Imagination is more important than knowledge | Hatch Magazine

My good friend and mentor, Professor Earl, straightens me out more often than a spring creek angler uncurls their tippet. Professor Earl, for example, taught me that bananas, tomatoes, and eggplants are berries, but strawberries and raspberries aren’t. He also showed me how the Bluetooth logo is made up of two Nordic runes, ᚼ and ᛒ, which are initials of a king named Harald Bluetooth. He taught me what a rune was, too, of course.

“Did you see that movie about the atomic bomb?” Professor Earl asked the other day. “Oppenheimer?”

“I did,” I said, waiting for Professor Earl to tell me why we named the biggest bomb we’d ever made after the smallest thing we’d ever known.

“What did you notice about the physicists?” he asked.

“Smart guys,” I said.

“Yes, but what else was noteworthy?” he asked.

Professor Earl liked to use the Socratic method for teaching. When he first started mentoring me, this could go on for hours. Then I learned to outsmart him by answering his questions with questions of my own.

“Did they wear toupees?” I asked.

“Why would you ask that?” he said.

“Is a question really a question before it’s asked?” I asked.

“Let’s just get to the point,” he said. “All the physicists dressed like bankers except one.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“And how did that one dress?” he asked.

“Like a teller?” I asked.

“No. His hair was unkempt. Clothes, a mess. Disheveled, I believe is the word,” Professor Earl said. “Remind you of anyone?”

“Anyone?” I asked. “Heck, that’s everyone I know.”

“And whereas all the banker types smoked cigarettes, that guy smoked a pipe,” Earl said.

“Just like everyone I know,” I said.

“Making the connection?” Professor Earl asked.

“My friends are all physicists?” I asked.

“No. Your friends are all . . . ?” Professor Earl spoke slowly, telling me and asking me with the same words.

“Three paychecks from ruin?”

“No,” Professor Earl said. “Look, every time the disheveled physicist is in a scene, where is he?”

“Princeton,” I said, certain Professor Earl would be impressed that I knew that one.

“No. Well, yes,” Professor Earl said. “But that’s not what’s important. A pond. He was by a pond.”

“A pond in Princeton?” I asked.

“Yes, in Princeton,” he said. “Now, you and your friends often hang out by a pond. Or a lake. Or a river, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So, your friends are all . . . ?” Professor Earl gradually told and asked again.

“Disheveled?” I said, having noted Professor Earl had used that word a couple of times. I figured it was a hint.

“No. No,” the professor said. “They are fly anglers. Your friends are all fly anglers.

“Fly anglers?” I said.

“Yes. Your friends are all fly anglers. That physicist—the one with the haystack of hair and a collar half in and half out of his sweater—he was a fly angler too.”

“Einstein?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” Professor Earl said. “Albert Einstein, the guy who showed us that space and time are a pair. He was a fly angler.”

“But he didn’t fish in the movie, did he?” I asked. “Because I’d remember that.”

“No,” Professor Earl said. “He didn’t.”

“Hey,” I said. “You want to hear my theory about fly fishing movies?”

“Did I say something to make you think I would?” Professor Earl asked.

“I think lobbyists for Fly Fishers International cut a deal with the Motion Picture Association. A deal that says every fly-fishing scene has to be completely wrong. Especially the way the actors cast and hold a rod.”

“Why would they do that?” the professor asked.

That would have been a great time to do the Socratic thing to him, but I held back.

“Because Fly Fishers International certifies fly casting instructors. They want these movies to screw anglers up so much they have to hire instructors to get unscrewed.”

“Well,” Professor Earl said, “there isn’t any fishing or casting in this movie.”

“I didn’t think so,” I said. “You know, A River Runs Through It got it mostly right. Some people even used that movie instead of lessons. That was a big reason the lobbyists needed to cut that deal. But if there isn’t horrible casting and fishing in this movie, how do you know Einstein was a fly fisherman?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Professor Earl said. “Can we go to my house so I can use my blackboard?”

I liked going to Professor Earl’s house. He didn’t have a wife, so he could smoke his pipe any time and place he wanted. As usual, his first move when we got there was to throw on his corduroy jacket with the leather patches on the elbows, pull the pipe from the pocket, and start smoking.

With pipe in mouth, he put an eraser in each hand and commenced to waving and rubbing the board until all the Greek letters and Egyptian hieroglyphics from his last lecture were gone. The room filled top-to-bottom with a milky-slate haze of chalk dust and pipe smoke. It looked like a trico hatch.

“His inattention to grooming and the scenes by the pond struck me first,” Professor Earl began. “But that wasn’t enough on its own. Then I thought about Einstein’s life.”

The professor scribbled across the top of the board.

