21.01.10 Bern
Now we are in Bern, the capital city of Swatch, or whatever this place is called. Or maybe Swatch is the national whisky of Swissland. Anyway, it’s all good.
Here’s the thing about Bern: Bern has a station and on the station is a clock and once a day the clock reads 12 noon. Albert Einstein was here, taking a train that was heading out of Bern. On his way out of Bern he passed Element of Crime, coming in. Albert understood that if he was outgoing and we were incoming then the light from the clock would reach us sooner than it would reach him. (What light?) Therefore we would get to lunch before him. This is in fact exactly what happened, which explains why Einstein is the greatest scientist of all time. Got it? It’s called The Theory of Relativity. Einstein liked to make his stuff easy to understand, with strong clear metaphors, which also explains why he gets better press than the Quantum Physicists, who had crap marketing advisers, although there’s more money in their stuff.
Once I took a train out of Bern, heading to Geneva, at the other end. I had a first class ticket because I wasn’t able to understand the guy in the ticket office, so I just said ‘yes’ when he asked me something I didn’t understand. Anyway. I was hoping to watch the station clock as it got smaller or later or the light came from it or whatever the theory would say about it. The first problem was that you can’t actually see the station clock from the train to Geneva. Probably Basel then. The other thing was the first class was full of all these smooth dudes from the International Olympic Committee. (Speakin of Smooth Dudes, I met Herb Alpert once. He’s the KIng of Smooth). These IOC people all had gold Rolexes and weren’t at all interested in the station clock thing. I was the only science tourist that day in that train, except maybe for the fellow looking at tickets (he checked mine very carefully) who was walking from the front of the train towards the back. In order to get to lunch sooner, I guess.
Tomorrow we go to Linz, which was where one the 20th Century’s leading politicians went to school.
If you are wondering why I don’t write backstage stuff about Element of Crime, the answer is that I might, in a while, but right now I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.