9 ms·

Einstein was no lone genius

118 points by etiam 11y ago

ratsmack 11y ago
I wonder how many geniuses there have been in the world that never had the opportunity to expand their natural skills because they were to busy just surviving.
- paulpauper 11y ago
  that's why awhile ago I proposed the high-IQ basic income. It's like a government Mensa that pays its members. But it would also be very un-egalitarian
- api 11y ago
  Billions. IQ is normally distributed, so it's easy math. Lots of cynics think people are dumb or we don't have enough smart ones, but the truth is that we quite literally have more brains than we know what to do with. We are a species of bored underachievers trapped in a gravity well with nothing much to do and no future, so we spend our time fighting and drugging and making pointless doodads as townies trapped in some nowheresville often do.
  - javajosh 11y ago
    Humanity is ~7B, and "billons" implies >= 2B which is >= 30% of humanity. I'd define "great" to be the top 1% of minds, which is ~70 million people. So, yes, tens of millions of great minds are certainly wasted, but not billions. (Not that that's much consolation).
    - robrenaud 11y ago
      Apparently 107 billion humans have ever lived. 1% of that is greater than a billion. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16870579 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16870579 > here are currently seven billion people alive today and the Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 107 billion people have ever lived. That said, merely being in the top 1% of intelligence doesn't seem to be worthy of the genius title.
      - api 11y ago
        If you are in the top 1% or even 5% you are probably capable of genius things if given the opportunity. The majority never are. Genius is much more common than opportunity.
        birbal 11y ago
        How do i up vote this. I have the genius but lacking the opportunity i think
      - cba9 11y ago
        > That said, merely being in the top 1% of intelligence doesn't seem to be worthy of the genius title. Especially considering that the population average in many places and times is far below the current population averages normed in the USA and UK and Western Europe. If you asked how many people throughout history or globally would be in the top 1% of the USA/UK/WE population, the answer will be much smaller than a billion. (Thin tails strike again.)
  - bedhead 11y ago
    I believe IQ is actually logrythmically distributed.
  - eru 11y ago
    > IQ is normally distributed, [...] But only by definition. IQ tests are graded on a scale.
- oneJob 11y ago
  Or not even geniuses, just talented individuals. A very small percentage of people have the luxury to do 1) what they enjoy and are motivated by or 2) what they are good at. We are all, as a society, worse off when we keep massive swaths of people living on the margin.
mettamage 11y ago
To some I might seem like Captain Obvious, but to me this article gave me a big insight. I mean I know social capital is important. I know it really well. Nevertheless, I didn't know that social capital is that important. Even Einstein needed it. I had no idea. I only thought he stood on the theories of others, but a lot of other people also helped him?! I never knew. How about Stephen Hawking? Did he receive significant help from fellow physicists as well? Are all popular scientists not lone geniuses? Are they all, for lack of a better term, group geniuses?
- vacri 11y ago
  It's very difficult to get to the cutting edge of a field without learning from (or with) other people in that field.
- sholanozie 11y ago
  The big lie sold to us is that there is such a thing as a "self-sufficient" man. The people who make it the furthest are the people with the most extensive and powerful networks.
Theodores 11y ago
The artist Damien Hirst does not make any of his own work, he has a team that do all that for him. Nonetheless, everything out his studio is 'by Damien Hirst' as in the artist, not one of his 'artworker' collaborators or business managers. I wonder if one could work as a scientist or an inventor like that? Which inventors, e.g.Edison, actually did? The art movement of the 'Blair era' could be described with only the names of half a dozen Hirst type artists mentioned, yet all those names have teams of helpers. Maybe the invention scene a hundred years ago was like that to a certain extent?
- psuter 11y ago
  Arguably, most professors run their labs in the same way Damien Hirst runs his studio, focusing on "design" and "sales".
cubano 11y ago
Einstein's big year was 1905, not 1915, and the four (five?) papers he produced during that year (one of which won him a Nobel) could easily be described as the work of a "lone genius." He did most of work of that year while working, of course as we all know, as a patent clerk. Obviously, no one lives in a vacuum, and all legendary geniuses stand on the shoulders of other giants, but I can't help but think this article somewhat misrepresents the reality of Einstein's world-changing contributions. [edits]
- rewqfdsa 11y ago
  It's part of a larger push toward revisionist history in general. It's no longer correct to imagine that great people moved history through inspiration and force. Now, everything is cooperative, gradual, social, and voluntary. Today's archaeologist might find the remains of a burned city littered with arrowheads and skulls and say, "There was no invasion! This was clearly just theater!" You might see an entire civilization wiped out, a language made extinct, a change in religious idols, and a sudden decrease in the sophistication and production of pottery, and the conclusion has to be "Oh! The people of this region voluntarily absorbed the language and practice of their neighbors" and not the fucking obvious conclusion "They were wiped out and replaced." And now, there are no inventory, no inspired people, just groups and systems that at some place and time happened to squirt out relativity.
  - forgingahead 11y ago
    I wish I could upvote this again. There is definitely this shift in the understanding of the world, and I believe it stems from an unwillingness to accept the cruelty of life. Accepting the harshness of the world and of human nature means also accepting the need to act in ways to survive and thrive in such an environment. Standards, dare I say virtues, have fallen to the wayside in pursuit of an easy, sedentary acceptance.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - 11y ago
sriku 11y ago
What Einstein and others contributed towards GR in a decade is now generally taught in one semester of grad school physics. Ruling out the possibility that grad students are today >20x intelligent than Einstein, and considering that Einstein needed no more experimental results than already available to everyone in 1905, the emphasis ought not to be as simplistic as "lone genius", but on his perseverance and nose for an interesting problem, enduring all the false twists and turns that exploring one entails. I believe this is the general trait of who we recognize as great minds.
