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How did Einstein Think?

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Re: How did Einstein Think?

#51

Post by stolio »

fargolime wrote: post #35
peterwwillis wrote: post #7

"Der Urquell aller technischen Errungenschaften ist die göttliche Neugier und der Spieltrieb des bastelnden und grübelnden Forschers und nicht minder die konstruktive Phantasie des technischen Erfinders" - Albert Einstein https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/einstein/einstein-at-the-pate... "He was denied any teaching position from just about every major University in Europe. This was mostly based on the fact that Albert a…

> This was mostly based on the fact that Albert approached Physics as a "New age day dreamer" (e.g.: thought experiments) rather than primarily from mathematical models or experimental insights. Remains true today. Certainly no paper consisting only of a thought experiment could get published in a top journal. Many self-described physicists have told me that thought experiments have zero scientific value. Brian Green…

> Brian Greene who wrote The Elegant Universe says he thinks Einstein's original papers would've been round-filed if submitted today.

I'm not sure that tells us very much, the field has changed a lot in the past 110 years. Would other papers of the time be rejected today also? He could have been on par with his peers.

I don't think it was his thought experiments so much as predicting the precession of Mercury's perihelion that got everybody's attention. "You have a vivid imagination? We all do, kid." And then "You figured out the Mercury problem?!?!? Tell me about those thought experiments again?"

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#52

Post by jleyank »

titzer wrote: post #10

Like many people, Einstein's life and work has been fascinating to me, but in comparison to other brilliant scientists of the twentieth century, there are at least a handful if not a dozen or couple of dozen people who were and are equally as intelligent, brilliant, and more prolific. That said, I find Einstein-worship annoying. The cultural obsession with Einstein and cult of personality detracts from the reality th…

"there are at least a handful if not a dozen or couple of dozen people who were and are equally as intelligent, brilliant, and more prolific."

This might be hard to prove. They'd have to have something comparable to Einstein's 1905 output, while working at some (dreary?) job to pay the bills. Maybe the Nobel (non-Peace) price isn't the best metric, but there are very few people with more than one and the 1905 work might have generated two that year...

It might be hagiography, but it seemed he had a clarity of thought that enabled asking the right question and no concern about what the answer might be. Most of us are prisoners of our world view, few are blessed with the ability to change it.

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#53

Post by fargolime »

stolio wrote: post #51
fargolime wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was mostly based on the fact that Albert approached Physics as a "New age day dreamer" (e.g.: thought experiments) rather than primarily from mathematical models or experimental insights. Remains true today. Certainly no paper consisting only of a thought experiment could get published in a top journal. Many self-described physicists have told me that thought experiments have zero scientific value. Brian Green…

> Brian Greene who wrote The Elegant Universe says he thinks Einstein's original papers would've been round-filed if submitted today. I'm not sure that tells us very much, the field has changed a lot in the past 110 years. Would other papers of the time be rejected today also? He could have been on par with his peers. I don't think it was his thought experiments so much as predicting the precession of Mercury's perih…

If a paper describing the new theory of special relativity would be round-filed today, it tells me that Einstein got lucky. In 1905 he was in the right place at the right time, getting reviewed by Planck, perhaps the only reviewer who wouldn't have summarily rejected the papers. If not for Planck the anomalous perihelion shift of Mercury might well still be a mystery, for Einstein's answer to that came a decade later. Presumably he'd have been ignored if his 1905 papers hadn't already opened the doors to academia.

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#54

Post by zem »

las_cases wrote: post #17
titzer wrote: post #10

Like many people, Einstein's life and work has been fascinating to me, but in comparison to other brilliant scientists of the twentieth century, there are at least a handful if not a dozen or couple of dozen people who were and are equally as intelligent, brilliant, and more prolific. That said, I find Einstein-worship annoying. The cultural obsession with Einstein and cult of personality detracts from the reality th…

> there are at least a handful if not a dozen or couple of dozen people who were and are equally as intelligent, brilliant, and more prolific. I can guess at least one: Nikola Tesla. May I ask you what other names do you have in mind?

ed witten and stephen hawking come to mind as current-day scientists on par with einstein

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#55

Post by jleyank »

fargolime wrote: post #35
peterwwillis wrote: post #7

"Der Urquell aller technischen Errungenschaften ist die göttliche Neugier und der Spieltrieb des bastelnden und grübelnden Forschers und nicht minder die konstruktive Phantasie des technischen Erfinders" - Albert Einstein https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/einstein/einstein-at-the-pate... "He was denied any teaching position from just about every major University in Europe. This was mostly based on the fact that Albert a…

> This was mostly based on the fact that Albert approached Physics as a "New age day dreamer" (e.g.: thought experiments) rather than primarily from mathematical models or experimental insights. Remains true today. Certainly no paper consisting only of a thought experiment could get published in a top journal. Many self-described physicists have told me that thought experiments have zero scientific value. Brian Green…

This might be flippant. If the initial read by an editor resulted in "wow, this is interesting", the lack of citations or the fame of the author is far less relevant. I've reviewed lots of papers that have a mile of citations but lack any spark of inspiration. I'd rather read something that tells me something that I don't know or makes me uncertain of what I think I DO know.

