Good Vibrations

Albert Einstein was born 131 years ago today in the City of Ulm in what is now the Federal Republic of Germany. In perhaps a mild irony, Ulm is also home to the tallest church in the world, rising a staggering 530 feet towards God’s heavenly seat and encompassing over 6.7 million square feet of volume. I visited Ulm as a young American soldier and have seen this magnificent human achievement dwarfing its surroundings, in much the same way that religion dwarfed science for much of humanity’s existence. I did not visit Einstein’s birthplace, since it was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in December of 1944. Construction of the great church in Ulm was begun in 1377, so it has seen its share of wars, but during the Second World War, the church went largely untouched. I wouldn’t read too much into this though, except perhaps that random chance is a viable, if emotionally unsatisfying, substitute for divine providence.

Albert Einstein’s life has been extensively chronicled by many insightful biographers and I’m sure there’s not much I can add. One of my favorite treatments is “Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain” by Michael Paterniti. It is an unorthodox exploration of Einstein’s human side and is appropriately irreverent to satisfy the contrarian in me, but whether you have ever read anything about Mr. Einstein or not, you are affected every day by the practical consequences of his thinking. While Einstein is best remembered by the average person for his Special Theory of Relativity, or E=MC2, he actually won his Nobel Prize for work on the photoelectric effect and his important contributions to the fields of fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, optics and quantum theory are universally recognized.

Perhaps the most unique thing about Albert Einstein as a physicist was his general aversion to complex mathematics. While many physicists were absorbed with the cliché blackboard full of seemingly interminable equations, Einstein would intuitively fathom the universe’s deepest secrets and leave the drudgery of mathematical proofs to others. Although it would be untrue to suggest that Einstein was a poor mathematician, he did not typically grind deductively through countless iteration of formulae, but rather inductively reasoned complex theories completely in his mind. Like the blind Kung Fu master, there was something almost supernatural about Einstein’s ability to guess what nature was up to simply through observation and contemplation.

The predictions of Einstein’s various theories continue to be verified all these years later. Most recently, astronomers have observed galaxies clustering in the manner predicted by General Relativity and General Relativity has also been utilized to confirm the mass, and therefore the existence, of Dark Matter surrounding the visible elements of galaxies. It turns out that Dark Matter may well be the predominate component of the universe, despites it elusive nature. I have my own theory that Dark Matter is comprised principally of all the missing socks and random chess pieces which have seemingly vanished into thin air throughout the years, although there is currently no empirical data to support this. The presence of wormholes, by the way, is just one of the many bizarre realities predicted by General Relativity, along with time travel and relativistic time dilation, so, as a Wormhole Repairman, I have a significant debt of gratitude to Mr. Einstein.

Einstein was something of a player and an intermittent workaholic, so his domestic relationships were sometimes less than satisfactory and many have observed that he could have been a more attentive father, so apparently, like all the rest of us, Einstein had his faults. What is interesting is that while in many ways he was so unlike most of us, he was after all just a brilliant, but flawed human. Einstein said, among other insightful things, that “the hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax”, which proves his genius for understanding both the mundane and the sublime. He enjoyed a cold beer, a shapely female form and speculating about quantized atomic vibrations, and we all know two out of three ain’t bad. Happy birthday dead genius dude, and thanks.