Congratulations to Oppenheimer, which has just swept up seven Oscars, thanks to Christopher Nolan’s directoral prowess and Cillian Murphy’s outstanding acting ability (and cheekbones). Who would have thought that a biopic of a theoretical physicist would be quite so earth shattering? (Almost literally,) 

Of course J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67) was not the world’s first theoretical physicist celebrity. That was the Global Treasure that is Albert Einstein, whose birthday it is on Thursday, 14 March.  Happy Birthday Albert, 145 this year!

To celebrate, Belvedere thought we would offer a taster from the Clowder Parafeline title, Scientific Cats. So here it is.

 “Albert Einstein is probably the world’s most famous scientist, the incarnation of the non-scientist’s idea of the genius absent-minded professor. His Theory of Relativity (1905) is one of the two pillars of modern physics. He was an enormous brain, but was somehow very approachable: Einstein’s equation is the one we all remember, even if we don’t understand it, because it appears to be very simple. And who could not warm to an academic who was best friends with Charlie Chaplin?

 Einstein was meant to go into the family business (electrical engineering), but refused, displaying an admiral feline opposition to being herded. An acknowledged mathematical prodigy, he also demonstrated great independence of mind and curiosity (more cat points), teaching himself algebra and Euclidean geometry as well as working out, at the age of 12, his own independent proof of Pythagoras’s Theorem.  His working method relied on Thought Experiments – where you sit still in a comfy chair, close your eyes, and imagine what might happen in various scenarios, rather than going out in the cold and wet for unnecessary physical exertion. What could be more cat?”

 Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics and changed the way we perceive the world and the universe. 

Awesome etc,  but what about the cat?

So was Einstein a cat person?  Yes indeed. He had a housecat called Tiger, who used to get very miserable whenever it rained. Einstein‘s friend Ernst Strauss remembers him commiserating with the morose cat on one rainy day, saying, “I know what’s wrong, dear fellow, but I don’t know how to turn it off.” When gloomy himself, he noted, correctly, that “there are two means of refuge from the misery of life: music and cats.”

As you will have seen if you have been paying attention, many great scientists are or were cat fans.  Belvedere thinks it is high time a proper scientific study was conducted to correlate the reciprocal influence between cats and scientific genius, and will, I am convinced, begin work on it very soon. 

As supporting evidence, note that even actors who play the parts of world-famous scientific brains are cat fans. Cillian Murphy (who plays Oppenheimer) has a ginger cat, and Robert Downey Jnr (who plays Ernst Strauss) has two cats. There is insufficient data on the real J Robert Oppenheimer’s cat quotient, but his wife Katherine was known as Kitty  ]           

See more about scientists and their cats in Scientific Cats, part of the Creative Cats series. 

Buy Einstein’s great work, The Theory Of Relativity here