Science and Creativity: Way to Go, Einstein Part I
Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen
PRX
4.6 • 675 Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2018
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When he was growing up in Germany in the 1880s and 90s, nobody had pegged Einstein as a genius. He dropped out of high school and had to apply twice to a university in Switzerland that accepted students without high school diplomas. He did well at college, but didn’t apply himself and struggled to complete assignments and pass tests.He ended up working at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland and knew, if he wanted to be a physicist, he had to do research and get published. He was looking at these patent applications and wondering: is it really true, as Isaac Newton had said, that time is the same for everyone, everywhere? So, he came up with a thought experiment which became the idea known as “special relativity.” And it rocked the foundations of physics.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From PRX. |
| 0:07.3 | This is Studio 360. |
| 0:09.1 | I'm Kurti Anderson. |
| 0:12.1 | On this bonus podcast episode, we're bringing you a special series of stories we've done about science and creativity. |
| 0:19.9 | Today, way to go, Einstein. |
| 0:22.7 | Part one of our three-part series about the scientist |
| 0:25.4 | who's loved even by people who don't care about science. |
| 0:29.5 | Albert Einstein. |
| 0:32.7 | It's the winter of 1915, |
| 0:35.9 | and this 36-year-old physics professor in Berlin is having just about the worst year of his life. |
| 0:43.1 | At the end of 1915, everything is coming apart for him. He's racing to figure out the theory of general relativity. |
| 0:50.7 | So he's staying up all night to try to get the equations right. |
| 0:53.8 | Biographer Walter Isaacson. In the meantime, he's estranged from his first wife, trying to get a |
| 1:00.0 | divorce. He is dating his first cousin. One of his children is having deep mental problems, and his wife |
| 1:08.5 | is trying to prevent him from seeing the kids. |
| 1:12.7 | And he doesn't compartmentalize that well. |
| 1:16.0 | Instead, he writes a ton of letters. |
| 1:19.3 | Never in my life have I tormented myself like this. |
| 1:22.6 | I am often so engrossed in my work that I forget to eat lunch. |
| 1:26.6 | And there's a world war. He's in the capital |
| 1:29.9 | city of the losing side. World War I is ending in defeat. They're starting to blame the Jews for it. |
| 1:38.1 | And he's very much a loner in the Prussian Academy, living alone in a big apartment in Berlin, padding around, having ulcers, |
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