Keep Moving

How can we solve any problem that we have created ourselves with the same mind that created the problem? This is why we must continue to educate ourselves to grow these minds so that we may be able to solve our own problems.

--Albert Einstein

Life is like riding a bicycle.
To keep your balance you must keep moving.
--Albert Einstein, in a letter to his son Eduard, February 5, 1930

There are many many Einstein jokes floating around. Here's one:

Q: How many Einsteins does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: That depends on the speed of the changer, and the mass of the bulb. Or vice versa, of course. Then it just might be easier to leave the bulb alone and change the room. It’s all relative.

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Quotes from Dr. Einstein:

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When a blind beetle crawls over the surface of the globe, he doesn't realize that the track he has covered is curved. I was lucky enough to have spotted it.

I have no particular talent. I am merely inquisitive.

It's not that I'm so smart , it's just that I stay with problems longer.

Nothing that I can do will change the structure of the universe. But maybe, by raising my voice, I can help in the greatest of all causes-- goodwill among men and peace on earth.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber.

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. ... I get most joy in life out of music.

The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves - such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine.

The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. ~Albert Einstein, "What I Believe," Forum and Century, 1930

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of others.

I want to know God's thoughts,..... the rest are details.

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.

Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater.

Two things inspire me to awe -- the starry heavens above and the moral universe within.

My life is a simple thing that would interest no one. It is a known fact that I was born and that is all that is necessary.

As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

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While it is good to be immersed in Dr. Einstein's life, please remember that this book is fiction, entirely written by Alan Lightman. He obviously referenced Einstein, pulling inspiration from that scientist's life, but Lightman alone is the author of Einstein's Dreams. He was the one that "dreamed up" all those different variations of time.

Click on the photo to read more about Alan Lightman.

Maps of Berne

This is a map from 1881.  I've highlighted some of the places so you can pick them out more quickly, beginning with the greenish Aare river.  Einstein's Dreams takes place about 25 years after this map was drawn.

A really early map of Berne, showing the walls around the city, as well as the gate and clock towers. This is looking from the reverse direction of the first map.

Aare River

The Aare river from the terrace of the House of Parliament (Bundeshaus). Most all of the shutters of the houses have interesting designs painted on them, like these with a sunburst in red and black.

The Nydegg Bridge

Looking down from the Nydegg Bridge to the Untertorbrucke (Untertor Bridge)

A view of the Aare from the Kirchenfeldbrucke (Kirchenfeld Bridge)

The statue of a bear in the middle of the spillway

Einstein's House

Einstein's House

Enter and sign in please
(I love how they painted the ceiling with galaxies)

The lived on two floors: this was the lower floor, with their living area at the front.

The Einstein family (Einstein's father) ran an engineering business, which specialized in installing electric lighting.  Perhaps this shows how Dr. Einstein's boyhood--spent around technical equipment--influenced his later thought-experiments.

Einstein was a man of unexpected, and sometimes unlikable, contradictions and polarities. As a student, he got a classmate pregnant, sent her away to have the baby (which he refused to see) and then apparently made the young woman give up the child for adoption. He regarded both of his wives as essentially caretakers, their main obligation being to see to his domestic needs. In the case of his first wife, he compelled her to forgo a promising scientific career and then treated her shabbily. He hardly ever saw their mentally ill younger son, whom he dismissed as degenerate.

Mileva Maric, that young fellow student who became his first wife

Looking out of the upper floor's balcony window.
Mozart was Einstein's favorite composer, and the "Sonata for Piano and Violin in E Minor" was his favorite piece. Einstein's cultural tastes were so deeply old-fashioned that the physicist found nearly all 20th-century art and music utterly incomprehensible or repellent, especially the works influenced by his own ideas.

Fountains of Berne

Zahringerbrunnen (Zahringen Fountain)
This is the one that Einstein would see when he would look out his balcony window.

The top of the Samson Fountain

Each of these fountains is a working fountain, and on market day, they prop their buckets under the streams of water to get water for their flowers. In the early days, this was the source of water for the city, as they had no indoor running water.

The Moses Fountain, in Munsterplatz (by St. Vincent Cathedral)

Various Landmarks and Sights

Buildings from different time eras, side by side (see 10 May 1905)

Doorway in Berne

St. Vincent Cathedral, above the Aare

The Gymnasium

Einstein's second paper, on the photoelectric effect, contained a revolutionary hypothesis concerning the nature of light for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1921. Einstein not only proposed that under certain circumstances light can be considered as consisting of particles, but he also hypothesized that the energy contained within a light beam is transferred in individual units--or quanta--contradicted a hundred-year-old tradition of considering light energy a manifestation of continuous processes. Virtually no one accepted Einstein's proposal.
 

