1In the fifth year of the new century, in the town of Bern among the mountains of the Swiss, there was a clerk at the office of patents. His rank was the lowest the office had. His work was to read other men's inventions and say whether they were new.
2His name was Albert Einstein, and he was twenty-six years old, and by every measure that the world uses he had failed.
3He had wanted to be a teacher of the laws of nature. He had finished his schooling, and then he had written to every house of learning from the northern sea to the foot of Italy, asking for the smallest post. Not one took him. His old masters remembered him as the student who did not come to lessons and who called them by their plain names.
4His father had written, in secret, to a great man of science, begging him to send the boy one kind word. No word came. Then the father's business failed, and his heart after it, and he died believing that his son would come to nothing. Albert carried that.
5A friend's father got him the clerk's post at last. So he sat at a high desk eight hours a day, six days a week, in a suit of checked cloth, with a wife and a small son in two rooms above the street of the clock tower, and the rent always a little behind.
6His wife was Mileva, a woman of Serbia with a limp and a quick dark mind. She had been the only woman in his class, and had studied the same hard things. Now she boiled the linen, and he rocked the cradle with one foot while he wrote with a board across his knees, and the stove smoked, and visitors remembered that he did not seem to notice.
7But listen. The office suited him better than any school would have done. For the master of the office had taught him a rule: when you take up a paper, suppose that everything the inventor says is wrong. Every day he was paid to look at a thing that someone was sure of, and ask what it truly rested on.
8And the work of a day he could finish in a few hours. Then he would slide open the drawer of his desk, where his own papers lay, and bend over them, and listen for the step of the master in the hall.
9He had three friends in Bern, as poor as he was. They met at night over sausage and a little cheese, and read hard books aloud, and argued until the neighbours knocked on the wall. They called themselves an academy, to laugh at academies. One of the books they read, line by line, was by the lens-grinder of Amsterdam who had said that God and the Whole are one thing. The clerk did not forget it.
10Now there was one question that the clerk had carried since he was a boy of sixteen. It had come to him on a walk, and it would not leave.
11He had asked himself: if I ran after a beam of light, as fast as the light itself, what would I see?
12By all the old laws he should see the light standing still beside him, a wave frozen in the air, as a rider beside a train sees the windows standing still. But the laws of light, which Maxwell had written, had no room for such a thing. Frozen light could not be. So either Maxwell was wrong, or something that everyone knew about running and catching up was wrong.
13For ten years he turned it over. The greatest minds of the age were turning it over too, with better tools than he had. They knew that light always seemed to go at one speed, whoever measured it, however fast the measurer flew toward it or away. It made no sense. They piled patch upon patch to save the old picture.
14In the spring of that fifth year he was near to giving up. One fine day in May he went to see his friend Besso, who worked at the same office and was the best listener in Bern. They walked, and the clerk laid out every side of the trouble, piece by piece, and Besso asked his slow questions.
15And in the middle of the talking, something turned over in him. He stopped. He said good night in the middle of a thought and went home.
16That night he looked out at the tower of Bern with its great clock, and thought of the next town's clock, and of how a man knows that two things happen at the same time.
17Hear how simple it was, and how terrible.
18When I say the train comes at seven, I mean: the train comes, and the small hand of my clock touches seven, and I see both together. That is well enough for me, standing here. But what of a thing that happens far off? I cannot be there. I must wait for word of it, and the word comes by light, and light takes time to cross.
19So he asked: when do two far-off things happen at once? And he saw that there was no answer that all could share. Two lightning bolts that strike together for a man standing on the bank do not strike together for a man riding past in a train. Each has measured honestly. Neither is wrong.
20There is no great clock hung over the world, ticking for everyone. That was the thing that everyone knew, and it was false. Each traveller carries his own time, and it runs at its own pace, and the faster he goes, the slower his clock is found to beat by those he passes.
21One thing only stays the same for all: the speed of light. Time and length must bend to keep it so. And they do.
22The next morning he met Besso in the street and did not even say good day. He said, "Thank you. I've completely solved the problem."
23For five weeks he wrote. Mileva read the pages over at the kitchen table when the child slept. When it was done he took to his bed for two weeks, emptied out.
24The paper he sent off had not one note at the foot of it pointing to another man's book. It leaned on no one. At its end it thanked one person: his friend Besso, for his faithful help.
25Now that would have been enough for one life. But mark what else that year held, for there has not been such a year for one mind since Newton sat out the plague in his mother's orchard.
26In March he had written that light itself comes in grains: that it is poured out not like water but like sand, in small counted parcels. Even he called that one revolutionary.
27And in May, the same month as the walk with Besso, he had sent off another paper. This one touched the dead man of Vienna, though the clerk had never met him.
