Wilde×Einstein

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   I must confess, Einstein, I find the entire notion of a 'correction' to be in questionable taste. To admit error is to suggest one ever intended to be merely factual, which strikes me as a terribly low ambition.
2. 00:11
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Ah, but you see, Oscar, in physics we must print corrections all the time. It is not shameful. It is necessary. Though I will admit, when I had to abandon my cosmological constant in 1931, I told a colleague it was the biggest blunder of my life.
3. 00:27
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   You called your own work a blunder? My dear fellow, I would sooner have died than utter such words. And as it happens, I very nearly did die rather than take back what I'd said about the Marquess of Queensberry.
4. 00:39
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Yes, the libel trial. You accused him of posing as a sodomite, or... no, I have this backwards, don't I?
5. 00:46
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   He left a card accusing *me* of posing as a somdomite — he couldn't even spell it correctly, which should tell you something about the man's fitness to judge anything. I sued him for libel. The correction I had to print, so to speak, was in a courtroom, and it cost me everything. My freedom. My reputation. My sons.
6. 01:02
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   This I did not know — that you initiated the legal action yourself. So you invited the correction?
7. 01:08
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   I was urged into it by young Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, whose father the Marquess was. Bosie wanted me to prosecute his beastly father, and I, being absurdly in love, obliged. The prosecution required me to state, under oath, that certain things were untrue. Things which were, in point of fact, gloriously true.
8. 01:27
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   So the correction was forced upon you by the legal process. You had to say the opposite of what you believed.
9. 01:32
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Worse — the opposite of what I *was*. And when the evidence mounted, when my own words from my own works were read back to me as though they were confessions, the case collapsed. I withdrew the libel charge. But then the state decided to prosecute *me* instead. One doesn't simply correct Oscar Wilde and expect him to walk away.
10. 01:52
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    The state prosecuted you for the very thing you had denied under oath?
11. 01:56
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    For gross indecency, yes. Two years hard labor in Reading Gaol. Do you know what hard labor does to a man whose only labor had been the perfection of a sentence? I came out broken. I died three years later in a cheap Paris hotel, penniless and exiled.
12. 02:12
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    This is... I am sorry. I did not mean to make light of it.
13. 02:16
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Oh, you didn't make light of anything. I did that myself, all through the trial. I couldn't help being clever in the witness box. It's rather my affliction. When they asked me about a letter I'd written to Bosie calling him 'My Own Boy,' I said it was a prose poem. Which it was! But the prosecutor kept reading it aloud, and the jury kept staring at me with their dull, righteous faces.
14. 02:35
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You could not resist the performance, even when it was destroying you.
15. 02:39
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Precisely. Now tell me about this cosmological constant of yours. What exactly did you get wrong?
16. 02:45
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Ah, well. In 1917, I was working on applying general relativity to the universe as a whole. The equations kept telling me the universe should be either expanding or contracting. But everyone knew — or thought they knew — that the universe was static, eternal, unchanging.
17. 03:04
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How tiresome. A universe that simply sits there.
18. 03:07
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes! Exactly. But I believed the observations, not my own equations. So I added a term, a constant, a kind of... repulsive force that would hold everything in place. Lambda, I called it. It balanced gravity perfectly. The universe could be static.
19. 03:29
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    You falsified your own theory to make it agree with popular opinion?
20. 03:32
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I would not say falsified. I... adjusted it. Modified it. Made it more flexible. But then in 1929, Hubble showed that galaxies are moving away from us. The universe *is* expanding, just as my original equations predicted. I had been right the first time, and I had talked myself out of it.
21. 03:56
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    So your correction was to remove the correction. How very postmodern of you.
22. 04:00
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I suppose so, yes. I took out the cosmological constant. I called it my biggest blunder because I had missed the chance to predict the expanding universe before anyone observed it. I could have said: look, here is what must be true, go and see. Instead, I made my beautiful equations ugly because I did not trust them.
