Isn't there a story about Einstein that he didn't speak until a fairly
old age (young, old age)? Reminds me of the hero of Gunter Grass's The
Tin Drum. He doesn't speak because he has nothing to say until he's
six years old or something (going from thirty year old memory here --
which is actually sometimes easier than two day old memory). Great book
if memory serves...
Ursula
(now also reminded of Marlena's (?) question a while back about most
life-changing books...i meant to get to that...soon...soon...but I have
one entry...Viktor Frankel's The Meaning of Life...well two...also Emile
Zola's Germinal...also Julian Jaynes and the Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind (the title is actually much longer...but something like that...)
also LaurensVan der Post's The Lost World of the Kalahari...and Richard
Mitchell's The Graves of Academe... )
Andy Amago wrote:
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
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