...about Einstein James May's Things You Need to Know

Mention the name "Einstein" and most people will immediately picture

a wrinkly faced old man with a massive shock of white hair.

However, there is much more to this iconic thinker

than simply an interesting barnet.

For example - how did Einstein become a celebrity pin-up?

What does E=mc2 actually mean?

And what happened to his brain?

Luckily for me, you don't have to be a genius to figure out

the Things You Need To Know About Einstein.

Right, let's kick off with a really obvious question -

did Einstein spend seven years as a cobbler?

Germany, 1879. Mr and Mrs Einstein gaze upon their newborn baby -

concerned about his large, misshapen head.

They needn't have worried.

This head contained one of the greatest brains in history.

But as a young boy, little Albert was slow to talk.

The maid even called him "the dopey one."

So his parents took him to see a doctor.

It turned out he just preferred speaking in complete sentences.

Einstein, as a young boy,

started to query the world he was living in.

He was fascinated by natural phenomena.

One of these was when he was given a compass at the age of five

and he was mesmerised by the needle that would move around

and these mysterious forces causing it to move.

The other thing that he loved was his geometry book

which he was given when he was 12.

He devoured this book.

His understanding of science was perhaps different to most other children.

You'd think that for a budding genius like young Einstein,

school would be an absolute doddle.

But you'd be wrong.

Einstein certainly wasn't a dummy in the classroom.

But he didn't like being told what to do

which often got him in trouble with his teachers.

In fact, he called the schools "barracks"

and the teachers "lieutenants".

To make matters worse, when Einstein was just 15 years old,

his entire family moved to Italy - leaving him behind in Munich.

So he got himself a doctor's note

and he quit school more than a year early.

Genius!

Without a single qualification to his name,

Private Einstein became a teenage high school dropout.

He also flunked the entrance exam to Zurich Polytech,

but tried again at 17 and aced it

only to become a bit of a rebel,

skipping classes and arguing with teachers.

He would be not paying attention, he would be questioning

some of the things that the teachers would be telling him.

He didn't like rules,

and that doesn't go down well in schools - still doesn't.

Or at least, it didn't when I was at school!

One professor was so miffed by Einstein's disobedience

that he did his best to sabotage his academic career.

Which is why at the age of 22, Einstein was unemployed,

with no prospects, and a pregnant girlfriend.

Luckily, he landed a junior post at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern,

doing the sort of work he referred to as his cobbler's trade.

So, no. Einstein didn't spend seven years mending stilettos.

But he DID do plenty of what he loved best - thinking.

In fact, during his years at the Patent Office,

this humble clerk did some of the finest thinking in the entire history of science,

which begs the question - what was Einstein's big idea?

Imagine you're chasing after a bus.

It's doing 30 miles an hour, but you only manage 29.

The bus is faster than you by one mile an hour.

Speed up just a bit, and you'll catch it.

But if the bus were a beam of light,

then no matter how much you speed up,

it's always faster than you by the same amount - the speed of light.

This doesn't seem to make much sense,

but by the start of the 20th century,

experiments had shown that it was true.

What on earth was going on?

No matter whether you are moving towards it or moving away from it,

you will always perceive light to be moving at the same speed.

It's always 300,000km/s or thereabouts,

and this is a little bit odd.

It's not what we experience in everyday life.

That flies in the face of common sense.

I mean, it sounds like the statement of a lunatic.

It really is a ridiculous thing to suggest.

It took one of Einstein's famous "thought experiments" to sort it out.

Let's say Mr and Mrs Einstein each have identical "relativity" clocks.

These super-accurate timepieces work

by bouncing a photon of light between two mirrors a few feet apart.

Now, if Albert hurtles past at near the speed of light,

Mrs Einstein would say that his photon has to travel much further

between ticks than hers.

So to keep the clocks ticking together,

his photon would have to speed up.

Except we already know that light doesn't do that!

Einstein reasoned that time itself, not light, changes speed.

He simply took this idea seriously - that the speed of light IS constant

and that means that the very notion of what space and time is has to give.

So this meant that time itself was no longer absolute.

It had to be relative,

and this is the big breakthrough that Einstein made.

This fundamental shift in the way we see the universe

meant that different clocks could show different times and still be right.

Relative to Mrs Einstein, Albert's clock ticks slower than hers.

The faster he goes, the slower it ticks

until, at the speed of light, it would stop altogether.

Bingo! Einstein had shown how nothing travels faster than light -

not even celebrity gossip!

Einstein published his universe-shattering theory in 1905,

followed by a small postscript.

This contained a tiny little equation,

one that just about everybody knows, but almost no-one fully understands.

So what does E=mc2 actually mean?

The world's most famous equation simply states that E,

or energy, equals mass - m, times c - the speed of light, times itself.

