The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates by Bloom Howard

Author:Bloom, Howard [Bloom, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2012-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

EINSTEIN GIVES SEVEN UGLY DUCKLINGS A HOME: THE YEAR OF MIRACLES

The year 1905 was a good year for Albert Einstein. A very good year. Such a good year that later generations of thinkers would refer to it as Einstein's Annus Mirabilis, Einstein's year of wonders, Einstein's year of miracles. That year Albert Einstein published four articles in the Annalen der Physik, four articles that would change the shape of physics. But in theory, Einstein had no right to be in such a journal. None at all. Why? Albert Einstein was only twenty-six years old, and he was still a graduate student at the Zurich Polytechnic. The Annalen der Physik was Germany's leading journal of physics. And Germany was one of the world's leading centers of physics. So there is no way a mere student should have been able to publish in the Annalen's pages. But in 1905 Einstein submitted twenty-one reviews66 of books and journal articles to the Annalen der Physik's review journal,67 Beiblätter zu den Annalen der Physik, Supplements to the Annals of Physics. All twenty-one were published.68 What's more, Einstein had the audacity to submit six papers to the Annalen der Physik itself.69 And four of them were accepted for publication. Yes, four of them. And those four would utterly change the way that physicists see our world.

How did Albert Einstein, a mere whippersnapper with an insignificant “teacher's diploma from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich,”70 manage to publish four articles in what some feel was the leading journal of physics in Europe?

On paper, Einstein's credentials were pathetic. He'd left high school at the age of fifteen, then at the age of sixteen he had tried to go directly to the equivalent of college, the Zurich Polytechnic. He'd taken an entrance exam designed for eighteen-year-olds, had flunked it, and had been forced go back to high school and finish the Swiss equivalent of a high school diploma. Very humiliating. Five years later, in 1900, when he'd graduated from undergraduate school at the Zurich Polytechnic at the age of twenty-one, he'd been at the bottom of his class. Only his girlfriend and homework-study partner, Mileva Marić, was lower than he was. What's more, Einstein was a bona fide reject. Along with four of his six fellow students, he'd applied for a position as a teaching assistant, a position that would have helped him pay the costs of grad school. The four other student applicants were accepted. Only one was rejected—Albert Einstein.

Einstein then “lived a hand-to-mouth existence while he looked for a post at other universities.”71 But he had no luck. So he turned to a far less ambitious form of work for a would-be physicist—tutoring and teaching in a secondary school.72 But even the secondary schools he applied to did not want him. The best he could land was a four-month position in what he called “a technical school at Winterthur,” Switzerland, subbing for a math professor who was going off to the army for a short stint.73

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.