On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Eyeroller
My late husband was an astrophysicist. In the summer of 2014 he attended a conference in Chamonix, France. I did not usually accompany him to conferences but I went with him to this one. We did some touring in the area during conference breaks, then afterward spent a week in Switzerland. One day we visited Bern and, among other sights, toured Einstein’s first apartment there. Since based on the Zoom meeting there seems to be some interest in Einstein, I thought I’d send some of the pictures.

Entrance to the building. The plaque reads “”In this house Albert Einstein developed his foundational treatises on relativity theory during the years 1903-1905.” That would refer to special relativity; the general theory came much later, with the theory laid out in 1915 and a paper with applications to cosmology in 1917.

All the stairs were steep and narrow. Without the modern lighting that was obviously added for tourist safety, they would have been dark as well.

Bassinet. The sign mentions Hans Albert (1904-1973) who became a professor of hydraulic engineering at UC Berkeley. Hans was the second child and first son. The fate of Einstein’s first child, a daughter, is unknown, but it’s most likely she died in infancy in 1903. The second son Eduard suffered from severe mental illness and was estranged from his family after his mother’s death in 1948.

Main sitting area. Always full of tourists. There was no kitchen in the apartment which mystified me, till just recently I happened to read that this was the norm for smaller urban apartments prior to WWII, especially in Europe but also in the US. People ate out or brought food in or did a little cooking on their heating stove.

View from the window. Probably little changed from when the Einsteins lived there.

