8 ms·

How did Einstein Think?

159 points by srsamarthyam 12y ago

johnchristopher 12y ago
Off-topic: That's a bizarre layout.
- spenuke 12y ago
  It's for this antiquated technology called a "book", where you lay out every other page to the right or left, respectively, to account for this thing that people once called a "margin".
  - elberto34 12y ago
    no need to be a condescending about it
  - cbd1984 12y ago
    That isn't what's bizarre about it.
- leeoniya 12y ago
  the random pink highlighting is bizarre
maskedinvader 12y ago
For someone who recently read a lot about Einstein and his work and learn what his theory actually accomplishes, this was a great read. I am glad I took 15 minutes of my time to read this paper. Personally I feel it sucks that almost every educated person can recollect his famous equation but a small fraction actually know what it is all about and how his work changed our understanding of space and time. I recommend anyone interested to learn more can check out this book by Author James Malcolm Bird , its on amazon [1] and free on google play [2]. [1] - http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Theories-Relativity-And-Gravitation/dp/116462959X http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Theories-Relativity-And-Grav... [2] - https://play.google.com/store/books/details/James_Malcolm_Bird_Einstein_s_Theories_of_Relativi?id=7e85AAAAMAAJ https://play.google.com/store/books/details/James_Malcolm_Bi... edit: for formatting
- js2 12y ago
  You might also appreciate this whimsical approach to Einstein's work: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%27s_Dreams http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%27s_Dreams
  - theoh 12y ago
    Or even http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html
- keithpeter 12y ago
  I particularly liked the contrast between the algebraic and geometrical views of the world. The simple illustration of a 'singularity' arising from the slope of a vertical line (y = mx+c with m=infinity) compared with the geometrical view where such a line is simply a vertical line which can be transformed into any other line by rotating will be useful in teaching!
mbrubeck 12y ago
I love how this paper doesn't overreach, but instead carefully admits what we can and can't conclude from the historical evidence.
peterwwillis 12y ago
"Der Urquell aller technischen Errungenschaften ist die göttliche Neugier und der Spieltrieb des bastelnden und grübelnden Forschers und nicht minder die konstruktive Phantasie des technischen Erfinders" - Albert Einstein https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/einstein/einstein-at-the-patent-office.html https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/einstein/einstein-at-the-pate... "He was denied any teaching position from just about every major University in Europe. This was mostly based on the fact that Albert approached Physics as a "New age day dreamer" (e.g.: thought experiments) rather than primarily from mathematical models or experimental insights. One way he dealt with the rejections was through a discussion group he formed with other workers at the Patent office that he self-mockingly named "The Olympia Academy", which met regularly to discuss science and philosophy. They studied the works of Henri Poincaré, Ernst Mach, and David Hume, which influenced his scientific and philosophical outlook." https://www.quora.com/How-many-patents-did-Albert-Einstein-have https://www.quora.com/How-many-patents-did-Albert-Einstein-h...
- fargolime 12y ago
  > This was mostly based on the fact that Albert approached Physics as a "New age day dreamer" (e.g.: thought experiments) rather than primarily from mathematical models or experimental insights. Remains true today. Certainly no paper consisting only of a thought experiment could get published in a top journal. Many self-described physicists have told me that thought experiments have zero scientific value. Brian Greene who wrote The Elegant Universe says he thinks Einstein's original papers would've been round-filed if submitted today. (And they weren't just thought experiments.) I suspect we know about Einstein today only because of the open-mindedness of Max Planck, who was Einstein's original reviewer.
  - stolio 12y ago
    > Brian Greene who wrote The Elegant Universe says he thinks Einstein's original papers would've been round-filed if submitted today. I'm not sure that tells us very much, the field has changed a lot in the past 110 years. Would other papers of the time be rejected today also? He could have been on par with his peers. I don't think it was his thought experiments so much as predicting the precession of Mercury's perihelion that got everybody's attention. "You have a vivid imagination? We all do, kid." And then "You figured out the Mercury problem?!?!? Tell me about those thought experiments again?"
titzer 12y ago
Like many people, Einstein's life and work has been fascinating to me, but in comparison to other brilliant scientists of the twentieth century, there are at least a handful if not a dozen or couple of dozen people who were and are equally as intelligent, brilliant, and more prolific. That said, I find Einstein-worship annoying. The cultural obsession with Einstein and cult of personality detracts from the reality that scientific achievement, knowledge, intelligence and wisdom all lie on a multi-dimensional spectrum, they aren't innate, and like any skill, mathematics and scientific knowledge can be learned. Even more so to say that there have been other geniuses at least at the level of Einstein who didn't land in the position of theoretical physics that afforded them the same level impact. As for special relativity, based on the development of physics and mathematics of the time 1880-1910, I think it was a toss-up who would have discovered it if Einstein had actually fallen off that mountain in Switzerland in grade school and not been save by his classmate.
- elberto34 12y ago
  yeah, same here. Einstein, through a combination of skill, connections and luck, rose to prominence at a pivotal time in science coinciding with the discoveries of both quantum and macro physics theory, as well as the advanced mathematics needed to describe it. No doubt Einstein was talented and a genius no doubt, but he was by far not the only one, and I'm sure he knew this. Pr ogres in physics has now become so incremental and slow; all the low hanging fruit has long been picked. Einstein seems smarter because he made more progress, but the field was in its infancy compared to today where it's very saturated and difficult.,
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    I'm not sure I'd describe GR and the foundations of QM as 'low hanging fruit.' Einstein seems smarter because he was smarter. He didn't transform one small area of physics, he solved a lot of problems that were out at the edges and introduced new ideas that made them tractable. Of course other people helped, and some of those other people might have created GR eventually. But he was the only one to pull it all together. In physics now there are plenty of people with world-class math talent, but no one with Einstein's intuition, insight, and creativity. Which is why I think progress on the really hard problems has become glacial. Those problems always need deep creative insight, and math alone isn't enough.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
