Einstein: A Conversation

Big A: What's the deal. Your moma drop you on your head? Or, she didn't drop you enough?

Me: Well, the deal seemed to capture what you were about in more ways than just physics. Got you down pat.

Big A: You don't know me. I wasn't the Einstein everyone made me out to be. I wasn't Einstein all the time. Sometimes I couldn't count.

Me: I know. I'm not as smart as I need to be nor as knowledgeable as the world needs someone to be, but, taken together, I am luckier than anyone else in the solutions we need to see.

Big A: Yah. I remember sitting in the back of a class amazed at the content and logic of the lecture as it unfolded. Rising in applause and comment, I was taken aback when the professor said the material was immediately derived from what I wrote. So, you think I was wrong, nein?

Me: No, just not fully right, like El Nino. I'm 90% you with a 10% correction. As you were at the cutting edge of your zeitgeist, so am I doomed to have someone expand upon how I used you as a stepladder. I stand on your achievements. You were my Newton.

Big A: You may smarter than me for one simple reason. You had my thinking to build upon while it's too late for me to improve on your discoveries. So, where's the correction?

Me: You gave time human qualities. You never let the trees fall in the forest without being there. Prof, humans are merely bags of chemicals sloshing forward nervously controlled by a bunch of neurons defecating on each other. Time is. Time ain't no fourth dimension. Gravity ain't no time-space warp. Your short-coming you summarized in your final letter. So, were you like me? Lucky with a simple inspiration followed by a lot of perspiration.

Big A: Yeh, but I didn't take three decades to share it. You've spent more time on timsim than the years between the two world wars with probably the same results.

Me: Yep, been a burden and a gift.

Big A: You've spent more years on this than all the years I was alive before I wrote the theory of special relativity. What kind of a timist are you?

Me: An elsetimer. Couldn't see sharing without means to prevent misuse. I'm not going to be known as the father of the ultimate timebomb.

Big A: Cute. If not me then someone else. Maybe if I had not said the bomb would have been delayed my decades.

Me: In the end it does not matter because man will always want something for nothing. Am I you magnified exponentially?

Big A: A pure thought stands no chance in the face of gut reactions. If you are right, even fewer people will understand you than understand me. Ninety-nine percent of the people who teach me merely regurgitate information without understanding. You know you'll get even less respect from the 'flat earthers' because your focus is even less scientific than mine.

Me: Cute. Yep, when I die, one percent of the population will understand one percent of what I know. The Jews and Arabs will find unity before there is a unity of time. Did you ever wish you could be a thinker without the politics?

Big A: All the time. Oh, the things I could have discovered if left alone. If it wasn't the fascism of nazism then it was the fascism of academics. Timism. Nice idea. Too simple. Or, is it simply a marketing ploy?

Me: Prof, you're the marketing ploy.

Big A: I like your Einstein Moments. Flattering. Is that what you meant by what I "had in part but not in whole?"

Me: I never figured out what I meant by that. Sounded good so I used it. Too bad what they did with your brain.

Big A: Yeh, they made me the Roger Dangerfield of preserved matter, took all the energy out..

Me: Well, when I die, no ping-pong life-after-death for my goofball golfball. I'm going to be cremated in toto. Want an American of highly probable African ancestry to burn up my white butt. I like the historical, poetic justice of it: A black man making money off of burning a white guy.

Big A: Oy vegh! What racism does to some people. The nazis chased away the brains that created the atom bomb. I don't think your anti-racism matters as an anti-matter for racism. Black mortician? What next? Jews circumcising guilt-ridden nazis? Cremation sounds good, for at the rate you are going you probably couldn't find enough pallbearers for a funeral. So you think you know time?

Me: No, but I know it better than anyone else.

Einstein is like religions: The more you know about either the less you believe the media hype.