Albert Einstein developed his ideas on relativity whilst working as a patent clerk at around the turn of the last century (1900 – in case someone forgot).
Now I’ve often wondered. I know from reading various accounts of him that he had a really busy schedule during those years he was developing his theories – work, eat, sleep… or so the story went.
But how long were his working hours? Coz I’m thinking if he worked 9-5 (am-pm) and then came home and started his theoretical ponderings he must have been exhausted by the time the night was out.
So exactly what was the Einsteinian schedule like during the period he was working at the Swiss patent office? What were his hours at the office and what time did he come home? Did he have to commute, or was it rather close by?
Einstein worked 8 hours a day at the Patent Office, six days a week (Sundays off), starting at 8 am. On top of this, he was devoting about an hour a day to teaching physics to private pupils, in order to make ends meet. There’s a letter from his wife to Helene Savic in March 1903 complaining about how much of his time is tied up in boring work at the office (see In Albert’s Shadow, Johns Hopkins, 2003, p82-4).
I’d expect he walked to the office: from my memory of pacing out the locations on the streets of Bern about 15 years ago, it’s (classically) roughly a ten minutes walk.
[ul]
[li]It may have been a repetitive bureaucratic job that left a lot of CPU cycles free, when the mind had a lot of CPU cycles to start with.[/li][li]His wife may have provided a lot of CPU cycles.[/li][/ul]