Bonus picture. The central section of Bern is full of statues/fountains. This is supposed to represent Sampson killing a lion, but to us it was “Man attempting to pill his cat.”
Baud
Very cool.
Dmbeaster
He wrote his four famous papers in 1905 (the Miracle Year). He did not get the Nobel until 1922. (Technically the 1921 prize, but awarded in 1922). It was “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”
The Nobel committee did not quite know how to assess contributions in theoretical physics. So they awarded it primarily based on the one paper that had observable outcomes and could be based on experiment.
Very cool to see that apartment where it happened.
Eyeroller
@Dmbeaster: General relativity was developed over several years, with the seminal paper published in 1917. Nobel’s bequest specified “service to humanity” which is one reason that the 1912 award went to one Gustaf Dalen for improvements in lighthouse technology. That had pretty much gone out the window by 1918, but the Committee still struggled to justify it so Max Planck had to wait till 1919 for his.
ETA both special and general relativity made experimental and observable predictions that were pretty quickly verified, at least preliminarily. Arthur Eddington’s observations of the deviation of starlight during the 1919 solar eclipse created a sensation and was probably a major impetus for Einstein’s award, but the Committee still must have felt obligated to make it based on something that could be used in practical applications.
Baud
@Eyeroller:
General relativity is used in GPS!
Eyeroller
In case anyone ever wondered why Einstein was working as a patent examiner in the first place, he had had a major falling out with his original PhD supervisor H.F. Weber, who also happened to be a raging anti-Semite. He switched to Alfred Kleiner but dropped out for a while. He needed a job to support his family; he first looked for teaching positions but couldn’t find one, but was hired by the Swiss Patent Office in 1902. He finally completed his PhD in 1905, the same year his first four major papers were published, but still could not immediately find an academic job. In 1908 he got a teaching position at the University of Bern; in 1909 a position became available at the University of Zurich, and Kleiner recommended him for that.
Maeve
The rule of the Nobel Prize, established by Alfred Nobel, who invented dynomite and regretted its use in warfare, anyway the rule he established was that theories of physics or chemistry etc. could not be awarded the Nobel Prize unless the were supported by experimental science.
sorry, my sentence got away from me.
stinger
Fascinating pics, thanks!
Baud
@Maeve:
Probably needed to weed out crack pot theories.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Laughed at your description of the statue. Thanks. I needed that
Eyeroller
@Baud: It requires both special and general relativity. Special because the satellites are moving relative to the earth, and general because of the gravitational field of the earth. The relativistic corrections are fairly small but important.
sab
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I lost my cat to hyperthyroid a couple of years ago. He was on medication and a surprisingly good boy about taking his pills. But months after he died, when I finally did a thorough Spring cleaning, I found little pills hidden all over the house. He had been sneaking off and spitting the pills out and hiding them.
I wouldn’t dare medicating any of the other cats. I might lose a hand.
Eyeroller
@Maeve: Max Planck’s theory was the only viable explanation for definite experimental results, and the Committee still dithered about awarding it for “theory.” Einstein’s photoelectric theory (which expanded Planck’s theory of light) also explained existing experimental evidence. Special relativity explained the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment.
TBone
I have a photo my Dad took of me sitting on the edge of that fountain. We didn’t tour Einstein’s apartment while in Bern, mostly because it was a rare weather day of sun and blue skies so we focused on outdoors activity on those days. Bern had a stone-lined pit with bears in it that broke my heart
a littlea lot.TBone
@sab: ugh, I’m sorry 😔
My cats hate me when I shove the pills all the way down their throats with a finger while they gag. It’s the only way to be sure.
Timill
@TBone: A squirt of water helps, as does a tap on the nose (so they lick it). We currently have 3 cats taking 11 pills nightly…
Belafon
@TBone: At least with a lot of dogs you can hold their snout closed until they swallow.
Uncle Cosmo
No it does not.
There is not a single word on that plaque about the “light quantum hypothesis.”
In fact it refers to the “basic treatise of relativity theory” that Einstein developed from 1903 to 1905 in the building. Look at the last line: Relativitätstheorie.
This comment should be deleted so as not to mislead readers who don’t understand German.
bluefoot
Back in my undergraduate years, I realized the university had the hard copies of journals bound down in the deep stacks where one could access them. This is back in the days of journal indexes and card catalogs. So I looked up some seminal papers. It was kind of amazing to read the photoelectric effect article in the original journal (I don’t recall the what the journal was) and then page through the journal and subsequent issues.
I remember reading Millikan and Fletcher’s oil drop experiment paper among others.
For the nerds in the room, one of my other favorite originals to read was the original Hodgkin and Huxley axon transmission paper.
pat
@Uncle Cosmo:
Thanks for the correction. I wondered where that came from.
bluefoot
It’s been a long time since I’ve had access to a university library. I wonder if all those old journals have been digitized and tossed out. I presume so, which is a little sad. One of the things that used to amuse me was looking at the ads for suppliers and equipment in scientific journals – you can really see the progression of technology in them. For instance, take any random issue of Cell every 5-10 years, and you can see the development of DNA and RNA sequencing technology just from the ads.
StringOnAStick
@TBone: There’s been a movement to improve the lot of the bears, I hope it worked.
Eyeroller
@Uncle Cosmo: I see the problem, I was looking at a different picture when I wrote that caption. That is a picture of a placard, written in English, that definitely referred to the “light quantization” problem. I have several more pictures than I submitted since they aren’t all that fascinating, so I just sent a sampling.
I don’t think I can correct these since they get sent in a form that is then published as a post, and I don’t have the ability to edit posts. I’ll try emailing Watergirl for a correction.
Eyeroller
@StringOnAStick: They live in a “habitat” now. They have quite a bit of room and lots of water to play in.
karen marie
@Belafon: Peanut butter.
Wombat Probability Cloud
Thank you for the informative post. Speaking as one who is primarily visual, the images of the stairs and apartment provide an emotional connection with his life. Wonder what it looked like through his eyes.
Steve in the ATL
@Maeve: @Baud: so unfair. I have gotten no prize for my perpetual motion machine.
Eyeroller
For the record, since the Internet is forever, the plaque with the statement about the “light quantum hypothesis” is the small black rectangle above the engraved commemoration. It’s hard to read even on a laptop display and probably impossible on a phone. But one can see that it has two paragraphs; the first is in German and the second in English. So no possible translation issues. And I was not as scatterbrained as I’d feared.