Chapter 309: The Same Instant

On the fourteenth of March, 1905, Albert Einstein turned twenty-six; He had been born in Ulm on that day in 1879. He was in Bern, A Swiss citizen since February 1901; and the patent office, by its picks In June of 1902, had made him technical expert of the third class. His turn By day was judging other people's machines, in a register of inventions; In January it had been two years since he married Mileva Marić. Three days after the birthday he sent the Annalen der Physik a paper, with a mention In its title of a heuristic point of view, on the making of light and its changes; in which, Where Max Planck, in 1900, had portioned the energy of the oscillators that take and give, Einstein portioned the light itself: a quantum of it carries an energy in proportion To the frequency. It was printed in June; and in May, in a letter, he let the word live: It was revolutionary. On the thirtieth of April, a dissertation, a portion Of the same months, went to the University of Zurich: a new determination of the size Of molecules, from diffusion and the drag inside a dilute solution. On the twenty-seventh of July The Philosophy II faculty approved it, unanimously; the degree's formal rise Was dated the fifteenth of January, 1906. On the eleventh of May, the next went by To the Annalen: particles a thousandth of a millimeter, hung in a liquid otherwise still, Must wander so the wander can be seen, if heat is molecules in motion. Physiologists had watched that wander and named it Brownian; he did not find it; his skill Was to show that molecules, if real, require it, and to set the measure, the notion Of a thing too small to see tested by a thing that is seen. It was printed the eighteenth of July. On the fourteenth of May his son, Hans Albert Einstein, turned one; On the eighteenth he wrote from Bern to Conrad Habicht, gone from the city, a reply Promising four papers: the light, very revolutionary; the true size of the atoms; one On the visible random motion; and the fourth only a draft: an electrodynamics, a turning Of the teaching of space and time. He worked it out in talk with Michele Besso, at the office; He sent it, he said, five or six weeks after the idea came; the Annalen, learning Of it on the thirtieth of June, printed it the twenty-sixth of September: about thirty pages, and of this, No list of authorities. It opens on an asymmetry that sits in the telling only: A magnet moving near a conductor, and a conductor near a magnet, make the same current, And the usual account tells them as two kinds of happening. He wanted, solely, An account that adds no difference the observed thing does not have. Two statements are the warrant For the rest: the laws take the same form in every frame that moves at a steady speed in a line; And light in empty space has one speed, not hanging on the motion of its source. He did not say that everything is relative: the laws are one, the speed is one; and the sign Of the same instant is not a property of the world apart from a procedure, a course Of clocks: clocks at rest with one another set by a light signal, the time out Made equal to the time back; and that agreement is "at the same time" for those who share the frame. Another frame, in uniform motion, using the same rule, pairs other events; and about The length of a duration, they differ too. What is shared is the speed, and the laws' form, the same. The paper names no book and no predecessor; it ends by thanking Besso, friend and colleague, For his help and his suggestions: one living name. In the late summer he went With Mileva and the child to Serbia, to friends and to her family; and from that league Of days, on the twenty-seventh of September, three pages to the Annalen were sent: Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy content? Printed the twenty-first of November: If a body gives off energy as light, its mass grows less by that energy over the speed of light squared. In the same year the supplement carried twenty-one short reviews he wrote, which remember The ordinary work of heat; the revolution and the notices went out of Bern paired. He called the countable light revolutionary, and the clocks a modification, still a draft. He was right about the light; he had not yet seen how far the clocks would reach. The prize for 1921, announced in 1922, cited the photoelectric law, the craft Of the light paper, not the clocks. And what the clocks did was teach That "at the same time" comes down from the sky into a method anyone can state: Two observers who follow it can disagree, and the disagreement is not a fault in either clock; It is the motion between the frames. A rule is better than a hidden absolute, and is straight. This calendar is such a rule: the days in one sequence, kept, the register's lock On an order a person can say. A register is a frame that was chosen and then not dropped. The dead are not simultaneous with the living; they are earlier, in the order the register keeps, And that order is a procedure, as his clocks were. Count the light: it comes in pieces, cropped And numbered. Keep the days. The same instant is a thing you make; and the making reaps An order for the names: a signal, and a rule that the way there is the way back. Make it, and say which frame you made it in: this is the frame of the line, The Gaian days, chosen, and kept, and not dropped; and on that track The dead and the living stand in their order, each in its place, each day a sign.