And because c squared is a really big number,

even a really small piece of matter like a paperclip equals a lot of energy.

18 kilotons of TNT's worth to be exact.

Or - one atom bomb.

It doesn't even matter what that matter is.

Marmalade, moon-rock, or a monkey's earwax - it's all atoms,

which, in theory, can be converted to energy.

So why can't we power our cities with paperclips

and heat our homes with earwax?

The problem is - releasing that energy requires an awful lot of well, energy.

One way to do it is nuclear fission.

Take one large atomic nucleus like uranium.

Split it in two, and a little bit gets converted to energy,

along with some nasty radioactive by-products.

Then there's fusion.

Take two hydrogen nuclei and stick them

together to produce one helium nucleus.

And some energy.

But, first you'll need about 100 million degrees Celsius.

Which is why stars like the sun can do it.

If we could crack it here on earth,

controlled fusion would give us unlimited clean energy.

Einstein's equation raises this possibility, the possibility

to use nuclear fusion to generate energy.

It means that if we crack fusion, we can actually generate

a huge amount of energy with a small amount of matter.

A fusion power station in one day would use about one kg of fuel.

That's like a big bag of sugar, whereas a coal-fired power station

every day uses hundreds of truckloads of coal.

So it gives you an idea

of the amount of energy that we can get from fusion.

Sounds too good to be true? Well, so far, it is.

The only energy-efficient fusion we have achieved is

the hydrogen bomb - and that's most definitely not controlled!

If all this can be explained by one tiny equation containing just three numbers,

then Einstein's next big idea would really shake things up.

Einstein knew that his first theory of relativity was missing something.

Gravity.

So he relabelled it "Special" and got cracking on a new version,

which he called "General Relativity".

If I'd just overthrown hundreds of years of scientific thinking,

I think I'd probably settle down, have a bit of a nap.

But then again, I'm not a genius.

The story goes that Einstein was sitting in his office

when he saw a man fixing a roof.

He imagined the poor chap falling off

and had what he called the happiest thought of his life.

As the man starts to fall, he is effectively in zero gravity.

Put him inside a large windowless box that's also in free fall,

and he has no way of knowing that he's moving.

That is, until he hits the ground.

Einstein realised that gravity is actually an illusion.

Although its effects were still as real as ever.

If you think about how you feel on a roller coaster,

for example, when you're going up and down,

that just like having gravity turned on and off.

So if you just jump off the top of a building,

then as you're falling down, it's like somebody's just turned gravity off.

And Einstein had come up with a profound new understanding

of how the universe behaved.

It took him ten years to work out the details,

but in 1916 he produced a brand-new picture of time, space and gravity.

And in this new universe, gravity slows time.

He took space, 3D space, and merged it with time,

and came up with the concept of space-time.

Four-dimensional space-time is something that is impossible to visualise

because we live in a three-dimensional world.

There's up/down, left/right, forward/back,

and then there's another direction which I can't point in,

unfortunately because I can only ever point in space,

but this other direction if I could point in it -

it's the time direction.

So we get this curved four-dimensional space-time,

and this is actually equivalent to gravity.

If I have a planet and I put it in my space-time,

it deforms space-time, and that is my gravitational well.

So we're not just thinking of it as a force,

we're thinking of it as a perturbance in space-time.

Because Earth's gravity gets weaker

the further away from its centre you are,

your head ages faster than your feet

by a hundredth of a billionth of a second every day.

By your 80th birthday,

your cranium has gained a good 300 nanoseconds on your tootsies.

Or, about a millionth of the time it takes to blink.

Einstein's brilliance may have changed the universe,

but it didn't actually make him a lot of money.

Apparently, he once quipped that his thought-experiments

placed clocks all over the cosmos,

and yet he couldn't actually afford to buy one for himself!

It's Einstein's 72nd birthday party.

A photographer asks him to smile for the camera.

Instead, the ageing professor engages in a cheeky spot of glossal protrusion.

This snapshot became so famous

that in 2009 an autographed copy sold at auction for nearly 75,000.

So just how did a wrinkly old physicist

become such a bankable icon?

Ironically, Einstein's meteoric rise to fame began with the stars.

In 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington photographed them during a solar eclipse,

and confirmed that gravity bends light.

So Einstein was right and just about everything we thought we knew

about space, time and the universe was wrong.

Almost overnight, Einstein's mug became global front-page news.

When it hit the newspapers

Einstein became an overnight celebrity throughout the whole world,

not just among scientists.

The Newtonian view of the world was utterly shattered.

This was something completely new and something that people weren't expecting

so when this theory was actually shown experimentally to be correct,

it caused a lot of excitement.

At first, he didn't exactly welcome the attention.

