MICHELLE THALLER: Albert Einstein was incredibly
brilliant and he revolutionized our understanding of the universe. MICHIO KAKU: People ask the question what
has Einstein done for me lately. And the answer is everything. Everything we see around us – the electronics,
the satellites, the atom smashers, all of that in some sense could be traced back to
the work of Albert Einstein. In fact, many of the crumbs, the crumbs from
his table, have gone on to win Nobel prizes for physicists even today. THALLER: Einstein, right. I just say that word and all of a sudden you're
thinking about sort of crazy white hair and a mustache, somebody who is brilliant. Those wonderful knowing eyes with lots of
smile lines around them. Everybody knows who Einstein is and people
understand that he was a very famous scientist. But I think that people often don't grasp
the true depth and the profound nature of the things that Einstein introduced to us. DAVID BODANIS: His sister thought he was a
genius. His father thought he was a genius. But he was stuck in the patent office in Bern,
Switzerland and nobody else thought he was a genius at all. He had mouthed off to his professors at university. He didn't get any good job. His department of theoretical physics was
the top drawer of his desk and he had slammed it closed. But then, and he had tried all sorts of things. He was about 25-26. He had tried lots of ideas while he was stuck
at the patent office. Nothing had really come together and then
suddenly in the spring of 1905, it was like a storm burst in his head. He poured out one paper after another. About four of them were worthy of the Nobel
prize and the final two were special relativity and E = mc2. FREEMAN DYSON: He had just this wonderful
gift of talking to the public and in addition, of course, he had a turbulent family life
and he was in many ways a selfish and unpleasant character. But on the other hand, he was wonderful with
children and so on. I mean there were all sorts of – he had
wonderful qualities. And those things I think the public rightly
appreciated. BODANIS: Einstein once said he wasn't smarter
than other people, but he said I have the persistence of a mule. And he was really honest about it. When he was a little kid he'd make card castles. He'd make layer after layer after layer of
card castles and if they blew down well, he'd take a deep breath and build it up again. All through his early 20s he was happily married
at the beginning to a really hot young Serbian physician student. The only woman in his class at the Polytechnic
Conservatory. And they had great dreams of maybe becoming
professors together. But reality got in the way. He was stuck at the patent office and until
1905 when he was 25-26 he couldn't get any fresh ideas. And he and his wife they began slowly to drift
apart. They didn't have money for childcare. She was stuck at home taking care of the kids. She couldn't really participate in his work. THALLER: Einstein was a professor. He actually taught a lot at the University
of Bern and also in Berlin and then eventually came to Princeton. He was very much a product of the time and
the science that was going on. There were brilliant people at this time. Science was changing in so many different
ways, and for a lot of things Einstein found himself in the right place at the right time
to see two different things going on and say aha, those things actually go together. And to me that really was some of the real
brilliance of Einstein was that he became a bridge between many, many different subject
matters. BODANIS: In 1905 he did have this epiphany
or series of epiphanies. He had great, great achievements and he thought
he was home clear. But nothing happened. The great professors in Germany, one or two
of them monitored his work but he couldn't get a job. He applied at one point to teach at a high
school in Switzerland and he submitted as a justification for teaching science in high
school this theory of relativity, E = mc2, and a few other things like that. He was rejected. This was Switzerland. He hadn't done the proper forms. They weren't properly typed and he stayed
in the patent office. In 1920 in Germany the opera house in Berlin
was taken over by an anti-Einstein rally. There were swastikas in the front hall. This wasn't Aryan science. This was Jewish science. It had to be wrong. And then horribly, in 1933, his books were
burned on the streets in Germany. And they weren't just burned by uneducated
mobs in the middle of nowhere. The greatest university the world had known
was Gottingen in Germany at the time and the students there so caught up in what was happening
that they dragged Einstein's books, and books of other people. and they burned them in huge piles right in
the center in Berlin and in Gottingen and in other places. Luckily by then, Einstein was out of the country. Some of the major newspapers and magazines
were charging him with, they said they had to kill him. It's a variation—They didn't just say lock
him up. They said the next stage. You start with one stage, you go to the next. Because he was famous, he managed to get to
America. He lived safely in Princeton, New Jersey after
that. THALLER: And he wasn't working alone. Some of the major parts of his theory, for
example, the special theory of relativity that deals with how time slows down when you
go close to the speed of light, had largely been formalized and set up before by people
like Lorentz. And even parts of general relativity, his
idea about gravitation and the curvature of space had been done by people like Lemaitre
and others. GEORGE MUSSER: Science is a deeply collaborative
enterprise and I've always been struck when I see physicists in action how much they are
