This is a hilarious re envisioning of how a young Einstein would have been graded by his boss...especially enjoyed these nuggets:
> You wrote that "A storm broke out in my mind" this year. Let me remind you that our Employee Assistance Plan (EAP) covers up to three psychiatric treatments, should you find them necessary.
> You seem to lack a flare for self-promotion. Lucky for us our PR department stepped in and changed your L/c2 equation into the much more marketable E = mc2."
Something that I find very interesting is that it is probable that some of the patent applications that Einstein evaluated were for methods of synchronizing clocks for railways. This was a pretty big deal at that time, and Einstein was probably in the center of it. His ideas about space and time may not have been so far removed from his occupation as most people assume.
My first reaction to what you said was "bah, the scale of space and time in which railways operate wouldn't be impacted by Einstein's ideas about space and time." (And they aren't, in a practical sense.)
But then I Googled up this short interview with Galison.[1]
Suppose, Einstein reasoned, that you wanted to know what time a train arrived in a train station. Easy enough: you see where the hand of your watch is at the time the engine pulls up alongside you. But what if you wanted to know when a train was pulling into a distant station? How do you know whether an event here is simultaneous with an event there? Einstein insisted that we need a simultaneity - fixing procedure, a definite system of exchanging signals between the stations that would take into account the time it took for the signal to get from one station to another. By pursuing this insight, Einstein discovered that two events that were simultaneous in one frame of reference would not be simultaneous in another. Moreover, since a length measurement involves determining the position of the front and back of an object at the same time, the relativity of simultaneity meant that length was relative as well. By removing the absolutes of space and time, Einstein restructured modern physics.
OP is marginally clever parody but your comment led me to this. So thanks!
It's supposed to show you that excellence like Einsein's does not fit into the narrow grid modern universities apply. Since people on hacker news often have a) delusions of grandeur and b) are misfits, they will immediately identify themselves with this scenario, i.e. that their excellence is underappreciated by the institutions.
> You wrote that "A storm broke out in my mind" this year. Let me remind you that our Employee Assistance Plan (EAP) covers up to three psychiatric treatments, should you find them necessary.
> You seem to lack a flare for self-promotion. Lucky for us our PR department stepped in and changed your L/c2 equation into the much more marketable E = mc2."