He told a friend, "I dream I'm burning in Hell

"and the postman is the Devil, eternally roaring at me."

But he soon got used to the glare of the spotlight.

By the time the Einsteins relocated to America in 1933,

they were hobnobbing with the rich and famous.

Albert's wild hair and drooping moustache were a cartoonist's dream,

as instantly recognisable as Mickey Mouse

and almost as easy to draw.

Which is why ever since, just about every absent-minded professor

and mad scientist looks a bit like you-know-who.

Today, anybody as famous as Einstein would have their own chat show, they'd have a private jet

and a temper shorter than a yardstick in a black hole.

Frankly, they'd be unbearable.

During his girlfriend Mileva's pregnancy,

Einstein wrote her a soppy letter.

"I am filled with such happiness and joy", he wrote, "that I must share it with you".

Aw, sweet - except the previous line of her Valentine read,

"I have just read a wonderful paper on the generation of cathode rays".

Albert and Mileva did tie the knot, and had two more children,

but you'd hardly call them love's young dream.

A few years into their nuptial arrangement,

they shared a passion for physics, but not much else.

He once said, "Marriage is the unsuccessful attempt

"to make something lasting out of an incident."

And called Mileva an employee he couldn't sack.

He even drew up a kind of legal contract,

ordering her to do his cooking and laundry,

prohibiting any sort of intimacy,

and demanding that she stop talking to him if he requested it.

Sounds more like a Hollywood pre-nup!

This marriage probably didn't get off to a good start.

The work that Einstein was doing required intense concentration.

He spent a lot of time lost in thought,

which is kind of incompatible with having a young baby around,

which is very distracting.

He was having to earn money,

he was having to do his physics in the evening

and he was having to be a father as well as a husband.

Hardly surprisingly, it ended in divorce -

partly because Einstein had at least one affair -

with his first cousin Elsa, who then became his second wife.

But despite many rumours to the contrary,

he didn't have an affair with screen goddess Marilyn Monroe.

The two never even met.

Talking of goddesses, we know that Einstein developed a deep and philosophical sense of wonder

at the beauty of the cosmos,

and he obviously had an eye for a heavenly body,

but he wasn't exactly a big fan of organised religion.

So how did this born-again atheist end up bringing the Almighty

into one of his most famous arguments?

Einstein spent his last 30 years attempting to pull off

his greatest trick yet -

a Unified Field Theory to explain just about everything in the universe.

His own Relativity Theory described a sort of "clockwork" universe.

Measure it accurately enough, and you could work out the past

and even predict the future.

Relativity was great at big stuff like universes,

but rubbish at little things, like atoms.

Quantum Theory did this brilliantly, but said some really crazy things -

objects could be in many places at once.

A cat in a box could be both alive and dead until someone takes a peek.

Worst of all, it said the fabric of reality is essentially fuzzy.

When I say "fuzzy",

I mean that by the time you get down to the level of subatomic particles,

things stop being actual things,

and they become probabilities -

which means they might be where you think they are,

but then again...they might not.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle said we can never be 100% sure of absolutely everything,

including the past and the future.

Quantum mechanics is definitely weird, and very counter-intuitive.

The most twisted and surreal imagination would never have come up with quantum physics

if we weren't battered into it by the weight of the experimental evidence.

Electrons can be in many different places at once.

We've got a particle travelling from A to B.

In the quantum world,

it can take many different paths at the same time.

So the object itself may or may not be there!

Einstein hated this idea,

rejecting it by saying "God does not play dice with the universe."

Niels Bohr, the champion of this disturbing new science, replied,

"Stop telling God what to do!"

It was more than 50 years before quantum mechanics could be tested by experiment,

and Einstein was finally proved wrong!

Yes, it's official. The world IS essentially uncertain.

God, it seems, DOES play dice after all.

But if Einstein made a mess of that, what else did he get wrong?

Or in other words...

Some might argue that Einstein's work gave us the atom bomb,

which is a pretty big faux pas in anyone's book.

But it seems his worst mistake was one of even greater gravity.

Einstein used his equations to build a model of the universe,

only to find that it should be expanding, or contracting,

but not remaining static as everyone at the time knew it was.

For once, Einstein wasn't thinking weird and far out.

He was maintaining conventional wisdom

that the universe was static, as we all expected.

I think he thought the universe was static

because there wasn't anything really to convince him otherwise.

So the idea was, he'd made a mistake somewhere.

Einstein bodged up a last-minute fix, adding a number

he called the Cosmological Constant into his equations,

a kind of "negative gravity"

to counterbalance the effects of regular gravity.

Even at the time, he knew this was very dodgy science.

He had to introduce a fudge factor,

and the fudge factor stopped him from having an expanding universe.

