Albert Einstein — The Clerk Who Rewrote Physics

Hi there, and welcome to 8 Minute Lives. In 1905, in the Swiss city of Bern, a twenty-six-year-old man spent his days at a desk in the patent office, reviewing patent applications. He was a technical expert, third class. He had failed to get an academic job after university. His old professors wouldn't recommend him. And in that one year, working evenings and stolen moments between patent files, he published four scientific papers. One explained the existence of atoms. One would win him the Nobel Prize. One overturned humanity's understanding of space and time. And one contained the most famous equation ever written. This is the story of Albert Einstein. He was born in 1879 in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg, in southern Germany, to a middle-class Jewish family. His father ran an electrical engineering business that never quite succeeded. Young Albert was slow to speak, and family legend later exaggerated this into stories of a backward child. In truth, he was quiet and intensely curious. When he was around five, his father showed him a pocket compass, and the boy was transfixed by the needle. Something invisible was reaching through space and moving it. He said later that the experience left a deep and lasting impression. School suited him badly. German education in that era ran on drill and obedience, and Einstein bristled at both. He taught himself geometry and philosophy at home, devouring books faster than any classroom could feed him. He eventually made his way to the Polytechnic in Zurich, Switzerland, where he studied physics, skipped lectures he found boring, and irritated the faculty so thoroughly that when he graduated, no one would hire him as an assistant. So while his classmates started academic careers, Einstein tutored schoolboys and drifted. A friend's father finally pulled strings to get him the patent office job. It looked like a dead end. It turned out to be perfect. The work was easy for him, the hours were regular, and his mind was free. He also had company: he had married Mileva Marić, a fellow physics student, one of the very few women studying the subject anywhere in Europe. Then came 1905, the year physicists still call the miracle year. In March, Einstein proposed that light comes in discrete packets of energy, an idea so radical that even he called it revolutionary. It helped launch quantum theory. In May, he explained the jittery dance of particles in water, giving strong evidence that atoms are real. In June came special relativity, which said something astonishing: time itself is flexible. A clock moving fast runs slower than a clock standing still. There is no universal "now" ticking away for everyone. And in September, a short follow-up showed that mass and energy are related by the equation E equals m c squared. Locked inside every gram of matter is an enormous reservoir of energy. A patent clerk had rewritten the foundations of physics. It took the scientific world a few years to notice, but notice it did. By 1909 Einstein finally had a university appointment, and universities across Europe began competing for him. Berlin eventually won, offering him a research post with few teaching duties, which was exactly the kind of freedom he craved. But he wasn't finished. Special relativity had a gap: it said nothing about gravity. For eight years Einstein wrestled with the problem, through failed calculations and false starts, and in 1915 he produced general relativity. The idea is breathtaking. Matter bends the fabric of space and time itself, and what we feel as gravity is objects following those curves. The Earth orbits the Sun because the Sun has warped the space around it. The theory made a testable prediction: starlight passing near the Sun should bend by a predicted amount. In 1919, a British expedition photographed stars during a total solar eclipse, and the light bent just as Einstein said it would. The results made front pages around the world. Overnight, a forty-year-old physicist became the most famous scientist alive, mobbed by crowds and reporters wherever he went. The Nobel Prize followed in 1921, awarded, oddly enough, for his work on light packets rather than relativity, which the committee still considered too controversial. Fame concealed a messier private life. His marriage to Mileva had collapsed, and in the divorce settlement he promised her the money from the Nobel Prize he hoped he'd win. He kept that promise. He married his cousin Elsa, and remained, by most accounts, a distant husband and father, devoted above all to his work. And the world around him was darkening. In Germany, nationalists and antisemites attacked "Jewish physics" and its famous face. Einstein, an outspoken pacifist and a Jew, became a target. When Hitler took power in 1933, Einstein was abroad. He never went back. The Nazis seized his property and placed a price on his head. He settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where he would spend the rest of his life. In 1939, fellow refugee physicists warned him that Nazi Germany might build a bomb using the energy locked in atoms — the very energy his equation had revealed. Einstein signed a letter to President Roosevelt urging the United States to act. That letter helped set the Manhattan Project in motion, though Einstein himself was kept away from the secret work. When the bombs fell on Japan, he was anguished. He reportedly said that had he known the Germans would fail to build one, he would never have lifted a finger to help with the atomic bomb effort. His final decades were quieter. He hunted, unsuccessfully, for a unified theory that would merge gravity with the rest of physics. He argued against the strangeness of quantum mechanics, insisting that God does not play dice with the universe. He spoke out for civil rights in America, calling racism a disease of white people, and in 1952 he was offered the presidency of the State of Israel. He declined, saying he lacked the aptitude for dealing with people. He died in Princeton in 1955. What did he leave behind? GPS satellites correct for the time-bending he predicted. Lasers, solar panels, and nuclear power all trace back to his work in different ways. Black holes and gravitational waves, confirmed a century later, were written into his equations all along. But perhaps his real legacy is the example itself. The establishment had no place for him, so he thought alone, at a clerk's desk, and asked childlike questions about light and time. The universe, it turned out, was listening.