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They forgot one thing. Smart people can sometimes get lost in their own heads and the world passes them by. Look at Einstein. He spent the last half of his care

They forgot one thing. Smart people can sometimes get lost in their own heads and the world passes them by. Look at Einstein. He spent the last half of his career trying in vain to solve the unified field equation theory. During that time the string theory was beginning to take hold but he couldn't see it. I don't know if it's hubris or simple ignorance that causes it but that is the biggest thing that smart people do that regular people would consider stupid.

shib71 16y ago
That isn't a smart-people thing - it's a all-people thing.
wdewind 16y ago
I think it's more the things the cause people to succeed in one way force them to fail in another. If Einstein was equipped to with the attributes that would've made him "see" string theory, he likely wouldn't have necessarily been equipped with the attributes that would've lead to the general theory of relativity. Einstein himself even said (although it's laughably inaccurate) that he wasn't smarter than anyone else, he just stuck with problems longer than other people.
- oliverdamian 16y ago
  I agree. People of the future who are truly going to change the world as we know it have insights and points of view that would not really make sense to us people of today. Some times today's crack-pots are tomorrow's visionaries.
splat 16y ago
Hmm...I may be about to verify the fifth point of the original article, but Einstein died in 1955 and string theory didn't at all start to take hold in the physics community until the 1980s. It's true that he perhaps ignored developments in QFT and QCD, but string theory was a long way off.
kscaldef 16y ago
Keep in mind that 40 years on, it's still not clear that string theory has any value as a scientific theory.
logjam 16y ago
/s/string theory/quantum mechanics/g Einstein had a difficult time accepting parts of quantum theory, but I don't think you can say "the world passed him by". He was generating fruitful scientific ideas well into his 60s, if not until his death 1955 at age 76 (and some would argue, as would I, that his contributions to ethics and political thought much later in his life were as important as much of his science). For example, in response to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, Einstein, Boris Pololsky, and Nathan Rosen devised troubling thought experiments into the late 1930s (the "EPR paradox"), which, while surprisingly not coincident with experiment, led to such famous results as Bell's Theorem...called by some among the most profound ideas in science. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bells_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bells_theorem I don't believe many of Einstein's biographers accused him of hubris...or of simple ignorance.
joelrunyon 16y ago
I don't know that regular people would consider someone not figuring out string theory "stupid." Sure, I can watch a 2 minute YouTube video on it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B0Kaf7xYMk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B0Kaf7xYMk - but, that doesn't mean I consider anyone that doesn't "get it" immediately stupid. That line of thinking seems very...well...stupid.

shib71 16y ago

That isn't a smart-people thing - it's a all-people thing.

wdewind 16y ago

I think it's more the things the cause people to succeed in one way force them to fail in another. If Einstein was equipped to with the attributes that would've made him "see" string theory, he likely wouldn't have necessarily been equipped with the attributes that would've lead to the general theory of relativity. Einstein himself even said (although it's laughably inaccurate) that he wasn't smarter than anyone else, he just stuck with problems longer than other people.

oliverdamian 16y ago
I agree. People of the future who are truly going to change the world as we know it have insights and points of view that would not really make sense to us people of today. Some times today's crack-pots are tomorrow's visionaries.

splat 16y ago

Hmm...I may be about to verify the fifth point of the original article, but Einstein died in 1955 and string theory didn't at all start to take hold in the physics community until the 1980s. It's true that he perhaps ignored developments in QFT and QCD, but string theory was a long way off.

kscaldef 16y ago

Keep in mind that 40 years on, it's still not clear that string theory has any value as a scientific theory.

logjam 16y ago

/s/string theory/quantum mechanics/g Einstein had a difficult time accepting parts of quantum theory, but I don't think you can say "the world passed him by". He was generating fruitful scientific ideas well into his 60s, if not until his death 1955 at age 76 (and some would argue, as would I, that his contributions to ethics and political thought much later in his life were as important as much of his science). For example, in response to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, Einstein, Boris Pololsky, and Nathan Rosen devised troubling thought experiments into the late 1930s (the "EPR paradox"), which, while surprisingly not coincident with experiment, led to such famous results as Bell's Theorem...called by some among the most profound ideas in science. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bells_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bells_theorem I don't believe many of Einstein's biographers accused him of hubris...or of simple ignorance.

joelrunyon 16y ago

I don't know that regular people would consider someone not figuring out string theory "stupid." Sure, I can watch a 2 minute YouTube video on it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B0Kaf7xYMk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B0Kaf7xYMk - but, that doesn't mean I consider anyone that doesn't "get it" immediately stupid. That line of thinking seems very...well...stupid.