Einstein ... alte amanunte, alte scrisorele ...

Atita l-ati invocat pe bietul geniu, incit iata, si-a facut aparitia nu numai el, dar si o noua biografie ...

“Walter Isaacson’s thorough, comprehensive, affectionate new biography, “Einstein: His Life and Universe” ..., relates how, in 1931, during the fifty-one-year-old scientist’s second visit to America, ... Einstein, at his own request, met Charlie Chaplin, who, as they arrived at the première of “City Lights,” said, of the applauding public,

“They cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you because no one understands you.”

(ha ha , buna si extrem de valabila !)
Sint “relativ” convinsa ca Albert ar fi delectat sa afle ca a ajuns sa fie catalogat drept “impostor” de catre diverse cucOnitze, de pe diverse bloguri. E stiut ca adora sa se vorbeasca despre el la derogatoriu ...
Era de altfel primul care sustinea ca habar nu avea in ce consta munca lui: “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”, de aia si considera ca totul este extrem de simplu:

"It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.”

(era cam afemeiat dupa fizica ..., hm hm)

[...]
"Einstein had not been able to secure any teaching job; his cavalier and even defiant attitude toward academic authority worked against his early signs of promise. He had left Germany and renounced his citizenship at the age of sixteen, and for four years was too poor to buy Swiss citizenship, depending for sustenance on a monthly stipend from his mother’s family and some fees from private tutorials. In the pinch, Marcel Grossmann, a brilliant math student whose meticulous lecture notes helped Einstein

(vai, vai, pezevenghiul !) get high grades at the Zurich Polytechnic, managed to secure him a job at the Swiss Patent Office, in Bern.

His long stint there figures, in the conventional Einstein mythology, as the absurd ordeal of a neglected genius, but Isaacson thinks it might have been a good thing:
”So it was that Albert Einstein would end up spending the most creative seven years of his life—even after he had written the papers that reoriented physics—arriving at work at 8 A.M., six days a week, and examining patent applications.…Yet it would be wrong to think that poring over applications for patents was drudgery.…Every day, he would do thought experiments based on theoretical premises, sniffing out the underlying realities. Focusing on real-life questions, he later said, “stimulated me to see the physical ramifications of theoretical concepts.”

“Had he been consigned instead to the job of an assistant to a professor,” Isaacson points out, “he might have felt compelled to churn out safe publications and be overly cautious in challenging accepted notions.”
Special relativity has a flavor of the patent office; one of the theory’s charms for the fascinated public was the practical apparatus of its exposition, involving down-to-earth images like passing trains equipped with reflecting mirrors on their ceilings, and measuring rods that magically shrink with speed from the standpoint of a stationary observer, and clocks that slow as they accelerate—counterintuitive effects graspable with little more math than plane geometry ..."

Intreaga recenzie, scrisa de savurosul scriitor John Updike a aparut, ... (unde putea sa apara ?) in The New Yorker, of course ...