“I don’t know all of the fishing books he would have had access to as a child, but one is clear,” Professor Earl said. “Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. Sure, Einstein didn’t master English until later in life. But have you ever read The Compleat Angler?”

“Tried to,” I said. “It was tough.”

“Of course it was,” Professor Earl said. “I’m not sure it’s actually in English. I think it’s a language—let’s call it Anglish—invented so anglers could write about fishing in code.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “People still use codes to confuse the common folk. Especially at shows and expos.”

“Imagine,” Professor Earl said, “how a math wizard like young Albert, one living along the River Danube, would react when he read this.”

The professor was back at the board.

“That’s in The Complete Angler?” I asked. “I really need to learn Anglish.”

“Next,” Professor Earl said, “I want you to remember this line from Mr. Walton.”

His handwriting was surprisingly clear. That one must have been important.

“We’ll come back to that,” Professor Earl said. “Do you remember when I told you Einstein worked in a patent leather factory?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I was wrong about that. He worked at a patent office in Switzerland. Which matters a lot, because he worked there with a guy named Heinrich Pflüger.”

“Like Plfueger reels?” I asked.

“Same pronunciation, different spelling,” Professor Earl said. “But they were related, so Heinrich showed Albert the 1907 patent for the Plfueger Automatic Reel.”

“How’d you find that out?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Professor Earl said. “I was researching Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect.”

He underlined that one with little squiggly lines.

“On a hunch, I watched all the movies in the Fly Fishing Film Tour. All of them.”

“That must have been rough,” I said.

“Brutal. But I found the one I was looking for.”

He broke his chalk putting the period under the question mark.

“The guys in the movie were graduate students at MIT,” he said. “They were right about it. Sometimes the flies looked like a collection of particles. Other times, they moved like a connected wave.”

“Like the chalk and smoke in this room,” I said.

“For years,” the professor said, “scientists and scholars have wondered what spark could have given Einstein his inspiration. They were looking in all the wrong places.”

“Next,” Professor Earl said. “Here’s the biggie.”

He underlined the words twice with thick, solid lines.

“Surely,” he said, “you’ve fished by foot and by boat. Right?”

“A lot of times I do both at the same time, especially when Squinty McGillis is rowing.”

“Then you know how much longer your drift can be from a boat than when you’re wading. Right?”

“Well, Squinty hits a lot of rocks, but I think I know what you mean.”

“It’s all about how fast the water is moving relative to your frame of reference,” he said.

“Ah,” I said. “It’s all relative.”

“Here’s the way Einstein explained the theory,” Professor Earl said.

He bit down hard on his pipe as he wrote. This was another important one.

“That doesn’t have anything to do with fly fishing,” I said.

“Of course it doesn’t,” he said. “Which works better? The stove analogy or the boat analogy.”

“The boat,” I said.

“Of course,” Professor Earl said. “There is no better way to explain relativity and the importance of the frame of reference than the difference between casting from a boat and casting from shore.”

“But he didn’t use that example,” I said. “He used the hot girl and the pretty stove.”

“It’s the other way around,” he said.

“Ah, pretty girl, hot stove,” I said. “Got it.”

“Look, Einstein was a genius,” Professor Earl said. “Have you ever known a genius who blabbed about where and how they fished or what they caught?”

“Just the opposite,” I said.

The professor relit his pipe, took a long pull, and refilled the room with chalk dust and smoke. It really did look like tricos.

“Oh shit,” I said.

Professor Earl smiled and nodded.

“Casting from a boat is the perfect way to explain it,” I said. “If Einstein weren’t a fly fisherman, he would have explained it that way. But because he was a fly fisherman—and a genius, too—he didn’t want other anglers to know about it. So he used a different explanation. Kinda like camouflage.”

Professor Earl looked at me the way a parent looks at a kid who just won the spelling bee.

“Here are some of Einstein’s most notable quotes,” he said as he walked to the board and picked up the chalk.

“You think that’s about science?” he asked.

Of course it wasn’t. Unless sci was Latin for fly and ience was Latin for fishing.

“Tell me that’s not about fly tying,” the professor said.

Professor Earl was on a roll.

“I’m not sure what that means,” he said, “but remember the thing Walton said about God? They have to be related.”

“I bet it’s about hatches,” I said.

“Now,” he said, “if you are left with any doubt that Einstein was a fly fisherman, blue liner, fly designer, Euro nympher, then check this out from an interview with The Saturday Evening Post.”

Professor Earl wrote the words with the best handwriting I’ve ever seen from him, before or since. Like Shakespeare, every word he had used, every movement he had scripted, had brought us to this place. It was the pièce de résistance of his lecture.

Professor Earl had done it. That glorious son-of-a-biscuit had done it. My friend had proved that Albert Einstein was a fly fisherman.