Anus Mirabilis

This past year has been good for reading about people who have done amazing things. Like Albert Einstein, who died in 1955, the year I was born. His demise came on my twenty-second day of life. During those three weeks and a day we never spent any quality time together, nor to the best of my recollection ever even met. But surely the extraordinary parallels of our lives must be due to more than mere coincidence.

For instance…

Einstein was born Jewish into a family that was largely unobservant of tradition and ritual. His views on religion were essentially agnostic. God to him was less a deity to be revered and more a mystery to be revealed. Science was Einstein’s tool to discern the ways and means of nature and the supernatural. He considered himself a spiritual person, albeit in a nontraditional way. Amazingly, I’m Jewish, too.

Einstein, like so many other career-challenged souls seeking employment, left his birthplace, moved around a lot, and wound up in New Jersey. Same here.

Einstein had a prominent proboscis, along with hair that was frequently disheveled, and he is known by his last name. My nose precedes the rest of me by a considerable margin, and while my hair is darker, tends to resemble his when I awake each morning. People call me by my last name all the time.

Einstein was one of history’s greatest theoretical physicists. Historically my physical greatness has been largely theoretical. His mind was legendary, and in mine so am I.

Einstein labored long and hard to articulate his theory of relativity. I, too, have a hard time explaining my relatives.

All right, so maybe Einstein and I are not fellow travelers of the intellectual highway. He zoomed down that road in the fast lane and I sputter along on the shoulder. The fact that his IQ and my cholesterol levels bear close resemblance in no way entitles me to lay claim to anything other than admiration for this man who once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” That simple, sublime pronouncement has given me more comfort than most any other rationalization. Of course, coming from him, there is a certain irony in its message. But for a college student who spent more energy waiting on tables for tips than in the library doing homework, well, my imagination came in very handy on essays. If it weren’t for all those darn tests I might’ve been a scholar.

People everywhere know of Einstein and typically equate him with genius. He was so smart that hardly anybody other than science teachers have any idea of what he actually figured out. How many people do you know who can explain the difference between Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity, without squinting? Or Googling?  Einstein’s ideas rank pretty high among those things I know of, yet know nothing about. Kind of like hedge funds and dry cleaning, they’re just beyond my understanding.

While most people cannot explain what Einstein actually did, we generally concur that he was—is—famous for being smart. Smart isn’t so easy to quantify, but fame is measurable. We measure products by sales, baseball players by batting average, and movie stars by awards or box office results, television shows by ratings. Everything we can measure, we compare. Should the measure of Einstein’s genius be how many people understand his ideas? The more who get it, the greater the genius? Or should genius be shrouded and veiled in complexities, preventing us mental commoners from seeing beyond the frazzled hairstyle of the thinker into the thoughts he thunk? Einstein remains perhaps the most famous scientist of all time yet how many can dive deeper into his theories than a belly flop?

Sure, most of us recognize his equation E=MC2.  But really, do you know what it means? It can be boiled down to mean that small amounts of mass are equivalent to huge amounts of energy. Does that help? Yeah, me neither. I heard once that when asked why his epic tome Ulysses was so hard to read, James Joyce supposedly replied that he spent most of his life writing the thing, he expected us to spend most of ours reading it. Genius, at times, comes packaged with an attitude.

Not so with Einstein.

As I wend my way through a biography of Einstein, one that is the first to make use of his private correspondence, it appears to me that he was less and more than this legendary Zeus atop Mt. Intellect. He was a human being, fraught with quirks and chinks in his personality like the rest of us. He seemed a classic example of a lover of mankind, it’s just the people he couldn’t stand. While he churned out scientific papers filled with profound and stunningly original insight, he was baffled as to how and why his marriage was disintegrating and seemed incapable of bridging the distance between he and his children. While I do not take pleasure in another family’s problems, it’s somehow comforting to realize that even a genius has trouble figuring out relationships.

Late in his life, Einstein wrote, “I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…”

He was relentless in pursuit of universal truths and questioned things at once so fundamental that we take them for granted, and so complex it took decades of work by countless scientists to prove them.

For example, it’s taken for granted that if we drop something, it falls down. He wondered how gravity worked and tried to figure it out.

Most of us note on occasion how time passes quickly, or perhaps slowly like during the prolonged Covid-19 lockdowns. Mostly our perception of time’s passing depends on what we are doing. That alone wasn’t a satisfying dish for Albert’s incessant intellectual appetite. He postulated that the passage of time would alter as one approached a gravitational anomaly. Personally, I haven’t been near one of those, though I have seen water flow in opposite directions on either side of the equator. 

Ever been struck by the random movement of particles suspended in a fluid? After all, it is among the simplest of continuous-time stochastic processes, but how many of us have tried to mathematically account for it? Yes, I know, I don’t understand what I just wrote either, but Einstein did. It fascinated him to no end.

Have you ever sat down at your desk and as you were about to dig into that stack of invoices or email, instead found yourself pondering the intricacies of the photoelectric effect?

Me neither. But Einstein did. In fact, he did much of his astonishing thinking while working a day job.

Whether he was avoiding work or more likely the people he worked with, he not only indulged the distraction, he wrote it down and submitted it for publication. While not exactly lurid pornography, the writing was hot. It was good enough to get published, and won him the Nobel Prize for physics. I wonder if, since he wrote the paper on company time, that Nobel Prize should actually belong to the Swiss Patent Office, his employer? Think how different the world would be if they held the rights to the theory of relativity. Well, maybe not so different.

In fact, he published four times in 1905 which came to be known by Einstein historians as Annus Mirabilis, Latin for extraordinary or miraculous year. Armed with little more than his mind and a few pens and pencils, Einstein’s writings that year laid the foundation for modern physics, changing worldviews on space, time and matter. Any one of the papers would have been a significant achievement. Taken together it really was a miracle year. 

As smart as he was, he also felt that to be considered an expert on something you had to be able to explain it to your grandmother. Proving his point, consider this explanation by Einstein of one of his greatest insights.

“Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.”

Einstein’s theories helped deepen our understanding of the universe, while paving the way for its destruction. His theoretical insights facilitated the creation of the atomic bomb, even though he never intended to do so, nor did he participate to any significant degree in the Manhattan Project. He himself was a pacifist, abhorred the entire concept of warfare, and once said, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

I may not get much of his science. Feel free to substitute the word “any” for “much.” Each year grants us time to think, to explore, to read, to endeavor if we choose. Some of us do, others just pass the time. When I read how a single person without benefit of a computer, or television, or cell phone, was able to plumb the mysteries of our universe through the sheer power of his intellect, I am awed and inspired to better utilize those idle moments when I may otherwise feel bored.

The other day I was looking at the cover of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein and wondered about gravity, trying to imagine in my mind what it is that holds us all down. After about twenty seconds of deep thought, I found myself Googling it, and felt a little ashamed at how few scientific insights I actually possess. Anus Mirabilis, that’s what I thought of myself. I translate it to perfect idiot, but then again, my Latin isn’t too strong.

So as I sit in my home, at my desk, with computer, iPad, phone and tv all on, I wonder who else in the neighborhood, or the region, or the country, or wherever, is also sitting and pondering thoughts I’ve never thought to think. And perhaps coming up with ideas, or solutions, or theories that will change the very foundations we think upon. I just hope it’s a human and not AI that comes up with the big ideas.