Guten tag, it is me, the ghost of Albert Einstein. You might know me for any number of things: as one of the greatest physicists of all time, my name being used as a general descriptor of highly intelligent people, or of course, for my weiner schnitzel.
Scherz! You know me for my Theory of Relativity of course, or at least you should. I’m very worried that you know me for one picture taken on my 72nd birthday more than anything else. You know the picture, it’s the one where I am sticking my tongue out. Ich bin so much more than that one photo.
I have spent many years watching the earthly realm from Science Heaven. Science Heaven is the same as normal Heaven, except it has fewer harps and more Bunsen Burners. The harps are in Science Hell. And the longer I watch the earth, the more I observe people associating me with a poster often found in freshmen studentenwohnheims.
Don’t tell me people’s opinions are all relative. I know it’s all relative, I wrote the theory on it! But you wouldn’t know that because I’m just a comical image to you, aren’t I?
Ok, ok, calm down Einstein, don’t waste your relatively short time here back on Earth.
To be clear, I’m fine with people knowing me outside my scientific achievements. I was a three-dimensional human being and not the two-dimensional one I’ve been made out to be. I would’ve thought the legions of high school science teachers who explained my work with large sheets of bending spandex or lycra would’ve taught you all that viewing things in an only two-dimensional space distorts them.
My reputation and the history of that verdammt snapshot of me have both been distorted. There was once scientific reasoning behind the picture that has been lost to time. I only stuck my tongue out to prove part of my Theory of Relativity!
It was my 72nd birthday und we were having a party/conducting a scientific experiment of great import as I am wont to do. You see, to the photographer and myself I was sticking my tongue out at the same time that they took the photograph. But to a third observer in a different frame of reference, over by the snack table, it looked like the photographer took my foto and then I stuck my tongue out.
This photograph was concrete evidence that my theory was correct, but instead it has led me to be seen as a silly and inconsequential scientist like Emmet “Doc” Brown or worse, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
You might think I’m overreacting, but you would be wrong. By the time I was a working physicist the mention of the great Sir Issac Newton elicited responses of, “didn't an apfel or some scheisse fall out of a tree and that’s how he invented gravity?”
Newton is one of our greatest scientific minds and he’s best remembered for a piece of fruit falling off a tree and bonking him on his wigged head! All of this is to say that I’ve seen what a goofy “fact” can do to an Einstein-like Newton’s reputation.
It’s not just Issac either. Marie Curie, was the first frau to win a Nobel Prize and a pioneer in radiation studies, but she’s most known for her untimely death from, well, radiation. Louis Pasteur helped bring vaccinations to the world, but people just think of him as “the milk guy” now. And of course, we all know that the father of evolution, Charles Darwin, asked his close friends to call him the “Zaddy of Evolution” in private. Oh, you didn’t know that about Darwin? Really? Well, he’s not going to like that I brought that up, forget I said that.
The point is, we should be remembered for our accomplishments, not some dumm fruit-based anecdote, or as the mann from the poster you saw at F.Y.E. once. Why are you looking at me like that? We’re ten years behind you in Science Heaven, is F.Y.E. not around anymore? Zaddy Darwin will be crushed.
In conclusion, if you remember one thing from my talk today remember this: E=mc2 not Einstein=That Guy Who Stuck His Tongue out.
P.S. It’s not just the tongue picture that upsets me. General life on Earth seems to mock me at every corner. I mean TikTok! I made it perfectly clear that time is relative, the tik is not necessarily the same as the tok, combining the two in one title makes them appear equal! It drives me irre!