Essay on Einstein by Carl Sagan from his book "Broca's Mind". Also appeared in "Fantasia 2000" * Fate sought to punish me for my contempt for authority, and therefore made me the authority myself. Einstein
Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879. He was one of that small group of people of our time who changed the face of the world thanks to a special gift, a knack for sensing old things in new ways, for posing profound challenges to conventional wisdom. Over the course of many decades, Einstein was considered a respected and sacred figure, the only scientist whose name the average person knew how to call Mania and Bia. Partly thanks to his scientific achievements which the general public achieved at least dimly; partly due to his bold stances on social issues; And partly due to his warm personality. Einstein was admired and respected all over the world. For children with scientific inclinations who were sons of immigrant parents, or children who grew up during the Depression, like me, the recognition given to Einstein was proof that scientists are flesh and blood, that a scientific career was not entirely beyond all hope. One of his important roles, a role he himself unwittingly fulfilled , was that of a scientific masterpiece.
If not for Einstein, it is possible that many of the young people who were scientists after 1920 would never have heard of the existence of scientific daring. The logic underlying Einstein's special theory of relativity could have been discovered a hundred years before, and as a matter of fact, in the last century there were even some researchers who sailed in this direction. But relativity had to wait for Einstein. However, the physics of special relativity is very simple, and many of its key results can be derived from high school algebra and a close look at a boat rowing upstream and downstream. Einstein's life was full of genius and irony, enthusiasm for the problems of his time, forays into the field of education, the connection between science and politics, and it was there to prove that details can, after all, change the world.
As a child Einstein did not show many signs of what was to come. "My parents," he later recalled, "were worried because I started talking at a relatively late age, and they consulted with the doctor about this... at that time I was... certainly about three years old at the very least." He was a like-minded student in elementary school and his teachers, he said, resembled to him rabbi sermalim. Inflated art and intellectual rigor were hallmarks of European education in Einstein's youth. He rebelled against the mechanical and boring teaching methods. "I preferred to bear punishments of all kinds and not memorize words to defend myself orally." Einstein would abhor rigid discipline in all fields, in education, science and politics.
At the age of five he was drawn to the mystery of the compass. And so he later wrote, "At the age of 12, I experienced a second miracle of a completely different type, in a small book that dealt with the Euclidean geometry of the plane... Here there were assertions such as the one that says that the three altitudes of a triangle intersect at one point, which were not self-evident. Yes, you were able to prove them with the certainty that she had to remove any doubt. This clarity and certainty left an indescribable impression on me." The formal studies turned out to be only a disturbing interruption to these kinds of reflections. Einstein wrote about his self-education: "At the age of 12 to 16, I became familiar with the basics of mathematics along with the principles of differential and integral calculus. In doing so, I was fortunate enough to find books that were not too strict in their logical precision, but filled the gap by presenting the main ideas in a clear and concise light...
I was also fortunate enough to become acquainted with the main results and methods of the entire field of natural science by means of an excellent presentation, equal to every soul, which confined itself almost from beginning to end to qualitative aspects... a treatise which I read with breathtaking attention." The modern popularizers of science can draw some consolation from these words.
"You'll never amount to anything"
It seems that among his teachers there was no one who stood up to his talents. At the Munich Gymnasium, the city's prestigious high school, one of the teachers scolded him, "You'll never amount to anything, Einstein." When he was fifteen years old he was strongly suggested to leave the school. "Your very presence," said the teacher, "has the potential to corrupt the respect the class has for me." He accepted the offer enthusiastically and wandered for many months in northern Italy, a boy who dropped out of school in the nineties of the nineteenth century.
All his life he tended towards informality in dress and behavior. If he had been a teenager in the 19s or XNUMXs, or rather in the XNUMXs, "square" people would probably have called him a hippie.
However, in a short time his passion for physics and his wonder at the wonders of the natural world came and overcame his aversion to formal education. He found himself applying, without a high school diploma, to the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. He failed the entrance exams, enrolled in a Swiss high school to make up the gap, and was admitted to the Federal Institute the following year. But was still only a mediocre student. He resented the compulsory curriculum, stayed away from the lecture hall and tried to dedicate himself to the things that really interested him. Later he wrote: "The weak point of the whole matter was, of course, the fact that you were destined to cram all this material into your head for the exam, whether you like it or not."
