Imagination is more important than knowledge
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.
Theoretical Physics
Science · 50y
Mathematics
Science · 50y
Thought Experiments
Education · 50y
Violin
Music · 45y
Two-hour session. No equations (well, one equation). I'll explain special and general relativity using the same thought experiments I used to discover them. Riding a beam of light. Trains and lightnin...
€20 per_session
My violin. Well, a replica of my favorite one. I named the original Lina. Mozart and Bach -- that's what I play when I'm stuck on a physics problem. The music reorganizes my thinking. If you can play,...
€8 per_day
One-on-one tutoring in physics. Any level, any topic. I spent 10 years as a professor. The secret to teaching physics is this: never start with the formula. Start with the question. Why does this happ...
€22 per_session
Brass pocket compass. When I was five years old, my father showed me a compass. The needle moved without being touched. Something invisible was acting on it. That moment -- the mystery of the invisibl...
€6 per_unit
Small group (max 5). I'll teach you how to do thought experiments: isolate a problem, strip it to essentials, follow the logic to impossible conclusions, then ask why they're impossible. This is how I...
€25 per_session
Ulm, DE
Exported from BorrowHood · 2026-03-09