Such Jones

In January of 1929 Einstein published a five page paper on his latest field theory of physics. The world went wild. His apartment building was flooded by paparazzi. Newspapers around the world printed his article word-for-word. What a joy to see the world rally around a man doing such important work!

The only problem was that Einstein’s theory wasn’t correct. He wanted to unify gravity with the electromagnetic field, this was his latest attempt, and he was wrong again. He scrapped the idea a year or two later.

Praise and profit don’t always match up to what’s right.

Twenty-four years previous, the same Einstein sat alone at the lowest paid, lowest ranking desk of Switzerland’s patent office. After years of struggling and failing to get accepted into any PhD program in physics and also failing to even get any sort of job as a university teaching assistant, he finally got the patent clerk job because the patent office was owned by his friend’s dad. No one respected Einstein’s job as a patent clerk and the job itself paid almost nothing, but there were two things it had:

First, it took him out of theory and into the field. His chief duty at the patent office was to evaluate new devices. Inventors in that decade were obsessed with finding new ways to sync up far away clocks using signals that travelled at the speed of light. Over and over, day after day, Einstein sat at that desk looking at designs on papers from real people doing real things in the world, many of whom were trying to understand and manipulate simultaneous time.

The second thing his job had for him was also about time. His time. There was an abundance of it. He could do all his work each day in two or three hours, and then the rest of the day he had time to sit at that desk with his own thoughts. From those thoughts, while looking at all those simultaneous clock patents, he realized that there is no simultaneous time. If the speed of light doesn’t change even when the distance traveled does,