And this was like a mysterious repulsive force that

went against gravity,

and actually stopped the universe collapsing, and kept it static.

He had to introduce a fudge factor into his mathematics,

which turned out to be a mistake.

12 years later, Edwin Hubble discovered that due to the Big Bang

the universe IS expanding.

Hubble worked out that all the galaxies in the universe are flying apart from each other,

exactly like...

..the spots on the surface of an inflating balloon.

So Einstein had been right about the expanding universe,

and wrong to add his Cosmological Constant,

the so-called biggest blunder of his life.

Einstein then realised that in fact

he had the solution all along.

He actually had the solution of an expanding universe.

His equations, taken at face value, actually predict an expanding universe,

so he kind of missed that trick.

The universe was actually expanding, so there was no need for this

Cosmological Constant to keep it static.

And this was his biggest blunder.

But as recently as 1998,

scientists discovered that the universe isn't just expanding.

It's speeding up, too.

Shocked by this result, they had to quickly invent a repulsive force to explain it away,

and they called it "Dark Energy" -

basically another name for the Cosmological Constant.

So, even when Einstein got it wrong, he ended up being right.

OK, so once in a blue moon Einstein stuffed up, dropped the ball, made a boo-boo.

But at least he was honest about it.

And scientists are good at that - admitting they're wrong

when somebody comes up with a better idea.

Unlike that other bunch.

You know - politicians.

Which makes me wonder...

They say that politics is just show business for ugly people.

Well, Einstein certainly never won any beauty contests -

maybe that's why he became so interested in the affairs of state.

In Zurich, when he should have been studying physics,

he was often found at the Odeon Cafe - a notorious hang-out

later frequented by the likes of Trotsky, Lenin, and Mussolini.

Perhaps inspired by this free-thinking atmosphere,

Einstein soon proved he wasn't one to shy away from a political argument.

Maybe he should have laid off the coffee.

After the outbreak of World War One, nearly 100 prominent scientists

signed a paper supporting Germany's military aggression.

Outraged, Einstein added his John Hancock to a pacifist counter-petition,

bringing the final number of signatures to a total of...four!

Before the next war, Einstein - who was Jewish -

had a reward placed on his head by the Nazi Party.

And his work became the target of their infamous book-burning campaign,

which might explain why he decided not to stick around.

But even after he settled in the Land Of The Free,

things weren't much better.

Wary of Einstein's socialist views and political influence,

the FBI opened a file on him collecting 1,800 pages

of so-called "derogatory information".

They tapped his phone, opened his mail, and even went through his bin.

But while America treated Einstein like the enemy,

other countries were a little more welcoming.

In 1952, the newly formed State of Israel

asked him if he'd like to have a bash at being their President.

He turned it down.

If the thought of President Einstein strikes you as maybe a little bizarre,

it's nothing - nothing! - compared with what happened after his death.

What happened to Einstein's brain?

Sadly, Einstein departed these four dimensions in 1955.

Against his wishes,

and without the family's permission,

autopsy pathologist Thomas Harvey removed the ex-genius's brain.

Curiously, he also removed the eyeballs,

which today reside in a New York safe-deposit box.

He actually stole Einstein's brain!

He was really interested in finding out

if there was a physical connection between the brain and genius.

Instead of handing over his cerebral trophy,

Harvey sliced it into 240 pieces,

pickled them in two jars of formaldehyde

and stashed them in his basement.

After losing his wife, his job and his medical certificate as a result of the scandal,

Dr Harvey set off around the USA in search of an expert

who could unlock the secrets of a genius's brain.

He even kept the brain in a beer cooler,

before eventually shoving it into the trunk of his Buick Skylark

and heading west to California.

He thought it would make a nice gift for Einstein's granddaughter,

but strangely enough, she didn't want it.

After 41 years, Harvey finally contacted a university researcher in Canada.

She spotted that thanks to an under-developed Sylvian fissure,

Einstein's parietal lobe was about 15% wider than normal.

This bit of the brain deals with mathematics and spatial awareness -

definitely two of Einstein's better subjects!

Later, a neuropathologist placed some of the sliced cerebrum under a microscope,

and discovered something rather remarkable.

Einstein's 76-year-old grey matter showed almost no sign of ageing.

So, the key to Einstein's genius may have been simply that he was young at heart -

or brain, at least.

Whatever the cause, Einstein's impressive cerebral abilities

have assured him a place as THE foremost thinker of the 20th century.

The by-products of his work have affected every single one of us on the planet,

not to mention quite a few people off it,

while he himself has become an icon -

a pipe-smoking, tongue-poking, sock-dodging symbol of true genius,

with a natty little 'tache and the worst hairdo in physics.

Relatively speaking, that is!

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