[lit-ideas] Re: Einstein


Le 28 oct. 05, à 14:53, Andy Amago a écrit :

[Original Message]
From: Michael Chase <goya@xxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 10/28/2005 9:28:34 AM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Einstein


Le 28 oct. 05, à 00:45, Andy Amago a écrit :

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). 

M.C. I, for one, seriously hope that Mr. Amago does precisely that. The
world could always use one more genius-level physicist. After all,
there are lots of physical problems still awaiting solution : he might
spend his initial ten years working on linking relativity (another
silly little discovery that lazy old Einstein spent God knows how many
years working on) with quantum mechanics (the work of no-account
layabouts like Bohr, Schrodinger and Heisenberg). This would be a
tremendous boon to mankind, and a much more productive way to spend
one's time than writing asinine messages to lit-ideas. Seriously, no,
seriously.



I would think your reply brilliant if it didn't completely miss the mark of
what I was getting at. I never belittled Einstein's accomplishments. 

M.C. Um, yes you did : “ I was disappointed in Einstein..", etc.


You
deleted the section that was the crux of my point: without ten years of
obsessive-level work, his intelligence was meaningless. Einstein was
obsessed much more than he was intelligent. 10% inspiration, 90%
perspiration, you read that part, right? So, other than insulting me, what
exactly is your point?

M.C. My point, if I had one, was that it is almost obscenely ridiculous for you to claim that you could repeat Einstein's discoveries if you chose to spend ten years thinking about the same subject. Ten years is not that long, and for 2500 years some of the most brilliant minds in Western history had been spending an awful lot longer than ten years thinking about light. Einstein came up with a solution that was better than any suggested before him.

I'm not comfortable with the idea of genius, but the fact that Einstein, and nobody else (at least to the same extent) came up with the ideas he did means he had something they didn't : otherwise (duh!) *everybody* who ever spent ten years or more thinking about light would have come up with similarly brilliant solutions. But they didn't, and Einstein did (he was not spending his time "talking with other physicists" at the time, by the way, but working as a clerk in a patent office in a one-horse Swiss town called Bern). It follows that he had something they didn't.

What was that something ? Intelligence, clearly ; creativity, but nobody has a real good idea of what that is. Great scientific advances are often carried out by outsiders (like Einstein at the time, a measly patent clerk), who are less weighed down by tradition and more able to "think outside the box". Rather than following current scientific trends of Kuhnian normal science, they rethink the basic presuppositions of the field they're studying and question them : and the best ones, like Einstein, come up with ways of looking at milennium-year-old problems from an entirely new viewpoint, as Einstein later did in the case of gravity : rather than a force acting instantaneously at a distance, as Newton had thought, he explained it as the result of the curvature of a four-dimensional space-time. I suppose (trivially) that anybody *could have* thought of this idea, but the person who actually *did* think of it was not just anybody, but Einstein.

So Andy thinks all he would have to do is take ten years off to think about something, and he'd be another Einstein ? The word for that type of mindset, it seems to me, is megalomania.

        best, Mike.







Michael Chase
(goya@xxxxxxxxxxx)
CNRS UPR 76
7, rue Guy Moquet
Villejuif 94801
France


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