Richard Dawkins reads his own hate mail
“Ha ha, you fucking dumbass! I hope you get hit by a church van…tonight!”
Awesome. The Einstein story is incredible, pure physics miracles aside.
His own work led to Neils Bohr developing quantum mechanics, which Einstein absolutely could not accept. The idea that certainty did not exist, and that at the quantum level (a level Einstein led us to) we could only predict probability, was unacceptable to Einstein. “God does not play dice with the world,” he famously said. Bohr’s response was a curt, “Stop telling God what to do, Einstein.”
In experiment after experiment, quantum mechanics proved to be accurate. Einstein threw everything he had against poking a hole in it. He constructed thought experiment after thought experiment, the basic mental tool that led to his relativity revelations, but each time Bohr had an answer for him.
Einstein lived out his days as a sort of eccentric character. A sympathetic and doddering old figure who’d led an earlier revolution, but then became the very same old guard that refused to accept his mind-bending relativity theories. His ongoing work to find a Grand Unified Theory largely ignored ongoing discoveries about new forces besides gravity, like the nuclear and electromagnetic forces.
After the Miracle Year and his (eventually losing) his legendary battles with Bohr over quantum mechanics in the 1920’s, Einstein never made another major contribution to physics, and he lived all the way until 1955. He went on scribbling equations until the very end, his last words in german and unknown to his American nurse.
Never mind a lick of having to understand the mathematics. The Einstein story is incredible.
You will let me sit down and summarize Albert Einstein’s four “Annus Mirabilis Papers.” Annus Mirabilis means “miracle year” and in regards to Einstein it refers to 1905, when he was an unknown 26 year old physicists and published these papers:
(listing dates published)
June 1905 - The…