Investigating how a great scientist thought is interesting, but should come with a YMMV warning. We see the same thing in the business press that focuses on "the characteristics of successful CEOs" and the like. The interesting question is not "How many successful people in field X have characteristics Y?" but "How many unsuccessful people in field X also have characteristics Y?" If we don't have an answer to that--and we generally don't, because unsuccessful people are relatively hard to identify compared to the successful ones, and are generally considered a less interesting subject to study--then we can't say much about the degree to which characteristics Y contribute to success in field X. There is no doubt Einstein's doggedness, patience, willingness to learn new methods, physical intuition and deep study of the physics of his time all contributed to his success, but there were likely quite a few people who had similar characteristics. That Einstein succeeded where they did not may be due to various factors, including various forms of luck. As the article suggests, Einstein's strengths were well-suited to the problems he focused on in his early career, and less well-suited to the problems he focused on in his later career. That is a form of luck, albeit a more subtle and powerful one than "his guesses just happened to be right."
etr71115 12y ago
FWIW, Einstein was also an avid musician. In Walter Isaacson's biography, "His Life and Universe", Einstein was caught in the middle of a meal when he began to ruminate on the Theory of Special Relativity. His wife described the next two weeks as a solitary exchange between meditation in his office and fiddling on the piano. He credited music to being a source of inspiration and creativity.
- 6stringmerc 12y ago
  Thanks for sharing; music is a common theme that crosses cultural boundaries yet exists in all cultures. Some of the most interesting research, to me, is how musicians can 'turn off' part of the conscious mind to fully engage in soloing. Harmony is to the beholder, and music is a way to achieve an outward exuberence of that sensation...which is probably why the "Pachebel's Canon" joke about so many pop songs using the same structure and notes keeps holding up year after year haha.
- MaysonL 12y ago
  And also a music teacher. See "The Night I Met Einstein" http://www.rd.com/true-stories/inspiring/the-night-i-met-einstein/ http://www.rd.com/true-stories/inspiring/the-night-i-met-ein... See also previous HN commentary at: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=the%20night%20i%20met%20einstein%2F&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=the%20night%20i%20met%20einste...
- agumonkey 12y ago
  Many big names are so it seems. Here's Minsky and a piano https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnOcjCLTjGc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnOcjCLTjGc . Feynman was also said to enjoy percussion (even though what I saw wasn't paying a great enough tribute to his understanding of physics ;)
  - jobposter1234 12y ago
    Feynman also had a semi-successful career as a local artist in California. He used a pseudonym so as to not let his Nobel fame affect his sales (physicists were big celebrities back then -- many people would have known his name).
heck0045 12y ago
The end of the article laments Einstein's retreat to 'simple mathematics' instead of following Bohr and company toward the complexity of Quantum Mechanics -- but this recent wired article suggests that perhaps Einstein was right all along: http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-reality/ http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-reality/
- renox 12y ago
  No, it is nearly impossible that "Einstein was right all along" in the EPR 'thought experiment' he was convinced that 'local realism' was the answer so the 'spooky action at distance' that QM predicted was wrong, except that all the experiments done so far show the opposite.. In one way, this is also a proof of Einstein's brilliance he was one of the few to understand this implication of QM.. That said, this is really a pity that it took so long between the 'thought experiment' and the real experiment: if the Bell tests experiments could have been done earlier who knows what Einstein would have achieved?
granfalloon 12y ago
"The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought." This is interesting to me. When I'm working on something difficult I often find my thought process to be very "verbal." Kind of like an internal monologue, talking myself through the problem. It's fascinating to think that my mental experience might be so profoundly different from someone else's.
- snarfy 12y ago
  > talking myself through the problem Also interesting is that there must be at least two people to have a conversation. Who's talking and who's listening when talking to yourself? Wouldn't the person listening already know what the person talking is going to say before they say it? Then why have the conversation? If he was imagining particle physics as little billiard balls I'm not sure vocalizing the problem mentally would help. Visualizing it is more helpful.
  - jonsen 12y ago
    Try playing both sides of say a game of chess. I bet if you do it seriously you can't predict the outcome.
- fargolime 12y ago
  Yep, yours is probably different from physicists' mental experiences, not software developers'. One thing I've learned from discussions about physics is that the thought processes that are common to software development are largely foreign in the realm of physics. Take for example Einstein's Relativity of Simultaneity thought experiment. [1] This is akin to discussion about a bug among software developers. Like developers can agree that a bug exists after discussion alone, a software developer could read the thought experiment and conclude there's a bug in physics (i.e. the general consensus at the time). But physicists don't seem to work that way. In discussions with many super smart physics-minded people, I've found that most reject that thought experiment, nay any thought experiment, as having value. Only a mathematically-based argument suffices for them. Imagine showing software bugs only mathematically! [1] In Einstein's words: http://www.bartleby.com/173/9.html http://www.bartleby.com/173/9.html
yodsanklai 12y ago
I once read a crazy but amusing "psychoanalytic" interpretation about Einstein discoveries. His name "Einstein" can be parsed: Ein-s-t-Ein, which can be seen as "one - space - time - one" (ein is german for one). He was predetermined to see space and time as a single thing!

