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How did Einstein Think?

pitt.edu

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Re: How did Einstein Think?

#71

Post by jobposter1234 »

agumonkey wrote: post #59
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 ;)

Feynman also had a semi-successful career as a local artist in California. He used a pseudonym so as to not let his Nobel fame affect his sales (physicists were big celebrities back then -- many people would have known his name).

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#72

Post by agumonkey »

jobposter1234 wrote: post #71
agumonkey wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

Feynman also had a semi-successful career as a local artist in California. He used a pseudonym so as to not let his Nobel fame affect his sales (physicists were big celebrities back then -- many people would have known his name).

Maybe he faked noobness when being Feynman to avoid attracting to much attention.

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#73

Post by bsder »

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…

> 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.

Looking backward, it is pretty clear that there were lots of people coming up with the formulations for quantum mechanics. Even without Einstein, somebody probably would have handled that stuff.

However, general relativity was definitely ahead of its time. It took decades until we could even test it.

Finally, while Einstein "lost" the Bohr-Einstein debate about the nature of quantum mechanics, the problem was actually the experiments of the day. One of the strikes against Einstein was the fact that the field formulation predicts that excited electrons in atoms do not decay which everybody knew was an incorrect prediction. Except that Einstein WASN'T wrong--if you put an excited atom in a photon trap and isolate it from the rest of the universe it's decay time goes way up. See: "Collective Electrodynamics" by Carver Mead http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/collective-electrodynamics

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#74

Post by yodsanklai »

I once read a crazy but amusing "psychoanalytic" interpretation about Einstein discoveries. His name "Einstein" can be parsed: Ein-s-t-Ein, which can be seen as "one - space - time - one" (ein is german for one). He was predetermined to see space and time as a single thing!

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#75

Post by renox »

heck0045 wrote: post #23

The end of the article laments Einstein's retreat to 'simple mathematics' instead of following Bohr and company toward the complexity of Quantum Mechanics -- but this recent wired article suggests that perhaps Einstein was right all along: http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-reality/

No, it is nearly impossible that "Einstein was right all along" in the EPR 'thought experiment' he was convinced that 'local realism' was the answer so the 'spooky action at distance' that QM predicted was wrong, except that all the experiments done so far show the opposite..

In one way, this is also a proof of Einstein's brilliance he was one of the few to understand this implication of QM..

That said, this is really a pity that it took so long between the 'thought experiment' and the real experiment: if the Bell tests experiments could have been done earlier who knows what Einstein would have achieved?

Re: How did Einstein Think?

#76

Post by mafribe »

benihana wrote: post #45
mafribe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly what has G. Hopper done that warrants her inclusion in this list?

She's not Einstein, and she's not well known outside of computer scientis. Seems to line up perfectly with ok_craig's comment. Of course she was brilliant, and influential, but putting her in the same list as Newton or Einstein feels like intellectual hipsterdom.

She's also not well-known inside computer science. I certainly don't know her. Wikipedia isn't a reliable source, so I am not sure what she has done. It appears that she was part of a team that might have developed one of the early loaders/linkers.
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