5 Chapter 4 The Best Years

Chapter 4 The Best Years When a person invents something—for example, a battery-powered back-scratcher for miniature poodles—the inventor sends a description of the invention to a patent office. An examiner looks at the idea and decides if it's really something new, or just something that is a little bit different from an already-invented gadget. If it's really a new idea, the inventor gets a patent, which means other people aren't allowed to copy it.

It takes a very smart person to understand inventions when they're just at the idea stage. Albert was that person. Reading applications for new inventions was like solving puzzles. Albert was so good at his job that each day he completed his work long before it was time to go home. He then was able to turn his attention to his first love—thinking. Imagine what this must have been like for Albert. It would be like a kid going to school every morning, finishing all the schoolwork within an hour, and then playing for the rest of the day.

With all that time to think, Albert ended up writing and publishing more scientific papers. In one year alone, he published five groundbreaking papers in a very famous German journal about physics. "A storm broke loose in my mind," explained Albert. So in some ways, his patent office job turned out to be a lot better than the teaching job that he had originally hoped for. Einstein in 4-D People measure objects in three ways: length, width, and depth. Anything—a piece of toast, a TV, a yo-yo—is so many inches high, so many inches wide, and so many inches thick. These three ways of measuring are known as dimensions. Albert threw in a fourth dimension—time. Albert said that the dimension of time was as important as length, width, and depth—especially when measuring something really big like outer space. To think about the size of outer

space but not the time it takes for something to travel through that space is like thinking about a song without the lyrics. Something important is missing. With steady work at the patent office, Albert felt that he could ask Mileva to marry him. So he did. She said "yes," and they were married in 1903. The following year, their son, Hans Albert, was born. Now Albert had the time to enjoy music, long dinners, and long walks with his family. Albert was happy and secure. Confident in his job, he could relax—be more himself. For Albert, that meant dressing carelessly, wearing the same wrinkled shirt day after day, and often forgetting to brush his hair. As someone once said, "Einstein looked as if he'd just smoked an exploding cigar."

Albert's years at the patent office were wonderful. He had a family, time to think and write lots of scientific papers, and enough money. Many of the greatest scientific achievements of the twentieth century—electronics, the atomic bomb, space travel—were all suggested by Einstein in the papers he published while he worked at the patent office. Those ideas were then worked on further by other scientists in the decades that followed.

Then in 1909, the University of Zurich convinced Albert to leave the patent office and become a professor. Albert would actually be paid to teach and study physics. Life was even more wonderful.