awful
lot of well, energy.
One way to do it
is nuclear fission.
Take one large atomic nucleus
like uranium.
Split it in two, and a little bit
gets converted to energy,
along with some nasty
radioactive by-products.
Then there's fusion.
Take two hydrogen nuclei
and stick them
together to produce
one helium nucleus.
And some energy.
But, first you'll need about
100 million degrees Celsius.
Which is why stars
like the sun can do it.
If we could crack it here on earth,
controlled fusion would give us
unlimited clean energy.
Einstein's equation raises this
possibility, the possibility
to use nuclear fusion
to generate energy.
It means that if we crack fusion,
we can actually generate
a huge amount of energy
with a small amount of matter.
A fusion power station in one day
would use about one kg of fuel.
That's like a big bag of sugar,
whereas a coal-fired power station
every day uses
hundreds of truckloads of coal.
So it gives you an idea
of the amount of energy
that we can get from fusion.
Sounds too good to be true?
Well, so far, it is.
The only energy-efficient fusion
we have achieved is
the hydrogen bomb - and that's most
definitely not controlled!
If all this can be explained by one
tiny equation containing just three
numbers,
then Einstein's next big idea
would really shake things up.
Einstein knew that his first theory
of relativity was missing something.
Gravity.
So he relabelled it "Special" and
got cracking on a new version,
which he called
"General Relativity".
If I'd just overthrown hundreds
of years of scientific thinking,
I think I'd probably settle down,
have a bit of a nap.
But then again, I'm not a genius.
The story goes that Einstein was
sitting in his office
when he saw a man fixing a roof.
He imagined the poor chap
falling off
and had what he called
the happiest thought of his life.
As the man starts to fall,
he is effectively in zero gravity.
Put him inside a large windowless
box that's also in free fall,
and he has no way of knowing
that he's moving.
That is, until he hits the ground.
Einstein realised that gravity
is actually an illusion.
Although its effects
were still as real as ever.
If you think about how you feel on a
roller coaster,
for example,
when you're going up and down,
that just like having gravity
turned on and off.
So if you just jump off the top
of a building,
then as you're falling down,
it's like somebody's
just turned gravity off.
And Einstein had come up with
a profound new understanding
of how the universe behaved.
It took him ten years to work out
the details,
but in 1916 he produced a brand-new
picture of time, space and gravity.
And in this new universe,
gravity slows time.
He took space, 3D space,
and merged it with time,
and came up with
the concept of space-time.
Four-dimensional space-time is
something that is impossible to
visualise
because we live in a
three-dimensional world.
There's up/down, left/right,
forward/back,
and then there's another direction
which I can't point in,
unfortunately because I can only
ever point in space,
but this other direction if I could
point in it -
it's the time direction.
So we get this curved
four-dimensional space-time,
and this is actually
equivalent to gravity.
If I have a planet
and I put it in my space-time,
it deforms space-time,
and that is my gravitational well.
So we're not just thinking of it
as a force,
we're thinking of it
as a perturbance in space-time.
Because Earth's gravity gets weaker
the further away from its centre
you are,
your head ages faster than your feet
by a hundredth of a billionth
of a second every day.
By your 80th birthday,
your cranium has gained a good 300
nanoseconds on your tootsies.
Or, about a millionth of the time
it takes to blink.
Einstein's brilliance may have
changed the universe,
but it didn't actually make him
a lot of money.
Apparently, he once quipped
that his thought-experiments
placed clocks all over the cosmos,
and yet he couldn't actually afford
to buy one for himself!
It's Einstein's 72nd birthday party.
A photographer asks him
to smile for the camera.
Instead, the ageing professor
engages in a cheeky spot of glossal
protrusion.
This snapshot became so famous
that in 2009 an autographed copy
sold at auction for nearly 75,000.
So just how did a wrinkly old
physicist
become such a bankable icon?
Ironically, Einstein's meteoric rise
to fame began with the stars.
In 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington
photographed them
during a solar eclipse,
and confirmed that gravity
bends light.
So Einstein was right and just about
everything we thought we knew
about space, time and the universe
was wrong.
Almost overnight, Einstein's mug
became global front-page news.
When it hit the newspapers
Einstein became an overnight
celebrity throughout the whole world,
not just among scientists.
The Newtonian view of the world
was utterly shattered.
This was something completely new
and something that people
weren't expecting
so when this theory was actually
shown experimentally to be correct,
it caused a lot of excitement.
At first, he didn't exactly welcome
the attention.
He told a friend,
"I dream I'm burning in Hell
"and the postman is the Devil,
eternally roaring at me."
But he soon got used to
the glare of the spotlight.
By the time the Einsteins relocated
to America in 1933,
they were hobnobbing with the rich
and famous.