159 points by srsamarthyam 12y ago

johnchristopher 12y ago

Off-topic: That's a bizarre layout.

spenuke 12y ago
It's for this antiquated technology called a "book", where you lay out every other page to the right or left, respectively, to account for this thing that people once called a "margin".
- elberto34 12y ago
  no need to be a condescending about it
- cbd1984 12y ago
  That isn't what's bizarre about it.
leeoniya 12y ago
the random pink highlighting is bizarre

maskedinvader 12y ago

For someone who recently read a lot about Einstein and his work and learn what his theory actually accomplishes, this was a great read. I am glad I took 15 minutes of my time to read this paper. Personally I feel it sucks that almost every educated person can recollect his famous equation but a small fraction actually know what it is all about and how his work changed our understanding of space and time. I recommend anyone interested to learn more can check out this book by Author James Malcolm Bird , its on amazon [1] and free on google play [2]. [1] - http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Theories-Relativity-And-Gravitation/dp/116462959X http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Theories-Relativity-And-Grav... [2] - https://play.google.com/store/books/details/James_Malcolm_Bird_Einstein_s_Theories_of_Relativi?id=7e85AAAAMAAJ https://play.google.com/store/books/details/James_Malcolm_Bi... edit: for formatting

js2 12y ago
You might also appreciate this whimsical approach to Einstein's work: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%27s_Dreams http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%27s_Dreams
- theoh 12y ago
  Or even http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html
keithpeter 12y ago
I particularly liked the contrast between the algebraic and geometrical views of the world. The simple illustration of a 'singularity' arising from the slope of a vertical line (y = mx+c with m=infinity) compared with the geometrical view where such a line is simply a vertical line which can be transformed into any other line by rotating will be useful in teaching!

mbrubeck 12y ago

I love how this paper doesn't overreach, but instead carefully admits what we can and can't conclude from the historical evidence.

