EINSTEIN’S LESSON: GIVING UP IS NOT AN OPTION

Posted September 21st, 2009 by admin

One hundred years ago this week, a young German physicist stood in the gym of the Andra school in the Austrian city of Salzburg explaining his groundbreaking work to the audience of his peers.

As he spoke, many of the 1,300 participants in the 81st Meeting of the Society of German Scientists and Physicians were baffled by the physicist’s findings.

The young physicist was Albert Einstein and the work he was delivering for the first time in the public forum was his theory of relativity. First published in 1905, the famous formula, E = mc ², would eventually revolutionize physics, but on the afternoon of September 21, 1909 it was met with skepticism. Even the most prominent physicists of the era who attended Einstein’s lecture - including Nobel laureates Max Planck, Johannes Stark and Max von Laue – did not fully understand the significance or future impact that the formula would have on the development of physics and science in general.

The rest, as the saying goes, is history. Despite the cool reception on that day, Einstein went on to a brilliant career and, in 1921, a Nobel Prize in Physics. Today, he is universally recognized as one of the greatest multi-disciplinary minds in world history, whose far-reaching vision paved the way to how we view gravity, time, space, and energy.

Many of Einstein’s contemporaries might have underestimated his out-of-the-box ideas, but time has proven them wrong. We have much to learn from Einstein, of course, and some of the lessons have nothing to do with physics. Rather, they teach us about the value of perseverance - staying the course despite the obstacles in our way – as well as the power of human curiosity and quest for knowledge that constantly push us to reach higher and farther.

Nothing expresses better those principles than two of Einstein’s own quotes: “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing,” and “Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.”

And there is nothing relative about that.