Albert's wild hair and drooping
moustache were a cartoonist's dream,
as instantly recognisable
as Mickey Mouse
and almost as easy to draw.
Which is why ever since, just
about every absent-minded professor
and mad scientist looks
a bit like you-know-who.
Today, anybody as famous as Einstein
would have their own chat show,
they'd have a private jet
and a temper shorter
than a yardstick in a black hole.
Frankly, they'd be unbearable.
During his girlfriend Mileva's
pregnancy,
Einstein wrote her a soppy letter.
"I am filled with
such happiness and joy", he wrote,
"that I must share it with you".
Aw, sweet - except the previous
line of her Valentine read,
"I have just read a wonderful paper
on the generation of cathode rays".
Albert and Mileva did tie the knot,
and had two more children,
but you'd hardly call them
love's young dream.
A few years into their nuptial
arrangement,
they shared a passion for physics,
but not much else.
He once said, "Marriage is
the unsuccessful attempt
"to make something lasting out of an
incident."
And called Mileva an employee
he couldn't sack.
He even drew up a kind of legal
contract,
ordering her to do his cooking
and laundry,
prohibiting any sort of intimacy,
and demanding that she stop talking
to him if he requested it.
Sounds more like a Hollywood
pre-nup!
This marriage probably didn't
get off to a good start.
The work that Einstein was doing
required intense concentration.
He spent a lot of time
lost in thought,
which is kind of incompatible with
having a young baby around,
which is very distracting.
He was having to earn money,
he was having to do his physics
in the evening
and he was having to be a father
as well as a husband.
Hardly surprisingly,
it ended in divorce -
partly because Einstein
had at least one affair -
with his first cousin Elsa,
who then became his second wife.
But despite many rumours to
the contrary,
he didn't have an affair
with screen goddess Marilyn Monroe.
The two never even met.
Talking of goddesses, we know
that Einstein developed a deep
and philosophical sense of wonder
at the beauty of the cosmos,
and he obviously had an eye
for a heavenly body,
but he wasn't exactly a big fan
of organised religion.
So how did this born-again atheist
end up bringing the Almighty
into one of his most famous
arguments?
Einstein spent his last 30 years
attempting to pull off
his greatest trick yet -
a Unified Field Theory to explain
just about everything
in the universe.
His own Relativity Theory described
a sort of "clockwork" universe.
Measure it accurately enough,
and you could work out the past
and even predict the future.
Relativity was great at big stuff
like universes,
but rubbish at little things,
like atoms.
Quantum Theory did this brilliantly,
but said some really crazy things -
objects could be in many places
at once.
A cat in a box could be both alive
and dead until someone takes a peek.
Worst of all, it said the fabric
of reality is essentially fuzzy.
When I say "fuzzy",
I mean that by the time you get down
to the level of subatomic particles,
things stop being actual things,
and they become probabilities -
which means they might be
where you think they are,
but then again...they might not.
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle
said we can never be 100% sure
of absolutely everything,
including the past and the future.
Quantum mechanics is definitely
weird, and very counter-intuitive.
The most twisted and surreal
imagination would never have come up
with quantum physics
if we weren't battered into it
by the weight of the experimental
evidence.
Electrons can be in many
different places at once.
We've got a particle
travelling from A to B.
In the quantum world,
it can take many different paths
at the same time.
So the object itself may or
may not be there!
Einstein hated this idea,
rejecting it by saying "God does not
play dice with the universe."
Niels Bohr, the champion of this
disturbing new science, replied,
"Stop telling God what to do!"
It was more than 50 years
before quantum mechanics could be
tested by experiment,
and Einstein
was finally proved wrong!
Yes, it's official.
The world IS essentially uncertain.
God, it seems,
DOES play dice after all.
But if Einstein made a mess of that,
what else did he get wrong?
Or in other words...
Some might argue that Einstein's
work gave us the atom bomb,
which is a pretty big
faux pas in anyone's book.
But it seems his worst mistake was
one of even greater gravity.
Einstein used his equations to build
a model of the universe,
only to find that it should be
expanding, or contracting,
but not remaining static as everyone
at the time knew it was.
For once, Einstein wasn't thinking
weird and far out.
He was maintaining
conventional wisdom
that the universe was static,
as we all expected.
I think he thought
the universe was static
because there wasn't anything really
to convince him otherwise.
So the idea was,
he'd made a mistake somewhere.
Einstein bodged up a last-minute
fix, adding a number
he called the Cosmological Constant
into his equations,
a kind of "negative gravity"
to counterbalance
the effects of regular gravity.
Even at the time,
he knew this was very dodgy science.
He had to introduce a fudge factor,
and the fudge factor stopped him
from having an expanding universe.
And this was like a mysterious
repulsive force that
went against gravity,
and actually stopped the universe
collapsing, and kept it static.
He had to introduce a fudge factor
into his mathematics,
which turned out to be a mistake.
