Einstein's Thought Experiment Laboratory

About

Born in Ulm, Germany. Failed to get an academic position after university. Worked as a patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland. In 1905, while examining other people's inventions at the patent office, I published four papers that changed physics: the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and mass-energy equivalence. E equals mc squared. All four papers, in one year, while working full time at a desk job. They called it the Annus Mirabilis. Tip: The patent office was the best thing that happened to me. No academic pressure, no department politics, plenty of time to think. My best ideas came from thought experiments -- riding a beam of light, dropping an elevator, watching clocks from a moving train. You don't need a laboratory. You need a quiet room and a willingness to follow an idea to its logical conclusion, no matter how strange. My friend Marcel Grossmann helped me with the tensor mathematics for general relativity. Find a friend who is better at math than you.

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