IV

Even a Genius Makes Mistakes

“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.”

ALBERT EINSTEIN

From 1905 to 1915, Albert was consumed with this nagging thought that there was a crucial problem, a possible flaw in his theory: he realized it had never made mention of acceleration or gravitation. He had a friend by the name of Paul Ehrenfest that had noticed if the disk is spinning, the outside rim will travel faster than it does in the center, so by special relativity you could place meter sticks on its circumference, and they should shrink. That would explain the Euclidian plane geometry had to fail for the disk.

It would obsess Einstein’s thoughts for the next ten years as he tried to develop a theory of gravity regarding when it came to the curvature of space-time. To Albert, Newton’s idea of gravitational force seemed to be a by-product of a something much more profound: the bending of time and space.

Then came November 1915, Albert could finally take a deep breath as he felt he had completed the “general theory of relativity ,” which would leave a mark on the world as his masterpiece.

During the summer of that year, Albert gave two-hour lectures, six times at the University of Gottingen to thoroughly explain the version that he felt was complete on general relativity .

Then along came a real smack in the head when David Hilbert, a mathematician, that had put together the lectures for Albert at the University wrote a paper in November on the subject of general relativity five days before Albert. David Hilbert acted like it was indeed his work.He deserved to be tarred and feathered and driven out of town.

Albert and Hilbert did later patch up their quarrel and remained friends. It seemed from letters that it was Einstein who put his right foot forward first.

He penned a letter to Hilbert saying: I struggled against a resulting sense of bitterness, and I did so with complete success. I once more thought of you in unclouded friendship and would ask you to try to do likewise toward me.

Even today, some physicists refer to this action that the equations are obtained as the Einstein-Hilbert action, but, they know it solely belonged to Einstein.