The Last Straw: One of my more realistic New Year's resolutions is to grasp, once and for all, the theory of relativity. I believe this is a realistic aim because, during the next 12 months, we'll have Albert Einstein coming out of our ears.
This is the centenary of his "annus mirabilis" when, aged 26 and still a lowly clerk in the Berne Patents Office, he published a series of papers that would overturn most of the principles of Newtonian physics. Indeed, so far-reaching were his findings that it would take another four years for the scientific community to grasp one of the obvious implications: that Einstein should be given a job in a university.
But his slow start in life helped make him a popular hero. Like many of us, he struggled to concentrate at school because he was only interested in one thing. OK, in his case it happened to be theoretical physics. Yet his academic failures provided an alibi for generations of underachievers, until we all passed 26 and ran out of excuses. Even then, there remained the consolation that Einstein was a dreamer. He was a big-picture man, and a life-long weakness at maths contributed to his greatest mistake, when fudged equations blinded him to the fact that the universe was expanding.
Relativity remains notoriously difficult to understand: especially the general theory (1916) with its idea that gravity results from the curvature of space/time in the vicinity of large bodies. On the other hand, Einstein's ideas seem more manageable when we remember that they are now used in everyday technologies, including the global positioning systems (GPS) that provide satellite navigation in cars. No, I don't how those work either.
Non-scientists will be encouraged by the populist approach being taken so far to the centenary. Although this week's British launch featured an Einstein lookalike, the starring role went to a teenager on a BMX bike, who performed a 360-degree aerial flip, using a ramp designed with careful mathematical calculation. Critics said the so-called "Einstein flip" was actually based on Newton's laws of motion (which state, for any BMX riders reading this, that you should not try the aerial flip at home, and certainly not without a helmet). But as a way of luring in the non-scientific, it was still a good start.
In a similar vein on Wednesday, Britain's education minister visited the world darts championships to promote his adult numeracy campaign - a campaign introduced last year with the help of former world darts champion, Andy "The Viking" Fordham.
Like Einstein, many top darts players struggled at school. But unlike him, they're all geniuses at mental arithmetic, able to make instantaneous calculations about the shortest way to get from 397 to zero; all the more impressive considering the amount of beer they drink.
Sadly, Andy "The Viking" - a 25-beers-a-night-man who weighs almost 31 stone and, like the universe, is still expanding - has already been knocked out of this year's championships. This was not due to any miscalculation. More likely it was because, as a very large body, he had begun to exert a gravitational pull on his own darts, and had not factored in the curvature of the space-time continuum around him. He has now been enrolled in the ITV programme Celebrity Fit Club, and the danger is that he will contract dramatically and turn into a black hole. In the meantime, surely there's a role for him promoting Einstein Year? Another sporting celebrity who should be recruited for the campaign is the estranged Birmingham City soccer player Robbie Savage. Footballers too are often unfairly derided for academic ineptitude, even though they may compensate with other skills, such as a highly developed spatial awareness. At Birmingham, for example, Savage plays the important role of midfield thug, and as such requires an instinctive sense of the position of his opponents (which is usually horizontal, when he catches up with them).
Sadly, his attempts to leave Birmingham for Blackburn Rovers have embittered his employers. It didn't help this week when he introduced his own special theory of relativity, by saying that he needed the move to Blackburn to be nearer his parents - that's the relativity bit - who live in Wrexham. A claim his employers countered with the essentially Newtonian argument that he should "check his atlas", which would show Birmingham's stadium to be three miles nearer Wrexham than Blackburn's.
Savage is clearly an original thinker, who would add something to the Einstein centenary celebrations. But the dispute with his club is unlikely to end amicably. The good thing is that, whether he starts out from Birmingham or Blackburn, thanks to satellite navigation, he's guaranteed to reach Wrexham eventually.