12 years later, Edwin Hubble
discovered that due to the Big Bang
the universe IS expanding.
Hubble worked out that all
the galaxies in the universe are
flying apart from each other,
exactly like...
..the spots on the surface
of an inflating balloon.
So Einstein had been right
about the expanding universe,
and wrong to add
his Cosmological Constant,
the so-called biggest blunder
of his life.
Einstein then realised
that in fact
he had the solution all along.
He actually had the solution
of an expanding universe.
His equations, taken at face value,
actually predict an expanding
universe,
so he kind of missed that trick.
The universe was actually expanding,
so there was no need for this
Cosmological Constant
to keep it static.
And this was his biggest blunder.
But as recently as 1998,
scientists discovered that
the universe isn't just expanding.
It's speeding up, too.
Shocked by this result, they had
to quickly invent a repulsive force
to explain it away,
and they called it "Dark Energy" -
basically another name
for the Cosmological Constant.
So, even when Einstein got it wrong,
he ended up being right.
OK, so once in a blue moon Einstein
stuffed up, dropped the ball,
made a boo-boo.
But at least he was honest about it.
And scientists are good at that -
admitting they're wrong
when somebody comes up
with a better idea.
Unlike that other bunch.
You know - politicians.
Which makes me wonder...
They say that politics is just
show business for ugly people.
Well, Einstein certainly never won
any beauty contests -
maybe that's why he became so
interested in the affairs of state.
In Zurich, when he should have
been studying physics,
he was often found at the Odeon
Cafe - a notorious hang-out
later frequented by the likes
of Trotsky, Lenin, and Mussolini.
Perhaps inspired by this
free-thinking atmosphere,
Einstein soon proved he wasn't one
to shy away from a political
argument.
Maybe he should have
laid off the coffee.
After the outbreak of World War One,
nearly 100 prominent scientists
signed a paper supporting
Germany's military aggression.
Outraged, Einstein added
his John Hanco*ck to a pacifist
counter-petition,
bringing the final number
of signatures to a total of...four!
Before the next war, Einstein -
who was Jewish -
had a reward placed on his head
by the Nazi Party.
And his work became the target
of their infamous book-burning
campaign,
which might explain why
he decided not to stick around.
But even after
he settled in the Land Of The Free,
things weren't much better.
Wary of Einstein's socialist views
and political influence,
the FBI opened a file on him
collecting 1,800 pages
of so-called
"derogatory information".
They tapped his phone, opened his
mail, and even went through his bin.
But while America treated
Einstein like the enemy,
other countries were a little
more welcoming.
In 1952, the newly formed
State of Israel
asked him if he'd like to have a
bash at being their President.
He turned it down.
If the thought of President Einstein
strikes you as maybe a little
bizarre,
it's nothing - nothing! - compared
with what happened after his death.
What happened to Einstein's brain?
Sadly, Einstein departed
these four dimensions in 1955.
Against his wishes,
and without the family's permission,
autopsy pathologist Thomas Harvey
removed the ex-genius's brain.
Curiously,
he also removed the eyeballs,
which today reside in a New York
safe-deposit box.
He actually stole Einstein's brain!
He was really
interested in finding out
if there was a physical connection
between the brain and genius.
Instead of handing over
his cerebral trophy,
Harvey sliced it into 240 pieces,
pickled them
in two jars of formaldehyde
and stashed them in his basem*nt.
After losing his wife,
his job and his medical certificate
as a result of the scandal,
Dr Harvey set off around the USA in
search of an expert
who could unlock the secrets
of a genius's brain.
He even kept the brain
in a beer cooler,
before eventually shoving it
into the trunk of his Buick Skylark
and heading west to California.
He thought it would make a nice gift
for Einstein's granddaughter,
but strangely enough,
she didn't want it.
After 41 years,
Harvey finally contacted
a university researcher in Canada.
She spotted that thanks to
an under-developed Sylvian fissure,
Einstein's parietal lobe was about
15% wider than normal.
This bit of the brain deals with
mathematics and spatial awareness -
definitely two
of Einstein's better subjects!
Later, a neuropathologist placed
some of the sliced cerebrum
under a microscope,
and discovered something
rather remarkable.
Einstein's 76-year-old grey matter
showed almost no sign of ageing.
So, the key to Einstein's genius
may have been simply
that he was young at heart -
or brain, at least.
Whatever the cause, Einstein's
impressive cerebral abilities
have assured him a place as THE
foremost thinker of the 20th
century.
The by-products of his work
have affected every single one of us
on the planet,
not to mention
quite a few people off it,
while he himself has become
an icon -
a pipe-smoking, tongue-poking,
sock-dodging symbol of true genius,
with a natty little 'tache
and the worst hairdo in physics.
Relatively speaking, that is!
