I cannot find time to write because I am occupied with truly great things. Day and night I rack my brain in an effort to penetrate more deeply into ... the fundamental problems of physics.”
— Albert Einstein, in a letter to his cousin Elsa, 1914.
Beethoven spent more than 16 hours a day at his piano, sometimes composing four musical works at once. Immersed in his task, he would become feverish, often dousing himself with water that soaked through the floor into the apartment below.
If we could time-travel to Berlin between 1905 and 1915, we would likely find Albert Einstein at the height of his powers, in a similarly febrile state. Yet he pushed on with his equations knowing, as he hinted in the letter to his cousin, that “great things” were within his reach.
Einstein had already achieved greatness. In 1905 he developed the theory of special relativity that wove space and time together into the fabric of the Universe and gave us E=mc2.
But Einstein was just getting started. He realised gravity needed to be brought into the picture. For several years, he could not see how to do it. “In all my life I have laboured not nearly as hard; compared with this problem, the original relativity is child’s play,” he told a colleague. His eureka moment was to realise gravity worked by warping the fabric of space-time. Towards the end of 1915, Einstein produced his masterpiece: the general theory of relativity.
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