Published in the November 25 – December 8, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life

By Marty Cheek

Marty Cheek, publisher Morgan Hill Life

Marty Cheek, publisher Morgan Hill Life

Albert-Einstein-webOne hundred years ago this month, Albert Einstein shared with fellow scientists his general theory of relativity, the most revolutionary idea in physics since the time of Isaac Newton. On the morning of Nov. 25, 1915, the 21st-century’s most famous physicist read his ground-breaking paper at the Prussian Academy of Science in Berlin.

Indulge me for a moment as I share my secret fantasy of a minor meeting previous to that day that in all probability never actually took place.
My grandfather, Kurt Drückler, owned a tobacco shop in Berlin in the central part of the city. Einstein was a pipe smoker. He was also known to take long walks as his brain worked out the mathematical details of the scientific ideas born in his imagination. So I like to imagine that perhaps there was a day while he was pondering the complexities of general relativity, Einstein took a walk along the streets of the German capital, inhaling the smoke from his pipe as the symbols of mathematical equations swirled in his mind.

At one point in his strolling the busy urban streets, he happened to run out of tobacco. Good fortune smiled on him. He looked up and noticed a corner tobacco shop with the words “Proprietor Kurt Drückler” over the door. He noticed the lean man behind the counter, my grandfather, and bought from him a replenishment of tobacco for his pipe, soon leaving to continue his contemplation of how space-time and gravity shape the universe.

Although it’s fun for me to speculate on a short encounter between Einstein and my grandfather at his tobacco shop, the odds are strongly against it. Berlin in 1915 was a city of nearly two million people, and tobacco shops were probably as prevalent throughout the cosmopolitan city a century ago as Starbucks coffee shops are today.

In the early 20th century, Berlin was the global hub of theoretical physics, with the star scientist Max Planck leading a team of brilliant physicists in exploring mind-blowing ideas of how the universe ticks. Einstein moved to Berlin in 1914 when, at the urging of Planck, he took on the appointment as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and as a professor at Humboldt University. Soon after, he was welcomed as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.

Einstein’s Berlin science success was a far cry from his time in 1900 as a 21-year-old undergraduate at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich where he cut classes and professors considered him a goof-off. After graduation, he couldn’t get a job in any science-based college. He seriously considered changing careers and selling life insurance. He found jobs as a substitute high school teacher and various other temp jobs — but nothing in academia. He thought he was a loser — and his family thought so, too. Finally, Einstein managed to land a job as a low-level patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland.

In 1905 in what is called his “Miracle Year,” Einstein published four science papers that wowed the world of physics. He wrote them during his moonlighting hours when he was not working as a six-day-a-week patent clerk.

The paper on the photoelectric effect concluded that light comes as a particle called a photon — and that eventually won him a Nobel Prize in physics. Another paper demonstrated the existence of atoms — something people today take for granted but in 1905 was a controversial idea. His special theory of relativity was conceived when he was a teenager imagining what might happen if he could ride a beam of light. Looking up at the town clock in Bern, he imagined that moving at light speed would cause the hands of the clock to appear to stop. A storm broke in his mind, and ideas gushed forth in his brain as he imagined the outlandish notion of space-time. And late in the year 1905, he dashed off a fourth paper explaining that energy is equivalent to mass times the speed of light squared (E=MC2).

Einstein today is the often considered the poster child of genius. The wild hair and the mischievous twinkle in his eyes are often seen on T-shirts of physics students and on posters in their college dorm rooms.

I must confess that there was a period in my life when, fascinated by how the universe works on its most basic level of time and space, I considered continuing my college education by studying physics.

During my last year studying for a degree in journalism at San Jose State University, I made the wild decision to continue college and get a degree in physics. My friends thought I was crazy. I enjoyed the college physics courses I took.

Unfortunately, the mathematical classes frustrated me and so, much to my regret now, I gave up on that dream of being a physicist. Looking back now, I realize that if I had studied mathematics as a language — and not as abstract as the instructors taught it — I might have made it through those courses.

This month, the world celebrated the 100th anniversary of the meeting at Berlin’s Prussian Academy when Einstein announced the completion of his theory of how gravity works. His masterful idea that relates the geometry of time and space to the energy and matter in the universe was born in his human imagination and developed through the language of math to change forever how we see ourselves in the universe.