Current and widespread political unrest is leading to a critical reappraisal of the records of some of our celebrated historical figures. Even our own personal idols and heroes may prove to have had unexpected human weaknesses. Intellectually speaking, my lifelong idol is Albert Einstein. But recently, I’ve discovered he too displayed a significant flaw in intellectual terms. This essay explains how I found that his celebrated thought experiment about a train hit by lightning — the one which demonstrated we’re all deceived if we think the passage of time we call ‘now’ is simply a universal and objective fact — was itself highly deceptive. I show how his apparently scientific argument was actually specious. Not only that, it then becomes apparent that his famous postulates of Special Relativity really lead to a very different conclusion. I doubt very much that Einstein consciously intended to mislead us. Nevertheless he did, and what you might call a blot in an otherwise brilliant theoretical career should be recognised. Not in order to denigrate his huge contribution to science, but to put straight our record of the proper scientific inference from this particular thought experiment. The proper conclusion is that simultaneity is conserved when changing perspective.