The outdoor cafes in Barenplatz

Einstein's third major paper in the spring of 1905, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," contained what became known as the special theory of relativity. After considering these problems for ten years, Einstein realized that the crux of the problem lay not in a theory of matter but in a theory of measurement. At the heart of his special theory of relativity was the realization that all measurements of time and space depend on judgments as to whether two distant events occur simultaneously. 

The Stadttheater (City Theater)

Lamppost (see 17 June 1905, where the young lovers meet)

A municipal building.

The year 1905 has been referred to as Einstein’s annus mirabilis, his "miracle year," for in that year he published four papers on physics with the German Annalen der Physik that were to change the nature of scientific research and knowledge. He was only 26. The special theory of relativity was the subject of the third of these papers, published in June 1905. The title of the paper was "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies." Einstein wrote it in five or seven weeks, later recalling, "When the Special Theory of Relativity began to germinate in me, I was visited by all sorts of nervous conflicts... I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion." Alan Lightman explains that Einstein’s special theory of relativity "proposed that distance and time are not absolute. The ticking rate of a clock depends on the motion of the observer of that clock." Measurements of time and distance vary, space and time are relative to observers, and only the speed of light remains constant at 186,000 miles per second.

Challenge: Which chapter of Einstein’s Dreams encodes the Special Theory of Relativity?

The Kuntsmuseum (see 8 May 1905)

Kunstmuseum (Museum of Fine Arts)

An old street car

The facade of the church at Munsterplatz (St. Vincent Cathedral). On the back side of the church is a park that overlooks the Aare. There's an elevator on one side that will take you down to Aarestrasse, the street along the river (as it's pretty far below).

The Cathedral of St. Vincent--another picture of the facade.

Some lady wielding a golden sword, about to take the head off of some green-faced creature.

Zygloggeturm (Clock Tower)

Einstein passed by the clock towers again on his way home, a route he often took with his closest friend, Michele Besso. The two men regularly discussed science and philosophy—including the nature of time. After one such discussion, Einstein came to a sudden realization: time is not absolute. In other words, despite our common perception that a second is always a second everywhere in the universe, the rate at which time flows depends upon where you are and how fast you are traveling. Einstein thanked Besso in his first paper on the Special Theory of Relativity.

These two are from an early morning walk:

Now the rooster crows:

This one is from another tourist and runs a little longer, but is a better view. Hang on until you hear the rooster crow:

The Zytglogge tower (German: Zeitglocke) in Bern, Switzerland is famous for its astronomical clock from the 16th century. The hand symbol displays the position of the sun (left is east, top is south, right is west), while a gold-and-black ball shows the phase of the moon.  The angle between these two marks the lunar phase.

The Zodiac is the moving part. The three concentric golden circles show the maximum height of the sun in the summer (outer-most circle), in the spring or autumn (middle circle) and in winter (innermost circle).

At the right-hand side of the astronomical clock is a carillon, which moves every hour, starting 4 minutes before(!) the full hour. It also sounds small bells by means of a 'Jester', indicating the number of the next hour.

While the Jester rings his two bells alternately, a roundabout of 7 bears rotates, representing the (ever recurring) days of the week: the first bear, mounted on a white horse, symbolizes Sunday, the beginning of the week; it is followed by 6 work-day bears (Monday through Saturday), each symbolizing a different profession.

The observant on-looker will note, that the 4th bear turns its head when coming out. - That's because it symbolizes Wednesday, the 'turn of the week.'

When the full hour arrives, 'the little man in rubber boots sitting on a golden chair' starts counting the hour by visibly moving his bearded chin while moving a golden rod (perhaps a sceptre?) left-right-left. He is 'morally supported' by a little golden 'Lion' on the right (i.e. his left) who vigorously shakes his head for each count.

At the same time (somewhat difficult to observe simultaneously), a huge golden male figure (John Bywood) in the very top of the tower (supposedly) rings the big bell up there, one stroke for each full hour. All of this is initiated by the crowing of a 'Rooster' (while he flaps his wings), who also crows at the middle of the show and eventually finishes it off.

Streets of Berne

Looking up Einstein's street (Kramgasse) towards the Zytgloggeturm (Clock Tower) His house would be on the left about half-way up. Einstein's street has four separate parts with four different names.

It starts out Spitalgasse, passes through the Prison Tower gate and becomes Marktgasse, which then goes by the clock tower and at that point the name changes to Kramgasse, which changes again to Gerechtigheitsgasse just before it passes over the Nydegg bridge.

