4 ms·
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
by 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 agoHe said it himself. "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious."
- lucozade 11y agoI 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 agoWhy 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 agoIf 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.
- LukeShu 11y agoI don't disagree with your thesis, but: understanding a solution to a problem, and coming up with the solution are two vastly different things.
- tomerico 11y agoNot unlike P and NP
- jjbinx007 11y agoExactly. I always thought magic tricks exploited P vs NP... once you know how a trick done it seems obvious, but there are so many things to rule out before you find the right answer.
- visakanv 11y agoYes! It takes the Universe billions of years to produce a cow. It takes that cow less than a year to produce many more cows.
- sriku 11y agoWhile that's true, it's beside the point. In this case, it's all about finding and formulating the problem. The solution is the easier bit. Consider this - how many of us have crossed off "m" on both sides of m d^r/dt^2 = -GMm/r^2 without actually noticing the problem with that? We're equating "mass" as associated with inertia and "mass" as associated with producing the gravitational effect. This is the central point from which pretty much all of GR emerges.
- leni536 11y ago> What Einstein and others contributed towards GR in a decade is now generally taught in one semester of grad school physics. Where? In my university we touch SR in many classes then we have a separate class dedicated to GR. Also the ability to come up with and idea and to understand the given idea is really not the same. The main difference is intuition.