He was able to pass the final exams only because his close friend, Marcel Grossman, diligently attended classes and shared his notes with Einstein. Upon Grossman's death, after many years, Einstein wrote: "I remember our college days. He was an impeccable student, I myself was scattered and mistaken in my dreams. He was on good terms with the teachers and understood everything; I was an outcast/unsatisfied and Ehud... Then came the end of our studies - suddenly I was abandoned from every limb, standing lost on the threshold of life." Investing himself in Grossman's notes, he was able to successfully complete his law studies at the Federal Institute. But, as Zemin recalls, the studies for the final exams "weakened my hands to such an extent... that the very study of some scientific problem seemed to me to be in despair for an entire year... It is only a miracle that the modern teaching methods did not completely stifle the holy curiosity of research, for if anything the little plant And this gentle one needs it most of all, apart from the initial stimulus, it is freedom: without it, he is certain to be destroyed... I believe that even a healthy predator can be tamed from her starvation, provided that they forced her to eat continuously with a whip, whether she was hungry or not..." These comments of his should provoke thought in each of us involved in science education in high schools. Harini wonders to myself how many potential Einsteins have been irreparably suppressed by competitive exams and the ravages of a forced curriculum. After supporting himself in various odd jobs and not being accepted for the jobs he longed for, Einstein accepted the offer to serve as an examiner of applications at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, an opportunity that came to him thanks to the intervention of old Grossman, Marcel's father. Around that time, Einstein forfeited his German citizenship and became a Swiss citizen. Three years later, in 1903, he married his sweetheart from the Federal Institute. We know almost nothing about the patent applications that Einstein approved in his capacity and those that he rejected. It is interesting to know if among the proposed patents were those that stimulated his physical thinking.
Effective utilization of working time in the patent office
Bansch Hoffman, one of Einstein's biographers, writes that "Einstein soon learned to perform his duties (at the patent office) efficiently, which allowed him to steal valuable chunks of time for his secret calculations, which he hid in a cupboard, feeling guilty, whenever steps Come closer to the room." Such were the circumstances that surrounded the birth of the great theory of relativity, but Einstein himself later defined the patent office with nostalgia and spoke of "that secular monastery where I conceived the beautiful in my ideas."
On several occasions in the future, Einstein claimed in front of his colleagues that the job of a lighthouse keeper is incomparably beautiful for a scientist - the work is relatively easy and allows for the contemplation necessary to carry out scientific research. "For Einstein's friend," said his co-worker Leopold Einfeld, "solitude, life inside a lighthouse, should have been extremely stimulating, would have freed him from many of the duties he hated. In fact, such a life would have been ideal for him. But almost every scientist aspires to the exact opposite of Talk. The curse of my life was that period I spent outside of a scientific atmosphere, when I had no one to talk to about physics."
Einstein also believed that there was something dishonest about teaching physics for the sake of money. He claimed that it is immeasurably better for a physicist to support himself from some other, simple and decent job, and engage in physics in his spare time. Returning to this comment, many years later in America, Einstein added that he would like to be a plumber. On the spot he was awarded honorary membership in the plumbers' organization.
In 1905, Einstein published four scientific articles, the fruit of his work in his spare time at the Swiss Patent Office, in the Annalen der Physik, the most important physical journal of that time. The first article showed that light has properties - both of a particle and of a wave, and also explained the photoelectric effect (that is, the emission of electrons from illuminated bodies) that scientists at the time had difficulty understanding. The second article discussed the nature of the molecules and explained it based on the statistical "Brownian motion" of small particles in suspension. The third and fourth articles presented for the first time the special theory of relativity, including the famous equation "E is equal to C squared" which is quoted so often and is only rarely understood. This equation expresses the transformation of matter into energy and energy into matter. It expands the law of conservation of energy to the law of conservation of energy and mass and states that it is impossible to create energy and mass and it is impossible to destroy them - even though one form of energy or a transformant can be transformed into another form.
The magic formula
In this equation, E expresses the energy equivalent of the mass M. The amount of energy that can be extracted under ideal conditions from a mass M is E and C is the speed of light - 30 billion centimeters per second (the speed of light is always written with a lowercase Latin letter C, never a capital letter If you measure M in grams and C in centimeters per second, you get E in energy units called args (and in the singular arg). The complete inversion of a mass of one gram into energy therefore releases 9 times ten to the power of twenty args, which is equivalent to the explosion of about a thousand tons. NT. Hence tiny amounts of matter hold enormous resources of energy provided we know how to use up this energy. Nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants are common examples on a global scale of questionably moral, questionably immoral efforts that are invested in extracting the energy stored within matter, As can be seen from Einstein's equation, a thermonuclear weapon, say, a hydrogen bomb, is a device of terrifying power - but even this bomb is only able to produce less than one percent of MC.
