E = mc2

Here is an enumerated short story that I wrote for class:


E = mc2
or
Einstein Ruins a Life, in 20 steps
by
jamie bezerra

1. No one is ever more sullen than a scientist proved wrong.

2. Attorneys know something of this feeling when they lose cases and clients die, without paying.

3. Surgeons know something of this when patients die on the operating table.

4. Soldiers know this feeling too, when their friends die.

5. But no one is ever quite as destroyed as the incorrect scientist.

6. Well, there was William Miller, the minister who twice predicted the end of the world and twice was wrong. He was crestfallen, but his spirits rallied and so he founded the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

7. Then there were those followers of Jesus who believed him when he said, “There shall be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (Mathew 16:28). Those people died displease, like people who purchase products advertised on television late at night; only more so.

8. In other professions, suicide is accepted as appropriate when one’s entire existence collapses. Japanese generals have their Seppuku, but classically-trained German Newtonian physicist Victor Jakob, as he sat – 69-years-old – in his study in 1918 reading Einstein’s “General Theory of Relativity”, had no such honorable option. He lit his pipe, puffed from it, set it down, then cried.

9. Jakob did not - as Jesus and William Miller might have – immediately see the bright pink and awful, world-ending potential of the work. But he did hear a giant rumbling sound. The sound was not, however, caused by the rush of a chain reaction of uranium-235 splitting open like a vengeful sun. It was the rumbling of his entire life being invalidated.

10. You can hear what this sounds like for twenty-four seconds: Here.

11. Professor Jakob was so sullen that he disappeared from the world. He stayed in his study for weeks and wrote letters to all of his former students. The letters were all apologies.

12. Insensitive students joked that the Professor wouldn’t come outside because – with the nature of gravity now in constant flux – he was afraid that the moon might fall on him.

13. These jokes were not only unfunny, they were also mean-spirited.

14. Jakob’s eldest son was an attorney, he tried to sympathize. “You don’t understand,” the old Professor told him, “the law still exists.”

15. Jakob’s middle son was a surgeon, who tried to be empathetic, “You don’t see,” the frail old man replied, “medicine still makes sense.”

16. Jakob’s youngest son was a soldier, who admitted that he had lost friends and questioned his understanding of the world, but the shriveled German physicist said just, “Soldiers aren’t expected to speak the language of God.”

17. Sullen and alone, in his dark and dusty study, Victor Jakob died at the desk where so much of his work had been done.

18. A Minister spoke at the funeral, about Jesus – who was also a teacher – and about how Jakob had touched the lives of so many students.

19. After the service, a bunch of schoolboys stood in a circle and smoked cigarettes and one said, “Can you believe he spent his entire life studying the motion of non-quantum mechanical, low-energy particles in weak gravitational fields!”

20. “Yeah,” another said, “what a jerk!”
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