[lit-ideas] Einstein

I saw some of the PBS show on Albert Einstein a while back.  I have to say that 
I was disappointed in Einstein.  Knowing nothing about him except that he came 
up with the theories of relativity, I always assumed he was a genius.  Now I 
learn that he spent 10 years obsessing over the nature of light, after ten 
years of which he had an aha moment.  It seems to me that if I spent ten years 
obsessively thinking about something and reading about it and talking about it 
with fellow physicists (assuming I were a physicist) and looking at it from all 
angles, I too, might have come up with it (seriously, no, seriously).  He wrote 
his most important papers that one year.  After that the well seems to have run 
fairly dry.  My question is, is Einstein really a genius?  He had a couple of, 
admittedly profound, insights, but he worked at them.  It seems to me that he 
was a genius in the same way Thomas Edison was a genius; 10% inspiration and 
90% perspiration.  My conclusion is that genius
  is using what one has, and the I.Q. number is pretty irrelevant.  

Andy Amago

Other related posts: