Einstein's genius wasn't genesis nor synthesis. His genius was hard work.<p><a href="http://quantumrelativity.calsci.com/Relativity/Chapter1.html" rel="nofollow">http://quantumrelativity.calsci.com/Relativity/Chapter1.html</a><p><i>Georg Riemann lived in Germany from 1826 until 1866. He was Gauss' last and most famous student. To finish his doctoral degree, in 1854 Riemann was required to give a lecture. Gauss asked him to lecture on geometry. In this single lecture, Riemann laid almost all of the mathematical foundation for Einstein's General Relativity. Riemann went on to become an important mathematician, but did little work on curved spaces after this one lecture.</i><p>Einstein took <i>8 years</i> in a boring patent office to understand what Riemann did in a lazy afternoon.
It's odd to me that we don't study creative thinking more. When it comes to technical details, we've got it covered; you can find hundreds of textbooks on any given field, from the arts to the sciences. But the mysterious step that actually lets you recombine that knowledge into new ideas is usually shrugged off as "hard work" or "inspiration".<p>On the other hand, I suppose it's a pretty difficult question to answer. If you were to ask a musician how they compose their music, they would probably talk about scales and chord progressions and improvisation. But the true answer involves a whole lifetime of experiences and memories, filtered in a specific way through the musician's brain to create certain musical effects, themselves based on years of training. To even talk about that would require a lot of introspection.<p>What if we could train ourselves to think like Einstein? What would this do for science? What about Mozart and music?
I just finished listening to Walter Isaacson's biography "Einstein" (on CD). What was distinctive about Einstein was not how he thought but what he thought about.<p>His special theory of relativity is a solution to the contradiction between Newtonian dynamics and the new (at the time) Maxwell's equations of electrodynamics. It was a creative solution to a difficult problem.<p>Today we have a similar theoretical contradiction between Einstein's General Relativity (large, galactic scale) and Quantum Mechanics (small, sub-atomic scale) but no one is able to reconcile these two theories and it has been shown that, as formulated, they are mathematically incompatible.<p>For years physicists ignored this problem because satisfying, productive careers in physics could be based on pursuing all the implications of Einstein's ideas and the parallel developments in Quantum Mechanics. This period is now ending and I believe that somewhere in the world is the modern equivalent of a "patent clerk" who is working on a new <i>conceptual</i> approach to physics that will allow the reconciliation of GR and QM.
This professor also has a book called "Einstein for Everyone", available for free online here:<p><a href="http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/</a>
Amazingly this article doesn't mention Immanuel Kant. If you read the autobiographical notes, Kant is the first name that appears. And from there it is quite a different step to the theory of relativity.
This is more important than anything about Yahoo and Tumblr. I read Isaacson's biography in the hopes of extracting the answer to exactly this question. Upon reading it, I found myself enormously relieved that my approach to Project Euler problems, and math and physics problems in general, follows the same form.<p>This does not seem to be how I approach medical problems. These seem to be quite a bit more like a flow chart, maybe in the best cases it's a Bodie plot.<p>Research, however, does generally seem to follow this mold a bit better.
I've been working through the following book:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-Create-Mind-Thought-Revealed/dp/0670025291" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/How-Create-Mind-Thought-Revealed/dp/06...</a><p>And it has a chapter (2 and 3) on stepping through exactly what algorithms and data structures Einstein used to figure out that time itself slows down for you to explain why traveling at fractions of the speed of light does not change how fast light passes you by. More important than guessing time as the variable property, he was expert at creating experiments to disprove his hypothesis. "If this is the case, we should be able to do this exact experiment to expose the exact value for time dilation as you approach speed of light."<p>The book is about creating a program which exposes the operating principles of Einstein's neo cortex that can do what Einstein did. To create simplistic models that explain the underlying principles of physics, and has the ability to say: "If we model the phenomenon like such, than we should be able to observe the following phenomenon". Then to go out and perform a test gathering evidence or disproving it. Then brute forcing this process and selecting for the most simple model that explains all available data.<p>Show all hypothesis that explain all available data, that have not been disproved, sorted by complexity of the model with most evidence collected for it, and least evidence levied against it.<p>If each of these processes could be automated, we could use the world's supercomputers to crunch out 500 years of physics scientific discovery in a few years.
We can see how Einstein thought through this modern day Einstein: meet Jacob Barnett (aka Einstein), a 14-Year-Old Master's degree student on his way to earning a PhD in quantum physics. Truly a genius.<p><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/11/jacob-barnett-autistic-14-year-old-nobel-prize_n_3254920.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/11/jacob-barnett-autis...</a>