- visakanv 11y ago
  He said it himself. "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious."
  - lucozade 11y ago
    I believe he was mistaken. His talent was to be able to get to the heart of a problem. To find the connection everyone else had missed, or that everyone else had missed the significance of: the constancy of c, mass-energy equivalence, the Equivalence principle. That's a pretty rare skill and, in my opinion, qualifies as genius. In terms of what I guess a lot of students see i.e. the field equations, then sure, he was a decent mathematician but no Gauss or Cauchy. He took time and needed help to get to the necessary machinery for GR. But that doesn't, in my eyes, in anyway diminish what was an astonishing intellectual feat. So no, he wasn't a lone genius but he was a genius.
    - visakanv 11y ago
      Why not both? Isn't it possible that it was his passionate, persistent curiosity that allowed him to get to the heart of problems, see what everyone else missed, etc?
      - philh 11y ago
        If so, then his passionate, persistent curiousity should be counted as a special talent. The fact is that not many people could have done what Einstein did. Whether it was genius or curiousity or stubbornness, the puzzle pieces were known to many people and he was the first to solve them.[1] For him to dismiss himself as having "no special talent" - that seems to be implying that just about anyone could have done it. It's a kind of modesty that we seem to reward, as a culture, but I dislike it. If Einstein had no special talent, then what of the people before him? Were they doing something wrong? [1] I'm not sure how long the world had to produce an Einstein, before it produced Einstein. Perhaps there were only a few dozen people who saw the puzzle pieces before Einstein did. That still leaves him in the top tier, but perhaps not the top tier of the top tier.
danharaj 11y ago
Einstein being a socialist and all around lover of human beings probably would agree. His letters to people like Levi-Civita make that clear. There are very few hermit geniuses. Whom we consider geniuses now were often gregarious individuals who mixed themselves up with others. An individual can only be as great as the communities that nurture them. We all rely on others to guide us towards truth and away from error. http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.4305 http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.4305 Before developing his 1915 General Theory of Relativity, Einstein held the "Entwurf" theory. Tullio Levi-Civita from Padua, one of the founders of tensor calculus, objected to a major problematic element in this theory, which reflected its global problem: its field equations were restricted to an adapted coordinate system. Einstein proved that his gravitational tensor was a covariant tensor for adapted coordinate systems. In an exchange of letters and postcards that began in March 1915 and ended in May 1915, Levi-Civita presented his objections to Einstein's above proof. Einstein tried to find ways to save his proof, and found it hard to give it up. Finally Levi-Civita convinced Einstein about a fault in his arguments. However, only in spring 1916, long after Einstein had abandoned the 1914 theory, did he finally understand the main problem with his 1914 gravitational tensor. In autumn 1915 the G\"ottingen brilliant mathematician David Hilbert found the central flaw in Einstein's 1914 derivation. On March 30, 1916, Einstein sent to Hilbert a letter admitting, "The error you found in my paper of 1914 has now become completely clear to me".
tiatia 11y ago
in 1881: m=E/c^2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hasen%C3%B6hrl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hasen%C3%B6hrl Einstein: E=m x c^2
- saiya-jin 11y ago
  quoting your own link: ... However, Max von Laue quickly rebutted those claims by saying that the inertia of electromagnetic energy was long known before Hasenöhrl, especially by the works of Henri Poincaré (1900) and Max Abraham (1902), while Hasenöhrl only used their results for his calculation on cavity radiation. Laue continued by saying that credit for establishing the inertia of all forms of energy (the real mass-energy equivalence) goes to Einstein, who was also the first to understand the deep implications of that equivalence in relation to relativity.
thelastguy 11y ago
Reminds of me the series Connections, where, no one man invented/created/discovered something all by himself. It was more of like, the thing of one man lead to this other thing of this other man, while this third man over here is also doing this other thing, and then bam! Something new and revolutionary that changed mankind for ever. Pete and repeats.
aschreyer 11y ago
Einstein's most genius insight was probably not to make any initial assumptions and simply to follow his thought experiments regardless of the outcome (even if they contradicted contemporary dogma). The idea that time is not constant and space can be bend was certainly genius and as far as I know rejected by others who thought the maths must be wrong. He certainly relied on others for the mathematical foundation but he always mentioned that. Science even today is strongly ego-driven and he surely had the personality to take on the other scientists of his time.
acqq 11y ago
Also worth mentioning, general relativity appeared to violate the conservation of energy until Emmy Noether's contribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether "Noether was brought to Göttingen in 1915 by David Hilbert and Felix Klein, who wanted her expertise in invariant theory to help them in understanding general relativity, a geometrical theory of gravitation developed mainly by Albert Einstein. Hilbert had observed that the conservation of energy seemed to be violated in general relativity, due to the fact that gravitational energy could itself gravitate. Noether provided the resolution of this paradox, and a fundamental tool of modern theoretical physics, with Noether's first theorem, which she proved in 1915, but did not publish until 1918."
- no1ne 11y ago
  Also worth mentioning is that feminists said Mileva Maric, his wife was the real credit behind his work and PBS even aired a documentary (which just shows how even documentaries are biased), until the back-lash from the scientific community dismantled this fantasized myth.
  - acqq 11y ago
    Maric story is irrelevant in relation to Noether, I don't know why it's brought up, because: Emmy Noether really did this, it was really a big thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem Certainly not a myth.
    - no1ne 11y ago
      Just stating another thing worth mentioning.. that is all :)
khattam 11y ago
I don't know much about physics but I always thought that he was popular ONLY because he was a "Jewish German".

