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Einstein’s Plumbing Fantasy: Why the Genius Dreamed of a Wrench in Hand

Posted on October 29, 2025 by Melbourne Plumber

Everyone knows who Albert Einstein is. For those that don’t, he was a famous physicist who was born in 1879 and died in 1954. He is most famous for his theory of relativity which is summed up as E=MC2. This translates into Energy = Mass X the speed of light squared. It is the fundamental principle which made us understand the how energy and mass are related and unlocked modern physics for the masses.

What if I told you that this genus also had a desire to be a plumber?

In a candid letter to The Reporter magazine, Einstein dropped a bombshell that sent ripples through the intellectual world: If he could turn back the clock and start his career over, he’d ditch the lab coat for a tool belt.

His reasoning was simple. He thought solving problems for people on an individual basis would be more valuable than what he was doing during the time of his interview. He felt that he wasn’t contributing to society and was “stuck” in limbo after WW2 and during the Cold War.

Basically, he was lamenting the loss of autonomy for thinkers in a society gripped by fear. “Under present circumstances,” he wrote, hinting at the suffocating bureaucracy and ideological purges that made independent research feel like a luxury.

Plumbing involves an understanding of several disciplines of science: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Thermodynamics, & Material Science. So, in a way, Einstein would actually have made a pretty good plumber if you look at it from this perspective. Now, could he or would he crawl into attics and crawl spaces to fix a leak or re-pipe a home? That could be debated.

–image created by Grok