teaching one another. This is a social enterprise and they kind
of go back and forth between the individual sitting, struggling against the brick wall,
banging their head against it trying to make sense of reality and the collaborative social
side of things. So one thing that's crucial to that is that
all scientists have to gather around them some kind of friend group. So science probably more than a lot of jobs
really depends on strong personal friendships among people. Sometimes this idea isn't located in either
person's head, but it's kind of floating in the space between them and each person is
kind of contributing to it. The idea is growing and growing and growing. Einstein for one loved it. He reveled in this kind of intellectual play. So he had a series of very famous encounters
with Niels Bohr at a series of meetings in the '20s and, well really in the '20s. In the '30s things kind of all fell apart
for Europe in general but certainly for the German science community. So in the '20s and the teens he went to these
conferences and would encounter these other scientists who just didn't accept what he
was saying. And they would go off usually off the record
and these had to be reconstructed by historians, had these intense debates over breakfast,
over wine, over just walking down the street. THALLER: Einstein was absolutely brilliant
at seeing that different theories that people were working on could come together into a
wonderful coherent whole. Even he admitted he wasn't particularly great
at the mathematics and he had other people that assisted him with actually formalizing
the mathematics of how gravity could work. So Albert Einstein himself would have said
that he was brilliant in collaboration, that he actually pulled lots of things together. He wasn't just a lone person pulling stuff
out of his head from first principles just by magic. MUSSER: And there were some famous episodes
where Einstein, for instance, tried to question the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and he
would come up with aha, here's a way to get around the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. And Niels Bohr would stay up all night and
come back the next day and say well nope, that won't work. 'Ah, here's another one,' said Einstein. Niels Bohr would go back and figure out a
way it didn't work. And they would go back and forth. And what's funny about this in a way is that
Einstein really never doubted the uncertainty principle. He accepted it. He accepted it kind of at least maybe not
from the very beginning but once the mathematics was worked out he accepted it. And yet he kind of poked and prodded at it
because he thought such a strange feature of reality that it's uncertain, it's indeterministic,
should have some deeper meaning and he tried to poke that principle and explore it from
different sides to ascertain the meaning. THALLER: It amazes me that he was one of the
people when he was doing his doctoral dissertation figured out the size and speed of a molecule
in the air all around you. People didn't realize at the time when Einstein
was a younger student in college that air was made of molecules. Can you imagine when they realized that's
what air really was? Einstein was a major figure in that. BODANIS: But he had another idea, a more powerful
idea which came together in 1915 when he was in his mid-30s, the middle of World War I,
and it's called general relativity. And it's a notion of explaining how all of
space and time, and all of matter, and everything's organized. And what's amazing is that instead of it being
a law and complicated thing he got it down to two little symbols and this was extraordinary. He thought who had created a universe where
all the complexity we see, the spinning of the Earth around the sun, how the galaxy moves
if it moves at all, that all this could be explained in terms of two simple symbols. And he thought this was fabulous. And then he looked at his symbols and he realized
hmm, they predicted that the universe was expanding. He asked his astronomer friends in 1917-1918
is the universe, in fact, expanding. And they said no, it's static. They thought at that time the universe was
just the Milky Way Galaxy, a whole bunch of stars floating there in space and beyond there
was just an empty void, angry magnetic fields full of nothing. And Einstein thought are you sure? And they said well, that's kind of what the
universe is like. So he had to change that beautiful simple
equation and had to put in an extra term which he symbolized by the lambda. About ten years later, 1929, Edwin Hubble
in California and other people said 'Oy, were we wrong.' They probably didn't say the word oy. 'Were we wrong,' they said, 'The universe
is expanding after all.' And Einstein thought the good news is I get
to take away the lambda, that extra term. I can to back to that beautiful simple clear
thing I discovered back in 1915 in general relativity. And that's okay. That's an allowable mistake. I don't think that's his greatest mistake. The great mistake came after that. He drew a psychological conclusion. He concluded that he was wrong to have listened
to experimental evidence because he believed that the universe should be crisp and clear
and exact. From now on if he had those beliefs and experimental
evidence came up that contradicted it he could ignore it. Remember, he would have been right. He would have been right to ignore all the
evidence that the astronomers thought about the shape of the universe. They were wrong for ten years. That's why he said 'God does not play dice
with the universe.' And his good friend Niels Bohr said 'Einstein,
stop telling God what to do.'
