For someone who recently read a lot about Einstein and his work and learn what his theory actually accomplishes, this was a great read. I am glad I took 15 minutes of my time to read this paper. Personally I feel it sucks that almost every educated person can recollect his famous equation but a small fraction actually know what it is all about and how his work changed our understanding of space and time. I recommend anyone interested to learn more can check out this book by Author James Malcolm Bird , its on amazon [1] and free on google play [2].<p>[1] - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Theories-Relativity-And-Gravitation/dp/116462959X" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Theories-Relativity-And-Grav...</a><p>[2] - <a href="https://play.google.com/store/books/details/James_Malcolm_Bird_Einstein_s_Theories_of_Relativi?id=7e85AAAAMAAJ" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/books/details/James_Malcolm_Bi...</a><p>edit: for formatting
"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"<p>- Albert Einstein<p><a href="https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/einstein/einstein-at-the-patent-office.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/einstein/einstein-at-the-pate...</a><p>"He was denied any teaching position from just about every major University in Europe. 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. One way he dealt with the rejections was through a discussion group he formed with other workers at the Patent office that he self-mockingly named "The Olympia Academy", which met regularly to discuss science and philosophy. They studied the works of Henri Poincaré, Ernst Mach, and David Hume, which influenced his scientific and philosophical outlook."<p><a href="https://www.quora.com/How-many-patents-did-Albert-Einstein-have" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/How-many-patents-did-Albert-Einstein-h...</a>
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.
Investigating how a great scientist thought is interesting, but should come with a YMMV warning. We see the same thing in the business press that focuses on "the characteristics of successful CEOs" and the like.<p>The interesting question is not "How many successful people in field X have characteristics Y?" but "How many unsuccessful people in field X also have characteristics Y?" If we don't have an answer to that--and we generally don't, because unsuccessful people are relatively hard to identify compared to the successful ones, and are generally considered a less interesting subject to study--then we can't say much about the degree to which characteristics Y contribute to success in field X.<p>There is no doubt Einstein's doggedness, patience, willingness to learn new methods, physical intuition and deep study of the physics of his time all contributed to his success, but there were likely quite a few people who had similar characteristics. That Einstein succeeded where they did not may be due to various factors, including various forms of luck.<p>As the article suggests, Einstein's strengths were well-suited to the problems he focused on in his early career, and less well-suited to the problems he focused on in his later career. That is a form of luck, albeit a more subtle and powerful one than "his guesses just happened to be right."
"The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought."<p>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.
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: <a href="http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-reality/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-reality/</a>
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.<p>That said, I find Einstein-worship annoying.<p>The cultural obsession with Einstein and cult of personality detracts from the reality that scientific achievement, knowledge, intelligence and wisdom all lie on a multi-dimensional spectrum, they aren't innate, and like any skill, mathematics and scientific knowledge can be learned.<p>Even more so to say that there have been other geniuses at least at the level of Einstein who didn't land in the position of theoretical physics that afforded them the same level impact.<p>As for special relativity, based on the development of physics and mathematics of the time 1880-1910, I think it was a toss-up who would have discovered it if Einstein had actually fallen off that mountain in Switzerland in grade school and not been save by his classmate.
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!