Making Galaxies from Black Holes: A Departing Physicist's Wildest Hypothesis

Long before Einstein was a household name, he worked at a patent office. The job's light workload is often credited with giving him the time to daydream--to work out the math behind some of his biggest ideas--but when you think about it, the substance of the role must have been just as big of a factor. Working at a patent office is almost like cheating at creativity: his job was to review and evaluate cutting-edge ideas, in the middle of the technological revolution brought about by the inventio...