118 points by etiam 11y ago

I wonder how many geniuses there have been in the world that never had the opportunity to expand their natural skills because they were to busy just surviving.

paulpauper 11y ago
that's why awhile ago I proposed the high-IQ basic income. It's like a government Mensa that pays its members. But it would also be very un-egalitarian
api 11y ago
Billions. IQ is normally distributed, so it's easy math. Lots of cynics think people are dumb or we don't have enough smart ones, but the truth is that we quite literally have more brains than we know what to do with. We are a species of bored underachievers trapped in a gravity well with nothing much to do and no future, so we spend our time fighting and drugging and making pointless doodads as townies trapped in some nowheresville often do.
- javajosh 11y ago
  Humanity is ~7B, and "billons" implies >= 2B which is >= 30% of humanity. I'd define "great" to be the top 1% of minds, which is ~70 million people. So, yes, tens of millions of great minds are certainly wasted, but not billions. (Not that that's much consolation).
  - robrenaud 11y ago
    Apparently 107 billion humans have ever lived. 1% of that is greater than a billion. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16870579 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16870579 > here are currently seven billion people alive today and the Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 107 billion people have ever lived. That said, merely being in the top 1% of intelligence doesn't seem to be worthy of the genius title.
    - api 11y ago
      If you are in the top 1% or even 5% you are probably capable of genius things if given the opportunity. The majority never are. Genius is much more common than opportunity.
      - birbal 11y ago
        How do i up vote this. I have the genius but lacking the opportunity i think
    - cba9 11y ago
      > That said, merely being in the top 1% of intelligence doesn't seem to be worthy of the genius title. Especially considering that the population average in many places and times is far below the current population averages normed in the USA and UK and Western Europe. If you asked how many people throughout history or globally would be in the top 1% of the USA/UK/WE population, the answer will be much smaller than a billion. (Thin tails strike again.)
- bedhead 11y ago
  I believe IQ is actually logrythmically distributed.
- eru 11y ago
  > IQ is normally distributed, [...] But only by definition. IQ tests are graded on a scale.
oneJob 11y ago
Or not even geniuses, just talented individuals. A very small percentage of people have the luxury to do 1) what they enjoy and are motivated by or 2) what they are good at. We are all, as a society, worse off when we keep massive swaths of people living on the margin.

