Bailyn's Fables: Einstein and Relativity

This one fits nicely in with my revision posts, as I plan to go into energy and mass equivalence next. for now though, do enjoy the next little story in this series.

One of the things that so many hopeful students know is how Einstein was kind of a moron as a young man. He didn't do well in tests, if he did them at all, he was kind of a rebel, and he generally hacked off his teachers, which as you'd expect means that he didn't do very well in the job market. He gets his job in the patent office, and after years of labouring away in obscurity he publishes 3 of the most important papers in physics, ever.


There are a few morals one can take from this which I shall go through in increasing order of sophistication.

1. Genius in obscurity can revolutionise science

This is the dangerous one, the one that the hopeful students mentioned above are most likely to cling to, because it basically means that no matter how rubbish you are, you might one day be lauded as one of the most important people of all time. Isn't that a nice thought? Such a nice thought, in fact, that many people do indeed cling to it, believing themselves to be the unsung hero of our times, citing Einstein as an example of their obvious genius.

So edgy and badass. Truly the mark of genius.

Every day professors and academics are bombarded by people who in very clear terms (caps lock) explain why Einstein and all of modern physics is wrong and why they are right. Which brings us nicely to the next, more acceptable moral...


     2.  You can revolutionise science only if the new theory encompasses previous theories

We have had centuries of Newtonian mechanics which has held up for that long, so obviously there is something right there. What Einstein did wasn't to overturn Newton's theories but to show that they were only part of a bigger theory. This is something that many don't understand. Just because you've come up with a radical new theory doesn't mean that the planets are going to stop moving in Keplerian orbits

Do explain why relativity is wrong and not, for example, a theory that has passed every observational and experimental test thrown at it for a century. Be sure to quote Galileo as evidence of your unappreciated genius.

Edit: I found this entertaining little number in a brief search for some of the more entertaining examples of the above.


     3. Einstein's work in the patent office was key to his way of thinking

Some of the big inventions that were passing through the patent office at the time it seems were methods of synchronising clocks over large distances. The introduction of rail travel meant that while before clocks could be out by a full 20 minutes and no one would really care, now they had to have a unified system, or else things are going to collide at high speeds and it will all be rather unpleasant.

Einstein therefore had to spend many days going through these inventions thinking about time and electromagnetic signals moving at the speed of light. Thus it is thought that maybe, rather that simply coming out of obscurity in a blazing glory of physics, the work he was doing in the patent office was actually key to his coming up with his theories.