[lit-ideas] Re: Einstein

> [Original Message]
> From: Michael Chase <goya@xxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 10/31/2005 4:41:27 AM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Einstein
>
>
> >
> > I'm disappointed in him, not in his accomplishments
>
> M.C. It's still not clear to me what his personal failures were. Did he 
> not help enough with the housework?


I wasn't talking about his personal failures, but if you insist.  He ran
around on his wife and left his child.  But, my disappointment in him has
nothing to do with that.



> >
> >
> >> <snip>
> >>
> >
> >
> > If  the most brilliant minds in Western history thought about light (if
> > they did), for most of that time it was from a philosophical 
> > perspective.
>
> M.C. Um, depends on what you call philosophical. Einstein's work was 
> pretty darned "philosophical" as well : he imagined, among other 
> things, what the world must look like from the perspective of a 
> travelling photon
>
>

 
You said for 2500 years they were thinking about this.




> > There's also someone else who came up with the same idea at the same 
> > time,
> > but I don't recall his name (perhaps you can supply it).
>
> M.C. There are always people coming up with the same or similar ideas 
> in science. It's been claimed that Poincaré was the real inventor of 
> relativity. Compare the controversy over the precedence of Newton and 
> Leibniz in the invention of calculus, of Wallace and Darwin in natural 
> selection; Galileo's discovery of the pendulum may have been 
> anticipated by Mersenne, etc., etc. None of that, it seems to me, is 
> all that important.
> >


So why is Einstein getting all the credit?



> > <snip>
> >
> >
> >
> > He was married to a mathematician (the famous line where she offered to
> > check his math).  His friends were mathematicians and physicists.  His 
> > life
> > and his heart were not in his day job.  Being married, and not 
> > contributing
> > to family life for the most part, freed up his time.
>
> M.C. Freed up his time ? So you think having a full-time job and having 
> to revolutionize physics on nights and weekends is  cushy situation?
>


You talk as if he cared about his job.  He lived and breathed physics.  His
real life was physics.


>
> >  His wife did not have
> > the same advantages.
>
> M.C. Which advantages were those, precisely? Did she have a full-time 
> job in a field that didn't particularly interest her, too?
> >
> >


She was supposed to continue her education.  Having a child precluded that.
Ever see the show 1900 House on PBS?  Taking care of a house in 1900 was
worse than a full time job.



> >
> > Why are you so hung up that he was a patent clerk?
>
> M.C. Because it's important, that's why. It supports my contention 
> (which is of course not only mine, but common to most historians of 
> science since Kuhn - whom you might want to read, by the way - ) 


I'm an outsider.  I can't read Kuhn.



that 
> important scientific progress, or Kuhnian revolutions, are often made 
> by outsiders. There are *reasons* for this : normal science is 
> programmed to exclude major upsettings of the hypotheses everyone takes 
> for granted. According to Craig Loehle ("A guide to increased 
> creativity in research? Inspiration or perspiration? â?? Bioscience 40 
> (1990) 123-129),
>


Einstein was in the field.  He wasn't in academia, but he was in the field.




>       "Most science is driven by grant funding, which is directed towards 
> the solvable. Had a young Einstein turned up today and put in a 
> research submission along the lines that he wished to study the nature 
> of space and time by conducting thought experiments in an armchair, 
> supported by some esoteric mathelatics, and that his research would 
> last a lifetime, he would not have been funded. 



Maybe.  Or he would have gotten a grant writing expert to write him a grant
proposal and worded it to get the money.  Today he may have been working
for a company anyway, a start-up maybe. But we're speculating as to what
may or may not have happened to Einstein if he lived today.




Similarly, Darwin would 
> not have gone very far had he put in a proposal that, although trained 
> as a geologist, he wished to study the problem of speciation by 
> travelling for five years on a research vessel, collecting every 
> specimen and fact that he could find, and then spend another 15 years 
> thinking it all over before writing a book".
>


I'm not convinced of this.  



>       Another example : when the Soviet scientist Belusov discovered that a 
> suitably-prepared chemical mixture would go through a cycle of complex 
> patterns before settling down, in apparent contradiction of the second 
> law of thermodynmaics, no journal would publish his results : since he 
> contradicted that law, they said, he must have done his experiments 
> wrong. He finally smuggled his results into print as an annex to a 
> completely unrelated publication, where it caught the attention of 
> Zhabotinsky, who confirmed his results. Now there's nothing more banal 
> in chelmistry than the Belusov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction, which is used 
> among other things as a model in the study of heart arrhythmia 
> (electrical waves can propagate from the pacemaker cells in the heart 
> in much the same way as waves of chemical reactions in the BZ reaction)
>


Louis Pasteur was laughed at, etc.  There are many examples of the human
race being generally close minded and resistant to change.  It's unrelated
to my original proposal, that Einstein was a genius like every other
genius.  But he was turned into a household word.  Others are not.



>       The same holds true in philosophy. Many, if not most, important 
> advances have been made by philosophers outside the university 
> (Spinoza, Descartes, Nietzsche) or by those whose relationship to the 
> university was problematic (Wittgenstein). C.S. Pierce worked as a 
> telegraph operator.
>


And who ever heard of C.S. Pierce?  Yet poor Einstein you see ...



>
> > His body was a patent
> > clerk.  His mind was in his physics.
>
> M.C. Sounds easy enough. Guess anybody should be able to put in an 
> eight-hour day, then come home and revolutionize an entire scientific 
> discipline in one's spare time.
>


It didn't matter where Einstein was, whether it was taking walks, whatever,
he was in his physics.



>       I, for one, am going to start tonight, thanks to Andy's inspiration. 
> But first I'd better go and put in my eight hours at my normal job, 
> even if, like Einstein, I too am married, which apparently frees up a 
> whole lot of my time.
> >
> >


Maybe you don't live and breathe physics and let everything else fall into
place around that.    


Andy Amago



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