> That's a joke right?

Yes. I'm not aware of any authentic Performance Appraisals of Albert Einstein, Patent Clerk. If you know of any (especially in German) please let us know! :)

> He didn't even receive the Nobel Prize for his Relativity Theories.
> They were still so disputed at the time (1921/22), that only the Photoelectric Effect was mentioned.

This remains a mystery! I don't think Special Relativity was anything special (pun intended ;) - after the failure of the Michelson-Morley experiment, and the earlier works of Lorentz and Poincare, it was ripe to be found. If Einstein hadn't found it in 1905, someone else would surely have done so within the next few years.

General Relativity is in a completely different ball park - if Einstein hadn't concocted it back then, we may still not know of it today!

Einstein, a notoriously ordinary mathematician, struggled with the mathematics of General Relativity for eight long years following the 'happiest thought of his life'. By contrast, the World's leading mathematician David Hilbert found a solution within weeks of Einstein giving a series of lectures at the University of Gottingen in 1915. See also: History of general relativity and General relativity priority dispute.

From Why didnt Einsteins Nobel prize mention relativity-theory? (stackexchange question):

Einstein's most original contribution to physics was General Relativity Theory, as Lorentz and Poincare already laid the foundations of Special Relativity. It is often said that the reason why Einstein's Nobel Prize didn't mention Relativity Theory is the lack of sufficient evidence to the theory of relativity by 1922. But actually, by 1922, the special theory of relativity had been tested for almost all its major and pivotal predictions. The general theory of relativity had passed many highly significant tests with extreme precision. Like the deflection of light rays or the precession of the perihelion of the Mercury. It should be noted that although the precession of the perihelion of the Mercury was known before the formulation of the theory, GR was not an ad hoc explanation for the same--and thus, the fact of precession should be regarded as a verified prediction of GR. So, the absence of the mention of the Relativity Theory remains a curious question.

SRT and GRT were still controversial indifferently of experimental proof because they were too "counterintuitive" for the mainstream.

Experiments don't necessary mean that a model is correct, many decades went into searching "better" models passing the very same experiments while contradicting RT.

Don't forget that Einstein's position to Quantum Theory was comparable. He didn't deny the results but opposed the statistical model.

"God does not play dice" ! ;)

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

> Don't forget that Einstein's position to Quantum Theory was comparable

Einstein's clever EPR paradox thought experiment was a fantastic contribution to Physics that had Bohr and others stumped for 30 years ... until out of nowhere, John Stewart Bell, an obscure physicist from Northern Ireland working at CERN in his day job, concocts Bell's theorem in his spare time on the weekends! So today we can do experimental tests of EPR. To date, all tests have found that the hypothesis of local hidden variables is inconsistent with the way that physical systems do, in fact, behave. That is, instantaneous "spooky action at a distance" (which Einstein felt to be obviously absurd) really happens!!

He (Albert Einstein) didn’t think the spooky action at a distance would be verified, but it was. He thought that was somehow unphysical. He presented this as an example of why quantum mechanics is probably wrong, but in fact it’s right.

-- Lawrence M. Krauss, quoted at Quantum_entanglement (wikiquote)

Update: Just to clarify, as noted at Faster than light communication: though quantum mechanics is non-local in the sense that distant systems can be entangled, quantum entanglement does not allow any influence or information to propagate superluminally.