Rock 'n' Roll Einstein

from the 9.1.05 Birmingham Weekly (cover story)

It’s amazing the difference that one hundred years can make.

On this date in 1905, there was no television to rot the minds of the young, no space program for the government to underfund, no weaponized Uranium to unsettle the worried minds of a nation. There were no cell phones, no passenger planes ferrying businessmen across the globe, no computers or Internet.

Today, of course, it’s incredible to believe that there was life before the technological wonders we take for granted, and mind-boggling to imagine a world without general relativity, where E doesn’t equal mc^2. But this world would be a very different place if not for that year one century ago, and the work of the most (in)famous scientist in the world.

If you’re a scientist, you know all about Einstein’s work; if you’re not, you know all you’ll probably ever understand. It was Einstein that taught us to look at light as composed not only of waves but of particles, paving the way for everything from remote controls to digital cameras to the photoelectric scanners at your neighborhood grocery checkout. It was Einstein who, essentially, proved that atoms were real objects, not just an abstract concept to be used for hypotheses. Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity allows for GPS tracking. And Einstein’s most famous idea – e=mc^2 – allowed us to understand why the sun shines and how to build bombs with Uranium.

All of this happened in one year, by the way: 1905. At the age of 26, married with a son, working in the Swiss Patent Office, finishing his doctoral thesis, he published five groundbreaking and revolutionary papers that would change the scientific world forever (something for you parents to tell your undergrad kids when they balk at getting a summer job between semesters).

And all this doesn’t even consider his most groundbreaking work, formulating the general theory of relativity, which introduced time as a fourth dimension (joining height, width, and depth) to the world we live in. It was a scientific discovery so powerful that it opened up a new field of study (cosmology, or the large-scale study of the universe as a whole).

Outside of the occasional Galileo reference or mention of Newton, there is no other scientist whose name and image have so permeated our mainstream culture. He’s been TIME magazine’s Person of the Century and appears almost without fail on the cover of Birmingham-based Mental_Floss magazine; Philip Glass wrote an opera about the man; he was portrayed by Walter Matthau in a dubious 1994 Meg Ryan movie. In our society, fascinated as we are with celebrities and beautiful people, it’s not hard to wonder how Einstein figures into the equation. But the answer is simple, with a little outside-the-box thinking: Einstein is the calendar boy for nerds, the original Geek Rock god (Rivers Cuomo, eat your heart out).

Einstein was the Jimi Hendrix of the physics world. Like Hendrix and guitar, Einstein is notable largely because he approached physics from a unique, left-field perspective. His was not a purely scientific approach, but rather largely influenced as well by philosophy and music. A by-the-numbers approach would never have lent itself so well to the harnessing of new and different ideas, which were the source of Einstein’s fame and importance.

Einstein, like Hendrix, succeeded in his field in a way which would not be possible today. Without discounting their abilities, taking nothing away from the nimble fingers and brilliantly skewed approach to 12 notes and rhythm or solid grasp of abstract mathematical concepts that make most people bleed from the eyes – credit where credit is due, but acceptance of brilliance (especially such that appears so alien from anything we know) requires timing and a world condition that we can’t control. Hendrix came along in changing times, when people were more open to new artistic ideas, when racial lines were fading and blurring, when psychedelic drugs were much more readily available to the listening audience.

Einstein, too, was blessed to be where and when he was. The world of science then was vastly different than it is today: there were fewer scientists, less specialization within fields, and less emphasis on collaboration. In his anis mirabilis, the Miracle Year of 1905, he submitted and saw publication of five papers. At the time, Einstein was an unknown, and he had no citations to accompany his papers – qualities that will land an author squarely in the trash bin today.

Rock ‘n’ roll scientist, perhaps to a fault: he divorced his first wife and married his cousin. That aside, though, those of us that suffered the slings and arrows of Nerdhood throughout our lives can take some solace in knowing that Einstein went a long way toward building the bridge between smart kids and rock stars.

Einstein once said, "The independence created by philosophical insight is — in my opinion — the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth." His early interest in reading the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer profoundly affected his thinking, allowing him to approach physics from a different angle than most scientists. It is, perhaps, this background and obvious interest in the pursuit of higher meanings that explains his lasting influence and surprising place as an icon in American celebrity.

While other scientists throughout history are famed for one or two discoveries, no other member of the scientific community – in fact, very few people at all – have had as great an impact on the world political scene. Affected strongly by what he witnessed during the First World War, he preached and rallied for peace and pacifism; this stance only strengthened when he left Germany and came to America upon Hitler’s rise to power in the early 1930s, and again after the end of World War II.

There was a short time around the beginning of the second War that Einstein publicly supported the construction of the atomic bomb, urging President Roosevelt to pursue the idea in order to beat Germany in the race. Toward the end of his life, however, he recanted these statements, calling them “the one great mistake in my life.” He spent the rest of his years speaking out against the impending nuclear race.

It is, in many ways, pointless to wonder what Einstein would have done had he been born one hundred years later, into our modern age with all its advances, with the power of the supercomputer and space travel and all the other technological wonders that surely would have streamlined his work. Pointless, because so much of what we trumpet as tools that would progress and ease his scientific explorations are a direct result of his existing work; without Einstein, there is no moon walk, no multithreaded processing, no Hubble Telescope or particle accelerator or networked supercomputing.

Pointless, too, because Einstein – like Jimi Hendrix or Nirvana, like Jesus and Mohammed and Moses – was a product of a confluence of things, not just his own personal strengths and gifts. In any other time, any other place, Einstein’s gifted voice would have been drowned out by world circumstance, by politics and jealousy and the worst of the human condition. The world one hundred years ago was a much different place, more accepting and prepared, in some ways, for radical and alien ways for approaching the problems of science.

And for that, we should all be thankful.

SIDEBAR: FUN FACTS ABOUT EINSTEIN

In 1952, Einstein was asked by Israel to be its president. He declined.
Einstein’s brain was removed from his body at his autopsy, and traveled the country with Thomas Harvey until 1996.
Mathematicians call Einstein's formula for Brownian motion "the random walk" because it not only describes molecular collisions but also can be used to precisely plot the erratic path of a drunk staggering home.
Einstein was a poor student, as the lore has it, although he excelled from an early age at – no surprise – math and science.
Encouraged by his musical mother, Albert began playing violin at age 6 and continued throughout his life. Rumor has it that he would pick up his bow whenever he faced a problem that he couldn’t figure out. In fact, he once said that, had he not become a scientist, he would have pursued music: “I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music...I get most joy in life out of music. ”
Although Einstein won the Nobel Prize in 1921, he never made it to Stockholm to pick up his medal (it was hand-delivered to him later by the Swedish ambassador). The money he won with the medal – approximately $32,000 – went directly to his ex-wife Mileva as part of their divorce settlement.
Contrary to popular myth, Einstein had nothing to do with the creation of the atomic bomb; the U.S. Army Intelligence office denied him security clearance necessary to be a part of the Manhattan Project. He did encourage the US building the bomb, if only so that they would beat out Germany in the race, but openly denounced nuclear weapons after the bombs were dropped on Japan.
Einstein was not a religious man, although one of his most famous quotes (“God does not play dice with the universe”) is often used out-of-context (the quote is a reference to quantum mechanics and Einstein’s belief that everything could be described with mathematical formulae) to portray him as such. A year before his death, he said, “I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”