28You remember Boltzmann, who counted the ways. You remember that the great men of his day had said to him: "Your atoms are a way of doing sums. No one has seen one. No one will." And he had worn himself out against them.
29The clerk had read Boltzmann's books and believed them. And he thought of a small thing that men had seen for eighty years and not understood. Put a grain of flower-dust in a drop of water, and look at it through a strong glass. The grain will not lie still. It jitters and wanders, this way and that, for ever, with nothing pushing it.
30Something is pushing it, reasoned the clerk. The water is made of atoms, and they are never at rest, and they strike the grain from all sides by the million: now a few more on the left, now a few more on the right. The grain is a ship in a sea of them. And he gave a rule, in numbers, for how far the grain must wander in a minute, if the atoms were real and of such a size.
31A patient man in France sat down with a glass and a watch and followed the grains. They wandered exactly as the rule said. After that there was no one left to say that atoms were only a way of doing sums.
32But the proof came three years too late. Boltzmann had gone to the sea-coast with his wife and daughter, at the end of a summer, and there he had closed his own Last Door. As far as anyone can tell, he never knew that a clerk in Bern had already won his war for him.
33Grieve for that, and learn from it. The one who lights a fire does not always live to see who warms their hands. He lit it all the same.
34There is one thing more from that year, and it is the smallest, and it throws the longest shadow in this book.
35In the autumn, when the great paper was already sent, the clerk saw that something further followed from it. He wrote it up in three pages. It was hardly more than a note.
36It said that the weight of a thing and the fire in a thing are not two matters but one. A body that gives off light or heat grows lighter by a little. A body that takes them in grows heavier. Matter is fire that has been tied in a knot. And the fire is very great, for to reckon it you must take the weight and multiply it by the speed of light, and then by the speed of light again.
37Think of that number. Light crosses from the moon to the earth in the time it takes to draw a breath. Multiply a thing by that, and then again by that. A pebble holds more fire than a forest. A handful of dust could drive every engine in a kingdom for a year.
38He did not see how it could ever be let out. For many years he doubted that it could. But he had read of the woman in Paris and her warm salt that never cooled, and in his note he wrote that perhaps, with such stuffs as radium, the thing might be put to the test.
39He wrote to a friend that the idea was amusing and tempting, but that for all he knew the Lord might be laughing at the whole matter and leading him about by the nose.
40So the measure of the purse was written down: the purse out of which the radium had been paying, the fire banked in the rooms of the atom. It was one line long. He did not know that he had written the first line of a much longer and darker book. No one did. It was a fine autumn in Bern, and the bears in the town pit were fat, and the clerk walked his son along the river in a small cart.
41And then nothing happened.
42That is the truth of it. He had sent out four papers, any one of which would have made a name. He waited for the storm. For months there was no word at all. He went to his desk each morning and read the claims of men who had made a better typewriter and a gravel-sorter that ran by electric power.
43At last a letter did come, from Berlin. It was from Max Planck, the first man of his science in all the German lands. Planck did not write to praise. He wrote to ask a question about a hard point on the ninth page. That was better than praise. It meant that the paper had been read by one who could read it.
44Even then the world was slow. He asked to teach at the school of Bern, and sent them the great paper as his proof of fitness. They sent it back and said it was not enough. The year after, they let him lecture, and three people came to hear him, and one of them was Besso. Four years more he stayed at the high desk. They raised him one rank.
45Did he rage? It is not told that he did. He had what he had found. The clock tower struck the hours over the street, and he knew now what a clock was, and that was a thing no office could give him or take away. This is what it is to work with the Near Hand. The papers were his to write. The answer was never his to command.
46Long after, when he was known in every land and could not walk down a street unfollowed, he would say that those years at the patent desk had been his best. He called the office his worldly cloister. It was there, he said, that he had hatched his finest thoughts.
47Now consider what kind of thing he had done, for it is not a small lesson.
48He had no rooms full of brass and glass. He had no helpers and no purse. He had a pencil, and the back of used paper, and a question a boy could ask. Every fact he used was already known to every master in Europe. What they did not have was his readiness to doubt the one thing nobody thought to doubt, because it had never once been wrong: that now is the same now everywhere.
49The door had stood in plain sight for two hundred years. It was not locked. It only looked like a wall.
50And see how the work was joined to other hands. The lens-grinder gave him his God. Maxwell gave him his light. Boltzmann gave him his atoms, and was repaid too late. Besso gave him an afternoon of listening. Mileva gave him the hours. A master of patents gave him a rule about doubt. Not one fire in that house was lit from nothing.
51In the years that followed he was to go much further, and to bend the sky itself, as you shall hear. But first the lamps of Europe had to go out. For while the clerk was teaching the world that no clock rules over all, the kings of the world were setting their clocks to the same hour, the hour at which the trains full of soldiers would leave.