51–60 of 64 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't disagree with your thesis, but: understanding a solution to a problem, and coming up with the solution are two vastly different things.
Not unlike P and NP
I always thought magic tricks exploited P vs NP... once you know how a trick done it seems obvious, but there are so many things to rule out before you find the right answer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He said it himself. "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious."
I believe he was mistaken. His talent was to be able to get to the heart of a problem. To find the connection everyone else had missed, or that everyone else had missed the significance of: the constancy of c, mass-energy equivalence, the Equivalence principle. That's a pretty rare skill and, in my opinion, qualifies as genius. In terms of what I guess a lot of students see i.e. the field equations, then sure, he was…
What Einstein and others contributed towards GR in a decade is now generally taught in one semester of grad school physics. Ruling out the possibility that grad students are today >20x intelligent than Einstein, and considering that Einstein needed no more experimental results than already available to everyone in 1905, the emphasis ought not to be as simplistic as "lone genius", but on his perseverance and nose for…
I don't disagree with your thesis, but: understanding a solution to a problem, and coming up with the solution are two vastly different things.
What Einstein and others contributed towards GR in a decade is now generally taught in one semester of grad school physics. Ruling out the possibility that grad students are today >20x intelligent than Einstein, and considering that Einstein needed no more experimental results than already available to everyone in 1905, the emphasis ought not to be as simplistic as "lone genius", but on his perseverance and nose for…
Where? In my university we touch SR in many classes then we have a separate class dedicated to GR. Also the ability to come up with and idea and to understand the given idea is really not the same. The main difference is intuition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether
"Noether was brought to Göttingen in 1915 by David Hilbert and Felix Klein, who wanted her expertise in invariant theory to help them in understanding general relativity, a geometrical theory of gravitation developed mainly by Albert Einstein. Hilbert had observed that the conservation of energy seemed to be violated in general relativity, due to the fact that gravitational energy could itself gravitate. Noether provided the resolution of this paradox, and a fundamental tool of modern theoretical physics, with Noether's first theorem, which she proved in 1915, but did not publish until 1918."
Also worth mentioning, general relativity appeared to violate the conservation of energy until Emmy Noether's contribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether "Noether was brought to Göttingen in 1915 by David Hilbert and Felix Klein, who wanted her expertise in invariant theory to help them in understanding general relativity, a geometrical theory of gravitation developed mainly by Albert Einstein. Hilbert h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't disagree with your thesis, but: understanding a solution to a problem, and coming up with the solution are two vastly different things.
Yes! It takes the Universe billions of years to produce a cow. It takes that cow less than a year to produce many more cows.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe he was mistaken. His talent was to be able to get to the heart of a problem. To find the connection everyone else had missed, or that everyone else had missed the significance of: the constancy of c, mass-energy equivalence, the Equivalence principle. That's a pretty rare skill and, in my opinion, qualifies as genius. In terms of what I guess a lot of students see i.e. the field equations, then sure, he was…
Why not both? Isn't it possible that it was his passionate, persistent curiosity that allowed him to get to the heart of problems, see what everyone else missed, etc?
The fact is that not many people could have done what Einstein did. Whether it was genius or curiousity or stubbornness, the puzzle pieces were known to many people and he was the first to solve them.[1] For him to dismiss himself as having "no special talent" - that seems to be implying that just about anyone could have done it. It's a kind of modesty that we seem to reward, as a culture, but I dislike it. If Einstein had no special talent, then what of the people before him? Were they doing something wrong?
[1] I'm not sure how long the world had to produce an Einstein, before it produced Einstein. Perhaps there were only a few dozen people who saw the puzzle pieces before Einstein did. That still leaves him in the top tier, but perhaps not the top tier of the top tier.
Einstein's big year was 1905, not 1915, and the four (five?) papers he produced during that year (one of which won him a Nobel) could easily be described as the work of a "lone genius." He did most of work of that year while working, of course as we all know, as a patent clerk. Obviously, no one lives in a vacuum, and all legendary geniuses stand on the shoulders of other giants, but I can't help but think this artic…
That really takes away from his "lone genius" status.
Also worth mentioning, general relativity appeared to violate the conservation of energy until Emmy Noether's contribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether "Noether was brought to Göttingen in 1915 by David Hilbert and Felix Klein, who wanted her expertise in invariant theory to help them in understanding general relativity, a geometrical theory of gravitation developed mainly by Albert Einstein. Hilbert h…
Also worth mentioning is that feminists said Mileva Maric, his wife was the real credit behind his work and PBS even aired a documentary (which just shows how even documentaries are biased), until the back-lash from the scientific community dismantled this fantasized myth.
Emmy Noether really did this, it was really a big thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem
Certainly not a myth.