¶ Einstein
Index Entry
Einstein:
"What did Einstein do and what had the other scientists not been doing that made it possible for him to surprise them so? . . . You must remember that Einstein was a schoolteacher in Switzerland, but he also worked in the first patent office. You also know that Switzerland is very famous for watches and clocks, so as a patent examiner in the patent office he would be in many, many patent confrontations with watches and clocks and dealing with time. I am sure that Einstein began to think a great deal about time as just an occupational result. At any rate, you have people trying to make watches that are better than other watches, stop watches and so forth. So one of the things he saw clearly was that none of the watches really agreed. And so in an important race you would have two or three timers and you would take the average of their results. In other words, he said there was no exact time. He had chronometers being invented so that the navigators would have better and better results, but he found the navigators had to have three or four chronometers on board and they took the rates of change of their error and they averaged their error to give themselves something that was reliable time. Time was all unreliable. He saw that Newton had said time was a very specific affair, that there was a specific and finite time that permeated the
¶ Citations
- Oregon Lecture #2, p.71, 2 Jul’62
