Everything Is F*cked(47)

That’s not Einstein, either.

Or how about “I fear the day when the technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will only have a generation of idiots”?8

Nope, not him.

Einstein might be the most illused historical figure on the internet. He’s like our culture’s “smart friend,” the one we say agrees with us to make us sound smarter than we actually are. His poor mug has been plastered next to quotes about everything from God to mental illness to energy healing. None of which has anything to do with science. The poor man must be spinning in his grave.

People project shit onto Einstein to the point that he’s become a kind of mythical figure. For example, the idea that Einstein was a poor student is bogus. He excelled at math and science from an early age, taught himself algebra and Euclidean geometry in a single summer at age twelve, and read Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (a book that present-day graduate students struggle to finish) at age thirteen. I mean, the guy got a PhD in experimental physics earlier in life than some people get their first jobs, so clearly he was kind of into the school thing.

Albert Einstein didn’t initially have big aspirations; he just wanted to teach. But being a young German immigrant in Switzerland, he couldn’t get a position at the local universities. Eventually, with the help of a friend’s father, he got a job at a patent office, a position mind-numbingly dull enough for him to sit around all day and imagine wacky theories about physics—theories that would soon flip the world on its head. In 1905 he published his theory of relativity, which launched him to worldwide fame. He left the patent office. Presidents and heads of state suddenly wanted to hang out with him. Everything was Gucci.

In his long life, Einstein would go on to revolutionize physics multiple times, escape the Nazis, warn the United States of the oncoming necessity (and danger) of nuclear weapons, and be the subject of a very famous photo in which he’s sticking out his tongue.

But today, we also know him for the many excellent internet quotes that he never actually said.

Since the time of (real) Newton, physics had been based upon the idea that everything could be measured in terms of time and space. For example, my trash can is here next to me now. It has a particular position in space. If I pick it up and throw it across the room in a drunken rage, we could theoretically measure its location in space across time, determining all sorts of useful stuff like its velocity, trajectory, momentum, and how big a dent it will leave in the wall. These other variables are determined by measuring the trash can’s movement across both time and space.

Time and space are what we call “universal constants.” They are immutable. They are the metrics by which everything else is measured. If this sounds like common sense, it’s because it is.

Then Einstein came along and said, “Fuck your common sense; you know nothing, Jon Snow,” and changed the world. That’s because Einstein proved that time and space are not universal constants. In fact, it turns out that our perceptions of time and space can change depending on the context of our observations. For example, what I experience as ten seconds, you could experience as five; and what I experience as a mile, you could theoretically experience as a few feet.

To anyone who has spent a significant amount of time on LSD, this conclusion might kind of make sense. But for the physics world at the time, it sounded like pure craziness.

Einstein demonstrated that space and time change depending on the observer—that is, they are relative. It is the speed of light that is the universal constant, the thing by which everything else must be measured. We are all moving, all the time, and the closer we get to the speed of light, the more time “slows down” and the more space contracts.

For example, let’s say you have an identical twin. Being twins, obviously you are the same age. The two of you decide to go on a little intergalactic adventure, and each of you gets into a separate spaceship. Your spaceship travels at a pokey 50 kilometers per second, but your twin’s travels at close to the speed of light—an insane 299,000 kilometers per second. You both agree to travel around space for a while and find a bunch of cool stuff and then meet back up after twenty earth years have passed.

When you get home, something shocking has happened. You have aged twenty years, but your twin has hardly aged at all. Your twin has been “gone” for twenty earth years, yet on his spaceship, he experienced only about one year.

Yeah, “What the fuck?” is what I said, too.

As Einstein once said, “Dude, that doesn’t even make sense.” Except it does (and Einstein never said that).

The Einstein example is important because it shows how our assumption of what is constant and stable in the universe can be wrong, and those incorrect assumptions can have massive implications on how we experience the world. We assume that space and time are universal constants because that explains how we perceive the world. But it turns out that they are not universal constants; they are variables to some other, inscrutable, nonobvious constant. And that changes everything.

I belabor this headache-inducing explanation of relativity because I believe a similar thing is going on within our own psychology: what we believe is the universal constant of our experience is, in fact, not constant at all. And, instead, much of what we assume to be true and real is relative to our own perception.

Psychologists didn’t always study happiness. In fact, for most of the field’s history, psychology focused not on the positive, but on what fucked people up, what caused mental illness and emotional breakdowns, and how people should cope with their greatest pains.