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> He was not particularly fast in his thinking nor was he mathematically gifted. May I suggest that, the media tends to declare someone a genius if his work ca
by nyc111 8y ago
> He was not particularly fast in his thinking nor was he mathematically gifted.
May I suggest that, the media tends to declare someone a genius if his work cannot be understood by laymen. Physicists like Einstein are declared true geniuses because the mathematics they use look mysterious and magical. But anyone can understand Darwin's prose. Personally, I think they are all human and by defining them as genius we deify them.
- whatshisface 8y ago>the media tends to declare someone a genius if his work cannot be understood by laymen That's not particularly true. I don't think there is a single mathematician whose papers are understandable to laypeople (by laypeople, I mean the average person, who remembers some but not all of highschool math). What's really going on here is that Einstein made a tremendous contribution to a tower that was already quite tall, while Darwin's contribution was to the ground floor where everybody could get on. The maths analogy to Darwin would be one of the inventors of Algebra - evolution is taught to children right along with the foundations of math and physics.
- 11235813213455 8y agoNot always understandable by Einstein itself, he got helped by his mathematician friends, like Levi Civita
- nyc111 8y agoTrue. And also he got mathematical help from Marcel Grossmann. Poincare too was doing work on the theory of relativity. Also one of the selling points of relativity in the early days was the difficulty of its math. I think it was Eddington who said that "only three people understood General Relativity."
- nyc111 8y ago>Einstein made a tremendous contribution to a tower that was already quite tall, while Darwin's contribution was to the ground floor where everybody could get on. I see your point, but if Darwin created a new field but Einstein contributed to an existing field, Darwin ought to be considered a greater genius. (Personally, I think it is better not to define anyone as a genius so that we can continue to evaluate their work critically.) I'm saying that we value things we don't understand more than things we do understand.
- zaphirplane 8y agoAfter evaluating their work if deemed so declare them a genius. Some would say that’s already happened
- Reelin 8y ago> That's not particularly true. I don't think there is a single mathematician whose papers are understandable to laypeople I suspect that the media would indeed portray most mathematicians as geniuses, though. In fact most laypeople I know would agree that they were, and I know some fairly well educated laypeople in my opinion. By mathematician, I mean a publishing academic with a PhD in math (or some rough equivalent to that).
- interfixus 8y agoThe prime glory of Einstein's 1905 papers is their accessibility. Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper is famously devoid of footnotes, and contains no insurmountable math. Of course he dashed off another three articles in the same edition of Annalen der Physik, all on the same level of comprehensibility, one of which scored him a Nobel prize. The difficulty of relativity was and is a silly meme. The basic principles are straightforward. I understood them as a boy, and I am - by a regrettably enormous stretch - no genius.
- nyc111 8y agoIf so, we must credit academic scholasticism for turning Einstein's simple theory presented in couple of brief journal articles into a 1,275 page book (over 5 pounds!). If those original papers required such a book to make them intelligible, then I would not call General Relativity a simple theory. The book is of course GR bible Gravitation by MTW. https://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-Charles-W-Misner/dp/0716703440#featureBulletsAndDetailBullets_secondary_view_div_1538902852326 https://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-Charles-W-Misner/dp/07167...
- rstuart4133 8y agoActually I think there is a parallel between Einstein and Darwin, but it's not the brilliance of their thinking. Most of what Einstein came up with is fairly obvious in hindsight. The one thing that wasn't is the math behind General Relativity: but Einstein needed the help of a mathematician with that. What marks them both is their willingness to abandon the established dogma when it didn't match the facts, and to set off exploring alternative ideas. Both of them are iconoclasts: Einstein because he proposed time wasn't absolute, which is a seriously batty suggestion to just about everyone unfamiliar with his work because we are very familiar with how time works here on earth. To me Darwin the more impressive in this regard because his idea wasn't just seriously batty (no one had seen evolution at work when he proposed it, despite living in it's midst) but just putting it out there was enough to get others burned at the stake. Another similarity is neither was your typical extroverted iconoclast. Quite the reverse in fact: they doggedly followed their favoured theories because the felt they did a better job of explaining the facts. Both seemingly didn't care that others would think less of them for their ideas. You can point to others in the same mould: Galileo for instance. The doctor that endured years of ridicule from his peers for suggest gastric ulcers were the result of a bacterial infection is another. Nonetheless Einstein stands out for second reason: he did it more than once.