From The Boston Globe
TWO MEN came to Zurich in the spring of 1913, Max Planck and Walther Nernst, both future Nobel laureates. Their mission: to persuade Switzerland’s best-regarded young physicist, Albert Einstein, to join them in Berlin. As the three of them talked, Planck asked Einstein what he was working on at the moment. Einstein replied that he was wrestling with a new theory of gravity that would, if he could work it all out, supplant Isaac Newton’s universal law of gravitation — the most famous idea in the history of science.
Taking pity on the younger man, Planck broke into his pitch. “As an older friend,” he told Einstein, “I must advise you against it, for in the first place, you will not succeed; and even if you succeed, no one will believe you”…