peterwwillis 12y ago

"Der Urquell aller technischen Errungenschaften ist die göttliche Neugier und der Spieltrieb des bastelnden und grübelnden Forschers und nicht minder die konstruktive Phantasie des technischen Erfinders" - Albert Einstein https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/einstein/einstein-at-the-patent-office.html https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/einstein/einstein-at-the-pate... "He was denied any teaching position from just about every major University in Europe. This was mostly based on the fact that Albert approached Physics as a "New age day dreamer" (e.g.: thought experiments) rather than primarily from mathematical models or experimental insights. One way he dealt with the rejections was through a discussion group he formed with other workers at the Patent office that he self-mockingly named "The Olympia Academy", which met regularly to discuss science and philosophy. They studied the works of Henri Poincaré, Ernst Mach, and David Hume, which influenced his scientific and philosophical outlook." https://www.quora.com/How-many-patents-did-Albert-Einstein-have https://www.quora.com/How-many-patents-did-Albert-Einstein-h...

fargolime 12y ago
> This was mostly based on the fact that Albert approached Physics as a "New age day dreamer" (e.g.: thought experiments) rather than primarily from mathematical models or experimental insights. Remains true today. Certainly no paper consisting only of a thought experiment could get published in a top journal. Many self-described physicists have told me that thought experiments have zero scientific value. Brian Greene who wrote The Elegant Universe says he thinks Einstein's original papers would've been round-filed if submitted today. (And they weren't just thought experiments.) I suspect we know about Einstein today only because of the open-mindedness of Max Planck, who was Einstein's original reviewer.
- stolio 12y ago
  > Brian Greene who wrote The Elegant Universe says he thinks Einstein's original papers would've been round-filed if submitted today. I'm not sure that tells us very much, the field has changed a lot in the past 110 years. Would other papers of the time be rejected today also? He could have been on par with his peers. I don't think it was his thought experiments so much as predicting the precession of Mercury's perihelion that got everybody's attention. "You have a vivid imagination? We all do, kid." And then "You figured out the Mercury problem?!?!? Tell me about those thought experiments again?"

titzer 12y ago

Like many people, Einstein's life and work has been fascinating to me, but in comparison to other brilliant scientists of the twentieth century, there are at least a handful if not a dozen or couple of dozen people who were and are equally as intelligent, brilliant, and more prolific. That said, I find Einstein-worship annoying. The cultural obsession with Einstein and cult of personality detracts from the reality that scientific achievement, knowledge, intelligence and wisdom all lie on a multi-dimensional spectrum, they aren't innate, and like any skill, mathematics and scientific knowledge can be learned. Even more so to say that there have been other geniuses at least at the level of Einstein who didn't land in the position of theoretical physics that afforded them the same level impact. As for special relativity, based on the development of physics and mathematics of the time 1880-1910, I think it was a toss-up who would have discovered it if Einstein had actually fallen off that mountain in Switzerland in grade school and not been save by his classmate.

elberto34 12y ago
yeah, same here. Einstein, through a combination of skill, connections and luck, rose to prominence at a pivotal time in science coinciding with the discoveries of both quantum and macro physics theory, as well as the advanced mathematics needed to describe it. No doubt Einstein was talented and a genius no doubt, but he was by far not the only one, and I'm sure he knew this. Pr ogres in physics has now become so incremental and slow; all the low hanging fruit has long been picked. Einstein seems smarter because he made more progress, but the field was in its infancy compared to today where it's very saturated and difficult.,
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  I'm not sure I'd describe GR and the foundations of QM as 'low hanging fruit.' Einstein seems smarter because he was smarter. He didn't transform one small area of physics, he solved a lot of problems that were out at the edges and introduced new ideas that made them tractable. Of course other people helped, and some of those other people might have created GR eventually. But he was the only one to pull it all together. In physics now there are plenty of people with world-class math talent, but no one with Einstein's intuition, insight, and creativity. Which is why I think progress on the really hard problems has become glacial. Those problems always need deep creative insight, and math alone isn't enough.

tjradcliffe 12y ago

Investigating how a great scientist thought is interesting, but should come with a YMMV warning. We see the same thing in the business press that focuses on "the characteristics of successful CEOs" and the like. The interesting question is not "How many successful people in field X have characteristics Y?" but "How many unsuccessful people in field X also have characteristics Y?" If we don't have an answer to that--and we generally don't, because unsuccessful people are relatively hard to identify compared to the successful ones, and are generally considered a less interesting subject to study--then we can't say much about the degree to which characteristics Y contribute to success in field X. There is no doubt Einstein's doggedness, patience, willingness to learn new methods, physical intuition and deep study of the physics of his time all contributed to his success, but there were likely quite a few people who had similar characteristics. That Einstein succeeded where they did not may be due to various factors, including various forms of luck. As the article suggests, Einstein's strengths were well-suited to the problems he focused on in his early career, and less well-suited to the problems he focused on in his later career. That is a form of luck, albeit a more subtle and powerful one than "his guesses just happened to be right."

etr71115 12y ago

FWIW, Einstein was also an avid musician. In Walter Isaacson's biography, "His Life and Universe", Einstein was caught in the middle of a meal when he began to ruminate on the Theory of Special Relativity. His wife described the next two weeks as a solitary exchange between meditation in his office and fiddling on the piano. He credited music to being a source of inspiration and creativity.