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#56

Post by ibebrett »

stolio wrote: post #44
ibebrett wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She was brilliant, but lets not go overboard. She's not even the biggest name in the fields of math she contributed to.

I don't know what she did for math but Noether's Theorem in physics, that symmetries in nature are connected to conservation laws, is impressive. No idea how far up the totem pole that puts her.

she was involved in commutative algebra. she had a nice little section in my undergrad abstract algebra book. i'm not saying anything negative about her, just that if you are going to list the most brilliant/productive scientists of all time then shes not going to be on the list. she was brilliant of course.

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#57

Post by danieldyer »

ibebrett wrote: post #30
danieldyer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget Emmy Noether: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether "In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began. In the realm of algebra, in which the most gifted mathematicians have been busy for centuries, she discovered methods which have proved of enormous importanc…

She was brilliant, but lets not go overboard. She's not even the biggest name in the fields of math she contributed to.

She's certainly far less well known than many of her contemporaries, but Noether's theorem is an incredibly important tool in theoretical physics, and has been described as "certainly one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics, possibly on a par with the Pythagorean theorem". [1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether#cite_note-FOOTNOTE...

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#58

Post by agumonkey »

joshmarlow wrote: post #28
titzer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, sorry. It's not about me at all. If I felt like I was special for having different heroes than everyone else then I wouldn't bother trying to draw attention to their accomplishments. It's about our culture's disproportionate focus on one particular person and their contributions to the exclusion of a much more complicated reality.

You know, whether right or wrong in this case, I think you're on to something. As a culture, we do like to focus on singletons - we like the idea of lone geniuses toiling away and changing the world and skip over the amount of team-work/collaboration that goes into real advances. So I wonder: is this specific to our culture or is a multi-cultural thing? If it is multi-cultural, then an explanation might be that hyper…

I was thinking something quite similar few hours ago. It seems people like to praise a leader (my shallow tribal interpretation) and not focus on the subtle intricacies of what really happened in details; unless they develop a taste for precision and systems.

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#59

Post by agumonkey »

etr71115 wrote: post #14

FWIW, Einstein was also an avid musician. In Walter Isaacson's biography, "His Life and Universe", Einstein was caught in the middle of a meal when he began to ruminate on the Theory of Special Relativity. His wife described the next two weeks as a solitary exchange between meditation in his office and fiddling on the piano. He credited music to being a source of inspiration and creativity.

Many big names are so it seems. Here's Minsky and a piano https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnOcjCLTjGc . Feynman was also said to enjoy percussion (even though what I saw wasn't paying a great enough tribute to his understanding of physics ;)

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#60

Post by logicallee »

titzer wrote: post #10

Like many people, Einstein's life and work has been fascinating to me, but in comparison to other brilliant scientists of the twentieth century, there are at least a handful if not a dozen or couple of dozen people who were and are equally as intelligent, brilliant, and more prolific. That said, I find Einstein-worship annoying. The cultural obsession with Einstein and cult of personality detracts from the reality th…

Maybe I'm going slightly too far, but I can imagine a world in which we don't know relativity but use quantum mechanical effects daily (e.g. at the microchip level.) Can you not imagine such a world? Granted space exploration would have had to not-happen. It's at the limit of what I can imagine in a world. Can you imagine the above historical scenario today? (2015) One hundred years on from when General Relativity actually was published. How could we have not discovered it for 100 years if Einstein had not thought it up?

One exercise you can do is ask what recent discoveries could have been made 100 years earlier. Off-hand:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-a-Graphene-Supercapacit...

"why wasn't this discovered 100 years earlier"? is very close to "why couldn't GR have been discovered 100 years later."

It was discovered via scotch tape and a block of graphite.

reference following http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene leads to,

"Scientists often find ingenious ways to attain their research objectives, even if that objective is a truly two-dimensional material that many physicists felt could not be grown. In 2003, one ingenious physicist took a block of graphite, some Scotch tape and a lot of patience and persistence and produced a magnificent new wonder material that is a million times thinner than paper, stronger than diamond, more conductive than copper. It is called graphene, and it took the physics community by storm when the first paper appeared the following year".

In point of fact, perhaps it could have happened in 1903. True, Scotch tape was invented in 1930 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch_Tape

But, again, why couldn't it have been invented a bit earlier?

And so forth. The fact is, what we know from the circumstances is that GR is a "great person" contribution to the world at a specific historical time. If it had not happened then, it is not appropriate to say it surely would have happened soon.

graphene was imminent for decades until it was discovered. (Other ideas were imminent for hundreds of years in science. It really doesn't mean anything.)

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