Unit 05 - The professor and the yo-yo - Alfred Noble- a man of contrasts

Unit Five Text

Seen through the eyes of a young man Einstein was a simple, modest and ordinary man.

The professor and the yo-yo

Thomas lee Bucky with Joseph P. Blank

My father was a close friend of Albert Einstein. As a shy young visitor to Einstein’s home, I was made to feel at ease when Einstein said, “I have something to show you.” He went to his desk and returned with a yo-yo. He tried to show me how it worked but he couldn’t make it roll back up the string. When my turn came, I displayed my few tricks and pointed out to him that the incorrectly looped string had thrown the toy off balance. Einstein nodded, properly impressed by my skill and knowledge. Later, I bought a new yo-yo and mailed it to the Professor as a Christmas present, and received a poem of thanks.

As a boy and then as an adult, I never lost my wonder at the personality that was Einstein. He was the only person I knew who had come to terms with himself and the world around him. He knew what he wanted and he wanted only this: to understand within his limits as a human being the nature of the universe and the logic and simplicity in its functioning. He knew there were answers beyond his intellectual reach. But this did not frustrate him. He was content to go as far as he could.

In the 23 years of our friendship, I never saw him show jealousy, vanity, bitterness, anger, resentment, or personal ambition. He seemed immune to these emotions. He was beyond any pretension. Although he corresponded with many of the world’s most important people, his stationery carried only a watermark –W- for Woolworth’s.

To do his work he needed only a pencil and a pad of paper. Material things meant nothing to him. I never knew him to carry money because he never had any use for it. He believed in simplicity, so much so that he used only a safety razor and water to shave. When I suggested that he try shaving cream, he said, “The razor and the water do the job.”

“But, Professor, why don’t you try the cream just once?” I argued. “It makes shaving smoother and less painful.”

He shrugged. Finally, I presented him with a tube of shaving cream. The next morning when he came down to breakfast, he was beaming with the pleasure of a new, great discovery. “You know, that cream really works,” he announced. “It doesn’t pull the beard. It feels wonderful.” Thereafter, he used the shaving cream every morning until the tube was empty. Then he reverted to using plain water. Einstein was purely and exclusively a theorist. He didn’t have the slightest interest in the practical application of his ideas and theories. His E=mc2 is probably the most famous equation in history – yet Einstein wouldn’t walk down the street to see a reactor create atomic energy. He won the Nobel Prize for his

Photoelectric Theory, a series of equations that he considered relatively minor in importance, but he didn’t have any curiosity in observing how his theory made TV possible.

My brother once gave the Professor a toy, a bird that balanced on the edge of a bowl of water and repeatedly dunked its head in the water. Einstein watched it in delight, trying to deduce the operating principle. But he couldn’t.

The next morning he announced, “I had thought that bird for a long time before I went to bed and it must work this way… “ He began a long explanation. Then he stopped, realizing a flaw in his reasoning. “No, I guess that’s not it.” He said. He pursued various theories for several days until I suggested we take the toy apart to see how it did work. His quick expression of disapproval told me he did not agree with this practical approach. He never did work out the solution. Another puzzle that Einstein could never understand was his own fame. He had developed theories that were profound and capable of exciting relatively few scientists. Yet his name was a household word across the civilized world. “I’ve had good ideas, and so have other men,” he once said. “But it’s been my good fortune that my ideas have been accepted.” He was bewildered by his fame: people wanted to meet him; strangers stared at him on the street; scientists, statesmen, students, and housewives wrote him letters. He never could understand why he received this attention, why he was singled out as something special.

Passage

Alfred Nobel – a man of contrasts

Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor and industrialist, was a man of many contrasts. He was a son of a bankrupt, but became a millionaire; a scientist with a love of literature, an industrialist who managed to remain an idealist. He made a fortune but lived in a simple life, and although cheerful in company he was often sad in private. A lover of mankind, he never had a wife or family to love him; a patriotic son of his native land, he died alone on foreign soil. He invented a new explosive, dynamite, to improve the peacetime industries of mining and road building, but saw it used as a weapon of war to kill and injure his fellow men. During his useful life, he often felt he was useless: “Alfred Nobel, “ he once wrote of himself, “ought to have been put to death by a kind doctor as soon as, with a cry, he entered life.” World-famous for his works he was never personally well known, for throughout his life he avoided publicity. “ I do not see, “ he once said, “that I have deserved any fame and I have no taste for it, “ but since his death his name has brought fame and glory to others.

He was born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833 but move to Russia with his parents in 1842, where his father, Immanuel, made a strong position for himself in the engineering industry. Immanuel Nobel invented the landmine and made a lot of money from government orders for it during the Crimean War, but went bankrupt soon after. Most of the family returned to Sweden in 1859, where Alfred

rejoined them in 1863, beginning his own study of explosives in his father’s laboratory. He had never been to school or university but had studied privately and by the time he was twenty was a skillful chemist and excellent linguist, speaking Swedish, Russian, German, French and English. Like his father, Alfred Nobel was imaginative and inventive, but he had better luck in business and showed more financial sense. He was quick to see industrial openings for his scientific inventions and built up over 80 companies in 20 different countries. Indeed his greatness lay in his outstanding ability to combine the qualities of an original scientist with those of a forward-looking industrialist.

But Nobel’s main concern was never with making money or even with making scientific discoveries. Seldom happy, he was always searching for a meaning to life, and from his youth had taken serious interest in literature and philosophy. Perhaps because he could not find ordinary human love – he never married he came to care deeply about the whole of mankind. He was always generous to poor: “ I’d rather take care of the stomachs of the living than the glory of the dead in the form of stone memorials,” he once said. His greatest wish, however, was to see an end to wars, and thus peace between nations, and he spent much time and money working for his cause until his death in Italy in 1896. His famous will, in which he left money to provide prizes for outstanding work in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, Medicine, Literature and Peace, is a memorial to his interests and ideals. And so, the man who felt he should have died at birth is remembered and respected long after his death.