When I was 8 years old I struggled with 3rd grade math. I sensed that my father thought the nuns at school were a bunch of nitwits who didn’t know how to teach anything so he ventured to a place he had no business being within thousand miles of, he was going to teach me math.
Of all the tools in the teacher’s toolbox, perhaps none is more important than patience. This was a tool my father didn’t own and if given to him as a gift, he wouldn’t have a clue how to use it. Deep down he was a good person and I loved him but his innate march to perfection was unshakable. He suffered no fools and proved it with a temper able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
We sat at the dining room table. This was the same location where he gave weekly performances in the art of humiliation while trying, with my mother, to balance the “books” from the pork store that bore his name. Imagine a game show with my mother as the hapless contestant who never seemed to have the right answer. Her parting gifts consisted of watching her children evacuate the scene and being screamed at for the rest of the night in two languages.
The next contestant is Paul and the category is math. After a few minutes of listening to Dad explain how addition and multiplication work, my glazed expression brought smiles to my brother's face. The first question was 2 + 2. Fortunately, I had some loose grip on simple addition and the answer was as clear to me as the vein already bulging in my father’s deepening scarlet neck. Then he asked me what 2 x 2 was and as I prepared to answer I simultaneously plotted my escape route from the high octane invective that was sure to follow while my brothers made book on whether I’d get screamed at in English or Italian.
“Four” I whispered.
“Right, see it’s not so hard” he said.
My 3rd grade brain seemed to have it figured out; multiplication is the same as addition!
“OK, now what’s 2 x 3?” he asked.
“Five” I shouted.
It was a Vesuvian explosion in a heavily embroidered combination of Italian and words I hadn’t heard before. Lesson over.
Who among us hasn’t come across at least one idea or concept that we just can’t grasp, its secret to understanding secured by a padlock. And then there are the handful of colossal ideas of the mind that seemingly reside inside an eight inch thick kryptonite box capable of incapacitating any investigator with a massive headache of the ice pick in the temple variety.
One such idea is Einstein’s theory of relativity. Its complexity makes it easy to ignore except that it helps explain some of the most profound mysteries of the earth and the universe. It is true genius, born in our century and we desperately want to understand it.
Here are two of the best and most easily understood explanations of the genius of Einstein’s theory. Have a seat at the dining room table.
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