Doc Brown "Loved Himself Some Einstein" | StarTalk

Einstein always kind of, uh, amazes me. And it was he amazes us all, by the way. Yes, yeah, and he was just a clerk in the patent Department. Yeah, nobody knew, you know, but he's going looking at this, and there's a railroad station.

And he spent a lot of time doing mind games. What are they called? Thought experiments. Yeah, you gon experience having to do with if a train is moving through, and somebody drops a ball and it bounces. How fast is it? You know, and how it relates to the world outside the platform.

Seeds of the Genesis of Relativity. And there was a famous Clock Tower over the railroad stations, so there was time travel, all that kind of stuff, uh, going on. So he loved himself some Einstein.

Yeah, in fact, my favorite Einstein quote is, "If a theory cannot be explained to a child, then the theory is probably useless," meaning that all great theories are based on pictures that even children can understand the idea.

And so, so in 1905 he had the special theory of relativity, which involved the trains and the clocks and the timings. And then, 10 years later, uh, 11 years later, the general theory of relativity.

So, Meo relativity is a modern idea of how the world works, and it doesn't seem to emanate from anyone's sort of chair because it's not part of anybody's common sense. That's right. Common sense says that time is like an arrow you fire; it never comes back.

One second on the earth is like one second on the moon. Einstein says no, time is like a river, a river that meanders and speeds up and slows down. And the new wrinkle on this that I work on is the fact that the river of time can have whirlpools and fork into two rivers.

And that, of course, is Back to the Future: whirlpools in the river of time. Man, that sounds like a really cool soap opera. That I—and now on the next episode of Whirlpool's River of Time!