[lit-ideas] Re: Einstein
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 09:18:40 -0400
> [Original Message]
> From: Michael Chase <goya@xxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 10/29/2005 7:54:16 AM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Einstein
>
>
> >
> > 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.
>
I'm disappointed in him, not in his accomplishments
>
> > 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.
>
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.
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).
> 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.
The people in his circle all contributed something, I'm not denying that.
Einstein's theories were of his time and place. It's possible that some
shepherd in medieval France was siting looking at the stars and had the
same idea, but he was laughed off so we'll never know it. Einstein was in
the right place at the right time.
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.
>
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. His wife did not have
the same advantages.
> 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),
Why are you so hung up that he was a patent clerk? His body was a patent
clerk. His mind was in his physics.
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
Not true. Attraction may have gone back to Aristotle, spacetime did not.
Einstein worked within scientific precedents and structures, even if he
wasn't in academia. So did Newton. Newton wasn't a nobleman who sat under
a tree and got hit in the head with an apple. He was surrounded by like
minded people with whom he cross fertilized.
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.
>
Einstein built on everyone else's achievements, the way all scientific
achievements are. He questioned Newton, certainly, but that's the whole
point: he questioned Newton. You seem to think he was an uneducated clerk,
a medieval shepherd for whom this was a bolt out of the blue. My point
was Einstein was no Mozart, essentially a stenographer for the music that
poured out of his head. No paradigm shifting or building on others with
Mozart. The fact that Einstein worked hard at his ideas doesn't lessen his
ideas, but they didn't just pour out of his head in a vacuum.
> 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.
>
Ten years in a vacuum is meaningless. That's not what happened in
Einstein's case.
Megalomaniacally,
Andy Amago
> best, Mike.
>
>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> Michael Chase
> (goya@xxxxxxxxxxx)
> CNRS UPR 76
> 7, rue Guy Moquet
> Villejuif 94801
> France
>
>
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