mettamage 11y ago

To some I might seem like Captain Obvious, but to me this article gave me a big insight. I mean I know social capital is important. I know it really well. Nevertheless, I didn't know that social capital is that important. Even Einstein needed it. I had no idea. I only thought he stood on the theories of others, but a lot of other people also helped him?! I never knew. How about Stephen Hawking? Did he receive significant help from fellow physicists as well? Are all popular scientists not lone geniuses? Are they all, for lack of a better term, group geniuses?

vacri 11y ago
It's very difficult to get to the cutting edge of a field without learning from (or with) other people in that field.
sholanozie 11y ago
The big lie sold to us is that there is such a thing as a "self-sufficient" man. The people who make it the furthest are the people with the most extensive and powerful networks.

Theodores 11y ago

The artist Damien Hirst does not make any of his own work, he has a team that do all that for him. Nonetheless, everything out his studio is 'by Damien Hirst' as in the artist, not one of his 'artworker' collaborators or business managers. I wonder if one could work as a scientist or an inventor like that? Which inventors, e.g.Edison, actually did? The art movement of the 'Blair era' could be described with only the names of half a dozen Hirst type artists mentioned, yet all those names have teams of helpers. Maybe the invention scene a hundred years ago was like that to a certain extent?

psuter 11y ago
Arguably, most professors run their labs in the same way Damien Hirst runs his studio, focusing on "design" and "sales".

cubano 11y ago

Einstein's big year was 1905, not 1915, and the four (five?) papers he produced during that year (one of which won him a Nobel) could easily be described as the work of a "lone genius." He did most of work of that year while working, of course as we all know, as a patent clerk. Obviously, no one lives in a vacuum, and all legendary geniuses stand on the shoulders of other giants, but I can't help but think this article somewhat misrepresents the reality of Einstein's world-changing contributions. [edits]

rewqfdsa 11y ago
It's part of a larger push toward revisionist history in general. It's no longer correct to imagine that great people moved history through inspiration and force. Now, everything is cooperative, gradual, social, and voluntary. Today's archaeologist might find the remains of a burned city littered with arrowheads and skulls and say, "There was no invasion! This was clearly just theater!" You might see an entire civilization wiped out, a language made extinct, a change in religious idols, and a sudden decrease in the sophistication and production of pottery, and the conclusion has to be "Oh! The people of this region voluntarily absorbed the language and practice of their neighbors" and not the fucking obvious conclusion "They were wiped out and replaced." And now, there are no inventory, no inspired people, just groups and systems that at some place and time happened to squirt out relativity.
- forgingahead 11y ago
  I wish I could upvote this again. There is definitely this shift in the understanding of the world, and I believe it stems from an unwillingness to accept the cruelty of life. Accepting the harshness of the world and of human nature means also accepting the need to act in ways to survive and thrive in such an environment. Standards, dare I say virtues, have fallen to the wayside in pursuit of an easy, sedentary acceptance.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - 11y ago

sriku 11y ago

What Einstein and others contributed towards GR in a decade is now generally taught in one semester of grad school physics. Ruling out the possibility that grad students are today >20x intelligent than Einstein, and considering that Einstein needed no more experimental results than already available to everyone in 1905, the emphasis ought not to be as simplistic as "lone genius", but on his perseverance and nose for an interesting problem, enduring all the false twists and turns that exploring one entails. I believe this is the general trait of who we recognize as great minds.

visakanv 11y ago
He said it himself. "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious."
- lucozade 11y ago
  I believe he was mistaken. His talent was to be able to get to the heart of a problem. To find the connection everyone else had missed, or that everyone else had missed the significance of: the constancy of c, mass-energy equivalence, the Equivalence principle. That's a pretty rare skill and, in my opinion, qualifies as genius. In terms of what I guess a lot of students see i.e. the field equations, then sure, he was a decent mathematician but no Gauss or Cauchy. He took time and needed help to get to the necessary machinery for GR. But that doesn't, in my eyes, in anyway diminish what was an astonishing intellectual feat. So no, he wasn't a lone genius but he was a genius.
  - visakanv 11y ago
    Why not both? Isn't it possible that it was his passionate, persistent curiosity that allowed him to get to the heart of problems, see what everyone else missed, etc?
    - philh 11y ago
      If so, then his passionate, persistent curiousity should be counted as a special talent. The fact is that not many people could have done what Einstein did. Whether it was genius or curiousity or stubbornness, the puzzle pieces were known to many people and he was the first to solve them.[1] For him to dismiss himself as having "no special talent" - that seems to be implying that just about anyone could have done it. It's a kind of modesty that we seem to reward, as a culture, but I dislike it. If Einstein had no special talent, then what of the people before him? Were they doing something wrong? [1] I'm not sure how long the world had to produce an Einstein, before it produced Einstein. Perhaps there were only a few dozen people who saw the puzzle pieces before Einstein did. That still leaves him in the top tier, but perhaps not the top tier of the top tier.

