In the opening scene in 1922, when Foreign Minister Rathenau was assassinated by the Organisation Consul, his car is shown flying the black, white, and red striped official flag of the German Empire which ended in 1918. The same flag was used again from 1933 to 1935, but in 1922 it would have been one with the black, gold, and red stripes of the Weimar Republic. Although an exception was made to allow the old flag for German diplomatic missions abroad, Rathenau was assassinated in Germany proper, so that would not have applied.
When train tracks are shown, concrete sleepers are exhibited. Austria and Italy were early adopters of concrete sleepers and are likely to be authentic.
Einstein asks if time is like the "audible tick-tock" of "Mozart's Metronome," during a lecture on relativity. Although Mozart plausibly used a musical chronometer to determine tempo for his compositions, the first clockwork version (finally having the relevant constant-rate tick) wasn't invented until two decades after his death.
The updated version, actually named the "Maelzel's Metronome," was the first production chronometer to be called a metronome. Einstein's plausible use of Mozart in a technically anachronistic analogy about the universe is consistent with both the large role music played in his thinking and his lack of attention to things he would regard as inessential.
The updated version, actually named the "Maelzel's Metronome," was the first production chronometer to be called a metronome. Einstein's plausible use of Mozart in a technically anachronistic analogy about the universe is consistent with both the large role music played in his thinking and his lack of attention to things he would regard as inessential.
While discussing "natura naturans" with Marie Winteler's family, a young Einstein concludes that all questions "from the smallest molecule to the largest galaxy" are solvable. But in 1895, the existence of other galaxies, then called 'island universes,' was only hypothesized. The term 'galaxy'--from the Greek for 'milky'--would have properly applied only to our own Milky Way. What are now know as distant galaxies were then commonly identified as nearby nebulae. Although his early thinking is unrecorded, Einstein accepted the consensus for a single galaxy in his 1917 static model of the universe, and this consensus was not broken until after Edwin Hubble proved the existence of other galaxies in 1924.