Last year universities around the country closed physics departments. The subject was widely undersubscribed and, in the eyes of our wonderful modernising government, it didn’t actually seem to do anything useful. One less physics department was about as bad for the economy as one less theology faculty.

Both theologians and physicists seem to pass their days in futile speculation about the meaning of everything without ever saying anything useful or comprehensible. They may as well do that on their own time, spending their own money.

This year is Einstein Year. It will be the 100th anniversary of the “miracle year” in which Albert Einstein, at the age of 26, overturned almost every orthodoxy of post-Newtonian physics. He did it on his own time, spending his own money. He was a patents clerk in Berne in Switzerland: no university would have him.

It will also be the 50th anniversary of his death. He departed this life in April 1955 muttering on a hospital bed in Princeton, New Jersey. What he murmured we do not know. The nurse attending him spoke no German and, at the last, he had returned to his native tongue. By his bed were pages of equations which went nowhere and meant nothing. Or did they? The physics lobby — quite rightly, of course — is seizing on 2005 as a chance to fight back against the reduction of the subject. There will be events around the country, and the Institute of Physics has even adopted a rap song by DJ John Vader — Einstein (Not Enough Time) — as a kind of theme tune. “Listen to the Vader,” it goes. “Size, passing through like warp factor nine/Delivering the message out there from the legend Einstein.”

Judging by the website (www.einsteinyear.org) the celebrations will be a combination of the usual fun, with the underlying message that Einstein’s work was of practical importance. This is true enough. Aircraft might be landing up to 15 miles from Heathrow, and your car’s sat nav would never get you home if GPS (global positioning system) technology had failed to factor in relativity. Einstein was also one of the first formulators of quantum theory, without which we would have no computers.

On the whole, however, the feeling is that Einstein said some amazing things about the universe which had little or no impact on the practicalities of our daily lives. Understandable though this may be, it is a feeling that physicists are most anxious to refute.

It is a secular impulse for a secular society and it is, frankly, boring. More to the point, it is philistine. The real reasons Einstein still inspires and thrills — and will do so for as long as this quantum, relative space deigns to support human life — are, above all, religious and aesthetic.

Speculative physicists are driven people. All too frequently they are driven to say staggeringly stupid things when they step outside their own discipline. But the reason they are driven is entirely noble and dignified. It is the same reason that inspires prophets and great artists. They think they are on to something fundamental without quite knowing what. Next to that, all else pales into insignificance.

Einstein’s struggle was with God and only God. To understand this it is necessary to understand at least the style of his thought. He was a very specific kind of thinker. As a mathematician he was quite weak. Most great physicists are also great mathematicians and, as a result, tend to see problems from the bottom up: working from the numbers upwards to the big theory.

Einstein, however, was a top-down thinker. He started from the top and worked downwards to the details. It was his greatest strength but also his greatest weakness.

He hit upon special relativity, the biggest scientific achievement of 1905, because he asked a typical top-down question: what would it be like to sit on a beam of light? This led to the revelation that the speed of light was the one constant in the universe. Everything else (time included) was relative to the position and speed of the observer.

In 1915, with his theory of general relativity, Einstein extended this hypothesis to include gravitation. Gravity was the result of the curvature of space time in the vicinity of large bodies. Gravity also travelled at the speed of light (Newton thought this action was instantaneous). A good, smart party trick is to summarise the theory of relativity in less than 10 words. It can be done in seven: action at a distance happens in time.

From 1915 onwards Einstein was a global star: the face of modern genius at a time when it really did seem we were on the brink of a final vision of cosmic truth. In 1929 a new paper of his was displayed in the windows of Selfridges department store.