The corner of Barenplatz and Spitalgasse

Looking up Marktgasse, past the Musketeer Fountain, towards the Prison Tower

The pink post truck in front of the Post Office, on (what else) Postgasse

An ornate building facade on Junkerngasse, one street over from Einstein's

Looking down Kramgasse

Munstergasse (and McDonalds)

Einstein's English vocabulary was probably no more than a few hundred words and that the great man was often largely incomprehensible in our language. All his assistants at Princeton had to speak German.

For most of us, Albert Einstein remains the emblematic genius-holy man of modern science -- part Gandhi, part absent-minded professor, part wide-eyed child. (Apparently Steven Spielberg modeled E.T.'s kindly and sorrowful eyes after those of Einstein.)

 

The drugstore on Marktgasse, beside the Clock Tower

Nydeggstalden, a street that curves from Einstein's street down to the smaller bridge over the Aare (Untertorbrucke)

Arcades

Arcades and Thoughts about Einstein
The Arcade on Marktgasse

This one's on Munstergasse. I liked the pretzel on the flag.


All these quotes are from the latest biography about Albert Einstein, titled Einstein: His Life and Universe, written by Walter Isaacson. The numbers to the side are the page numbers.

5 "His fingerprints are all over today's technologies. Photoelectric cells and lasers, nuclear power and fiber optics, space travel and even semi-conductors all trace back to his theories.

He made imaginative leaps and discerned great principles through thought experiments rather than my methodical inductions based on experimental data. The theories that resulted were at times astonishing, mysterious, and counterintuitive, yet they contained notions that could capture the popular imaginations: the relativity of space en time, E=mc2, the bending of light beams, and the warping of space.

7 [His] outlook made Einstein a rebel with a reverence for the harmony of nature, one who had just the right blend of imagination and wisdom to transform our understanding of the universe.

8-9 His slow development was combined with a cheeky rebelliousness toward authority, which led one schoolmaster to send him packing and another to amuse history by declaring that he would never amount to much. These traits made Albert Einstein the patron saint of distracted school kids everywhere. But they also helped to make him, or so he later surmised, the most creative scientific genius of modern times.
His cocky contempt for authority led him to question received wisdom in ways that well-trained acolytes in the academy never contemplated. And as for his slow verbal development, he came to believe that it allowed him to oversee with wonder the everyday phenomena that others took for granted. "When I ask myself how it happened that I in particular discovered the relativity theory, it seemed to like in the following circumstance," Einstein once explained. "The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time. But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and times only when I was already grown up. Consequently, I probed more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child would have."

14 Music was no mere diversion. On the contrary, it helped him think. "Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or faced a difficult challenge in his work," said his son Hans Albert, "he would take refuge in music and that would solve all his difficulties," The violin thus proved useful during the years he lived alone in Berlin, wrestling with general relativity. "He would often play his violin in his kitchen late at night, improvising melodies while he pondered complicated problems," a friend recalled. "Then, suddenly, in the middle of playing, he would announce excitedly, 'I've got it!' As if by inspiration, the answer to the problem would have come to him in the midst of music."

36 [Einstein] was also influenced by reading a lesser-known theorist, August Föppl, who in 1894 had written a popular text. . . . The only way to define motion, Föppl notes, is relative to another body.

37 Music continued to beguile Einstein. It was not so much an escape as it was a connection: to the harmony underling the universe, to the creative genius of the great composers, and to other people who felt comfortable bonding with more than just words. He was awed, both in music and in physics, by the beauty of harmonies.
69 The Second Law of Thermodynamics has many equivalent formulations. It says that heat flows naturally from hot to cold, but not the reverse. Another way to describe the Second Law is in terms of entropy, the degree of disorder and randomness in a system. Any spontaneous process tends to increase the entropy of a system. For example, perfume molecules drift out of an open bottle and into a room, but don't, at least in our common experience, spontaneously gather themselves together and all drift back into the bottle.

94 At the heart of Einstein's paper were questions that were bedeviling physics at the turn of the century, and in fact have done so from the time of the ancient Greeks until today: Is the universe made up of particles, such as atoms and electrons? Or is it an unbroken continuum, as a gravitational or electromagnetic field seems to be? And if both methods of describing things are valid at times, what happens when they intersect?

123-3 [On the Eurodynamics of Moving Bodies]. . . there is no absolute time. Instead all moving reference frames have their own relative time.

128 As he later put it, "There is no audible tick-tock everywhere in the world that can be considered as time,"

220 Space and time become players in the evolving cosmos. They come alive. Matter here causes space to warp there, which causes matter over here to move, which causes space way over there to warp even more, and so on. General relativity provide the choreography for an entwined cosmic dance of space, time, matter and energy. –Brian Greene

224 [After he finished delivering the four papers that would mathematically "prove" the General Theory of Relativity, he wrote a letter to Besso.] He signed himself, "contented but kaput."