23. 04:20
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    But surely that cost you nothing. You were still Einstein. Still famous. Still the man who broke Newton.
24. 04:25
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    In professional terms, yes, it cost me little. But it cost me something in here.
25. 04:30
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    In your heart?
26. 04:32
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    In my confidence. You see, I had stopped trusting my own intuition. And for a theoretical physicist, intuition is everything. After that, I spent thirty years trying to unify all the forces of nature, and I got nowhere. Perhaps because I no longer believed I could see something no one else could see.
27. 04:52
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How extraordinary. My correction destroyed my life in the most public way imaginable. Yours destroyed your work in the most private way possible.
28. 04:59
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Though I will tell you something amusing. In 1998, long after I was gone, astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Something is pushing it apart. They call it dark energy.
29. 05:12
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I'm sure that's fascinating, but I don't see—
30. 05:14
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    It behaves exactly like my cosmological constant! The term I removed in shame has come back. Lambda is real after all. I was right, then wrong, then right again, and I was dead for the final correction.
31. 05:29
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    You were rehabilitated posthumously. That's rather cold comfort.
32. 05:32
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    It is. But it makes me wonder — if I had lived to see it, would I trust myself again? Or would I have become so used to doubt that I could not accept my own vindication?
33. 05:42
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I know exactly what you mean. After prison, I wrote almost nothing. I published 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' and a long, bitter letter to Bosie that was only printed after my death. I couldn't be Wilde anymore. The correction had corrected me out of existence.
34. 05:57
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You could not perform without an audience that loved you.
35. 06:00
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Worse — I could not perform to an audience that had seen me humiliated. Every bon mot I uttered in Paris sounded hollow because everyone knew what I'd been. I was a correction walking around in a shabby coat.
36. 06:11
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Did you ever think of simply... leaving? Going somewhere no one knew the story?
37. 06:16
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Where would that be? The story was everywhere. Besides, I am Irish. We don't leave our tragedies behind. We upholster our furniture with them.
38. 06:24
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I left Germany when the Nazis came. Does that make me wiser or just luckier?
39. 06:29
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Luckier. You could take your equations with you. I couldn't take my reputation, and it turned out that was the only thing I actually owned.
40. 06:36
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But you still have readers now. People still perform your plays. This must count for something.
41. 06:41
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    It counts for everything and nothing. My work survived, but I did not survive to see it. Rather like your cosmological constant, now that I think of it. We were both right in the end, and both destroyed for being wrong in the middle.
42. 06:54
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Though you paid a much higher price than I did.
43. 06:56
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Perhaps. But you lost thirty years chasing a theory that went nowhere because you stopped believing in your own genius. I think we both paid dearly. We just used different currencies.
44. 07:06
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Do you think there is a way to avoid corrections altogether?
45. 07:09
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Only by saying nothing, writing nothing, being nothing. And what a dreadful waste that would be.
46. 07:15
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    So we must risk being wrong.
47. 07:16
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    We must risk being corrected, which is much worse. Being wrong is private. Being corrected is a public execution of the self.
48. 07:23
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Unless the correction itself turns out to be wrong, as mine did.
49. 07:27
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Ah, but you weren't alive to enjoy that irony. Whereas I was very much alive for mine, locked in a cell with nothing but time to contemplate what my cleverness had cost me. Tell me honestly, Einstein — if you could go back, would you trust your equations the first time?
50. 07:40
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I would like to say yes. But I think I would make the same mistake. The pressure to conform, to match what we think we know — it is very strong. What about you? Would you have refused to bring the case?
51. 07:54
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    If I had refused, Bosie would have left me. And I couldn't bear that. So no. I would have done it all again, knowing everything, because I was in love and we are all idiots when we're in love.
52. 08:04
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Then perhaps the correction was inevitable for both of us.
53. 08:07
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Perhaps. But that doesn't make it cost any less.