SINE

Everybody’s heard of Einstein. Even us Chinese. Latest thing to confirm his thinking was finally getting a picture, if you are willing to see something as a picture that can only be inferred by the presence of the matter around it, in this case a black hole seen because of the swirl of stars and gases circling it. But typical life wasn’t easy for Einstein. Most Americans know of Einstein from Sagan’s book called Cosmos, so some people may remember these passages as I read them:

Carl Sagan, Cosmos, (New York: Random House, 1980):

"Einstein [was] fascinated by Bernstein's People's Book of Natural Science ... that described on its very first page the astonishing speed of electricity through wires and light through space. He wondered what the world would look like if you could travel on a wave of light.

"If you started on a wave crest, you would stay on the crest and lose all notion of it being a wave. Something strange happens at the speed of light. The more Einstein thought about such questions, the more troubling they became. Paradoxes seemed to emerge everywhere if you could travel at the speed of light.

"Certain ideas had been accepted [by many scientists] as true without sufficiently careful thought. Einstein posed simple questions that could have been asked centuries earlier. For example, what do we mean when we say that two events are simultaneous?

"...[His] teachers ... told him that he would never amount to anything, that his questions destroyed classroom discipline, that he would be better off out of school. So he left and wandered, delighting in the freedom of Northern Italy, where he could ruminate on matters remote from the subjects he had been force-fed in his highly disciplined Prussian schoolroom."

That’s sort of my story, too. I thought I was in a certain program but then heard of Elon Musk’s work and aimed to join it, but then met Aura who keeps asking the question that has been asked for centuries without any answer yet, and now I’m wandering with her.

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