6stringmerc 12y ago
Thanks for sharing; music is a common theme that crosses cultural boundaries yet exists in all cultures. Some of the most interesting research, to me, is how musicians can 'turn off' part of the conscious mind to fully engage in soloing. Harmony is to the beholder, and music is a way to achieve an outward exuberence of that sensation...which is probably why the "Pachebel's Canon" joke about so many pop songs using the same structure and notes keeps holding up year after year haha.
MaysonL 12y ago
And also a music teacher. See "The Night I Met Einstein" http://www.rd.com/true-stories/inspiring/the-night-i-met-einstein/ http://www.rd.com/true-stories/inspiring/the-night-i-met-ein... See also previous HN commentary at: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=the%20night%20i%20met%20einstein%2F&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=the%20night%20i%20met%20einste...
agumonkey 12y ago
Many big names are so it seems. Here's Minsky and a piano https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnOcjCLTjGc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnOcjCLTjGc . Feynman was also said to enjoy percussion (even though what I saw wasn't paying a great enough tribute to his understanding of physics ;)
- jobposter1234 12y ago
  Feynman also had a semi-successful career as a local artist in California. He used a pseudonym so as to not let his Nobel fame affect his sales (physicists were big celebrities back then -- many people would have known his name).

heck0045 12y ago

The end of the article laments Einstein's retreat to 'simple mathematics' instead of following Bohr and company toward the complexity of Quantum Mechanics -- but this recent wired article suggests that perhaps Einstein was right all along: http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-reality/ http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-reality/

renox 12y ago
No, it is nearly impossible that "Einstein was right all along" in the EPR 'thought experiment' he was convinced that 'local realism' was the answer so the 'spooky action at distance' that QM predicted was wrong, except that all the experiments done so far show the opposite.. In one way, this is also a proof of Einstein's brilliance he was one of the few to understand this implication of QM.. That said, this is really a pity that it took so long between the 'thought experiment' and the real experiment: if the Bell tests experiments could have been done earlier who knows what Einstein would have achieved?

granfalloon 12y ago

"The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought." This is interesting to me. When I'm working on something difficult I often find my thought process to be very "verbal." Kind of like an internal monologue, talking myself through the problem. It's fascinating to think that my mental experience might be so profoundly different from someone else's.

snarfy 12y ago
> talking myself through the problem Also interesting is that there must be at least two people to have a conversation. Who's talking and who's listening when talking to yourself? Wouldn't the person listening already know what the person talking is going to say before they say it? Then why have the conversation? If he was imagining particle physics as little billiard balls I'm not sure vocalizing the problem mentally would help. Visualizing it is more helpful.
- jonsen 12y ago
  Try playing both sides of say a game of chess. I bet if you do it seriously you can't predict the outcome.
fargolime 12y ago
Yep, yours is probably different from physicists' mental experiences, not software developers'. One thing I've learned from discussions about physics is that the thought processes that are common to software development are largely foreign in the realm of physics. Take for example Einstein's Relativity of Simultaneity thought experiment. [1] This is akin to discussion about a bug among software developers. Like developers can agree that a bug exists after discussion alone, a software developer could read the thought experiment and conclude there's a bug in physics (i.e. the general consensus at the time). But physicists don't seem to work that way. In discussions with many super smart physics-minded people, I've found that most reject that thought experiment, nay any thought experiment, as having value. Only a mathematically-based argument suffices for them. Imagine showing software bugs only mathematically! [1] In Einstein's words: http://www.bartleby.com/173/9.html http://www.bartleby.com/173/9.html

yodsanklai 12y ago

I once read a crazy but amusing "psychoanalytic" interpretation about Einstein discoveries. His name "Einstein" can be parsed: Ein-s-t-Ein, which can be seen as "one - space - time - one" (ein is german for one). He was predetermined to see space and time as a single thing!