How did Einstein Think? • Hacker News Board

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#31

Post by ibebrett » Wed, Jan 21, 2015, 11:03 PM UTC

titzer wrote: post #19

las_cases wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

John Von Neumann, Grace Hopper, Turing. Bernoulli, Euler, Riemann.

Why is grace hopper on here? She was brilliant, but the gap between her and euler is immense. There were a ton of brilliant minds, but it doesn't make a ton of sense to throw her in.

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#32

Post by darkmighty » Wed, Jan 21, 2015, 11:31 PM UTC

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…

Well there's a very obvious reason for that: we want to learn from the best. Why would you pick someone which is only good, or anything else but the best, most creative, most inspiring? Surely having an ensemble of good performers is nice, but the 'genius' by consensus is who anyone would wish to learn foremost.

I do have a specific opinion on what it means to learn form someone. People often overreach and obsess with details from the lives of those, when in reality learning from Einstein is as simple as reading what he wrote and the way he described his theories. This goes for many other geniuses -- they are geniuses in their fields, and we shouldn't expect everything they did to be right.

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#33

Post by MaysonL » Wed, Jan 21, 2015, 11:40 PM UTC

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.

And also a music teacher.

See "The Night I Met Einstein"

http://www.rd.com/true-stories/inspiring/the-night-i-met-ein...

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#34

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Wed, Jan 21, 2015, 11:57 PM UTC

elberto34 wrote: post #11

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…

yeah, same here. Einstein, through a combination of skill, connections and luck, rose to prominence at a pivotal time in science coinciding with the discoveries of both quantum and macro physics theory, as well as the advanced mathematics needed to describe it. No doubt Einstein was talented and a genius no doubt, but he was by far not the only one, and I'm sure he knew this. Pr ogres in physics has now become so inc…

I'm not sure I'd describe GR and the foundations of QM as 'low hanging fruit.'

Einstein seems smarter because he was smarter. He didn't transform one small area of physics, he solved a lot of problems that were out at the edges and introduced new ideas that made them tractable.

Of course other people helped, and some of those other people might have created GR eventually.

But he was the only one to pull it all together.

In physics now there are plenty of people with world-class math talent, but no one with Einstein's intuition, insight, and creativity.

Which is why I think progress on the really hard problems has become glacial. Those problems always need deep creative insight, and math alone isn't enough.

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#35

Post by fargolime » Thu, Jan 22, 2015, 12:03 AM UTC

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 Greene who wrote The Elegant Universe says he thinks Einstein's original papers would've been round-filed if submitted today. (And they weren't just thought experiments.) I suspect we know about Einstein today only because of the open-mindedness of Max Planck, who was Einstein's original reviewer.

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#36

Post by granfalloon » Thu, Jan 22, 2015, 12:11 AM UTC

"The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought."

This is interesting to me. When I'm working on something difficult I often find my thought process to be very "verbal." Kind of like an internal monologue, talking myself through the problem. It's fascinating to think that my mental experience might be so profoundly different from someone else's.

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#37

Post by snarfy » Thu, Jan 22, 2015, 12:24 AM UTC

granfalloon wrote: post #36

"The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought." This is interesting to me. When I'm working on something difficult I often find my thought process to be very "verbal." Kind of like an internal monologue, talking myself through the problem. It's fascinating to think that my mental experience might be so profoundly different from someone else's.

> talking myself through the problem

Also interesting is that there must be at least two people to have a conversation. Who's talking and who's listening when talking to yourself? Wouldn't the person listening already know what the person talking is going to say before they say it? Then why have the conversation?

If he was imagining particle physics as little billiard balls I'm not sure vocalizing the problem mentally would help. Visualizing it is more helpful.

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#38

Post by fargolime » Thu, Jan 22, 2015, 12:25 AM UTC

granfalloon wrote: post #36

"The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought." This is interesting to me. When I'm working on something difficult I often find my thought process to be very "verbal." Kind of like an internal monologue, talking myself through the problem. It's fascinating to think that my mental experience might be so profoundly different from someone else's.

Yep, yours is probably different from physicists' mental experiences, not software developers'. One thing I've learned from discussions about physics is that the thought processes that are common to software development are largely foreign in the realm of physics.

Take for example Einstein's Relativity of Simultaneity thought experiment. [1] This is akin to discussion about a bug among software developers. Like developers can agree that a bug exists after discussion alone, a software developer could read the thought experiment and conclude there's a bug in physics (i.e. the general consensus at the time). But physicists don't seem to work that way. In discussions with many super smart physics-minded people, I've found that most reject that thought experiment, nay any thought experiment, as having value. Only a mathematically-based argument suffices for them. Imagine showing software bugs only mathematically!

[1] In Einstein's words: http://www.bartleby.com/173/9.html

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#39

Post by jonsen » Thu, Jan 22, 2015, 12:28 AM UTC

granfalloon wrote: post #36

"The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought." This is interesting to me. When I'm working on something difficult I often find my thought process to be very "verbal." Kind of like an internal monologue, talking myself through the problem. It's fascinating to think that my mental experience might be so profoundly different from someone else's.

Maybe there is no difference. You said when "difficult" you go verbal. Well language, be it natural or math, is the means by which to think rationally and highly conscious. On the ohther hand creative thinking is more done in "pictures". I think they are calles schemas. Einstein said that he first created ideas by thinking physiscs and then rationalised over it by thinking math.

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#40

Post by Chinjut » Thu, Jan 22, 2015, 12:29 AM UTC

fargolime wrote: post #38

granfalloon wrote: post #36

"The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought." This is interesting to me. When I'm working on something difficult I often find my thought process to be very "verbal." Kind of like an internal monologue, talking myself through the problem. It's fascinating to think that my mental experience might be so profoundly different from someone else's.

Yep, yours is probably different from physicists' mental experiences, not software developers'. One thing I've learned from discussions about physics is that the thought processes that are common to software development are largely foreign in the realm of physics. Take for example Einstein's Relativity of Simultaneity thought experiment. [1] This is akin to discussion about a bug among software developers. Like devel…

Physicists reject that thought experiments have value? I'd say the context in which I most frequently hear the phrase "thought experiment" (or "Gedankenexperiment") is physics! Indeed, that is historically where the term originated. (And we must also consider examples like the very one of Einstein's you pointed out).

I also don't see any reason why thought experiments and mathematical arguments should be thought of as exclusive... I would think an important part of a thought experiment is often its mathematical analysis.