danharaj 11y ago

Einstein being a socialist and all around lover of human beings probably would agree. His letters to people like Levi-Civita make that clear. There are very few hermit geniuses. Whom we consider geniuses now were often gregarious individuals who mixed themselves up with others. An individual can only be as great as the communities that nurture them. We all rely on others to guide us towards truth and away from error. http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.4305 http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.4305 Before developing his 1915 General Theory of Relativity, Einstein held the "Entwurf" theory. Tullio Levi-Civita from Padua, one of the founders of tensor calculus, objected to a major problematic element in this theory, which reflected its global problem: its field equations were restricted to an adapted coordinate system. Einstein proved that his gravitational tensor was a covariant tensor for adapted coordinate systems. In an exchange of letters and postcards that began in March 1915 and ended in May 1915, Levi-Civita presented his objections to Einstein's above proof. Einstein tried to find ways to save his proof, and found it hard to give it up. Finally Levi-Civita convinced Einstein about a fault in his arguments. However, only in spring 1916, long after Einstein had abandoned the 1914 theory, did he finally understand the main problem with his 1914 gravitational tensor. In autumn 1915 the G\"ottingen brilliant mathematician David Hilbert found the central flaw in Einstein's 1914 derivation. On March 30, 1916, Einstein sent to Hilbert a letter admitting, "The error you found in my paper of 1914 has now become completely clear to me".

tiatia 11y ago

in 1881: m=E/c^2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hasen%C3%B6hrl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hasen%C3%B6hrl Einstein: E=m x c^2

saiya-jin 11y ago
quoting your own link: ... However, Max von Laue quickly rebutted those claims by saying that the inertia of electromagnetic energy was long known before Hasenöhrl, especially by the works of Henri Poincaré (1900) and Max Abraham (1902), while Hasenöhrl only used their results for his calculation on cavity radiation. Laue continued by saying that credit for establishing the inertia of all forms of energy (the real mass-energy equivalence) goes to Einstein, who was also the first to understand the deep implications of that equivalence in relation to relativity.

thelastguy 11y ago

Reminds of me the series Connections, where, no one man invented/created/discovered something all by himself. It was more of like, the thing of one man lead to this other thing of this other man, while this third man over here is also doing this other thing, and then bam! Something new and revolutionary that changed mankind for ever. Pete and repeats.

aschreyer 11y ago

Einstein's most genius insight was probably not to make any initial assumptions and simply to follow his thought experiments regardless of the outcome (even if they contradicted contemporary dogma). The idea that time is not constant and space can be bend was certainly genius and as far as I know rejected by others who thought the maths must be wrong. He certainly relied on others for the mathematical foundation but he always mentioned that. Science even today is strongly ego-driven and he surely had the personality to take on the other scientists of his time.

acqq 11y ago

Also worth mentioning, general relativity appeared to violate the conservation of energy until Emmy Noether's contribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether "Noether was brought to Göttingen in 1915 by David Hilbert and Felix Klein, who wanted her expertise in invariant theory to help them in understanding general relativity, a geometrical theory of gravitation developed mainly by Albert Einstein. Hilbert had observed that the conservation of energy seemed to be violated in general relativity, due to the fact that gravitational energy could itself gravitate. Noether provided the resolution of this paradox, and a fundamental tool of modern theoretical physics, with Noether's first theorem, which she proved in 1915, but did not publish until 1918."

no1ne 11y ago
Also worth mentioning is that feminists said Mileva Maric, his wife was the real credit behind his work and PBS even aired a documentary (which just shows how even documentaries are biased), until the back-lash from the scientific community dismantled this fantasized myth.
- acqq 11y ago
  Maric story is irrelevant in relation to Noether, I don't know why it's brought up, because: Emmy Noether really did this, it was really a big thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem Certainly not a myth.
  - no1ne 11y ago
    Just stating another thing worth mentioning.. that is all :)

khattam 11y ago

I don't know much about physics but I always thought that he was popular ONLY because he was a "Jewish German".