Einstein was no lone genius | Hacker News Reader

Einstein was no lone genius

nature.com

118 pointsetiam61 comments

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.

He said it himself. "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious."

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.

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?

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.

I don't disagree with your thesis, but: understanding a solution to a problem, and coming up with the solution are two vastly different things.

Not unlike P and NP

Exactly.

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.

Yes! It takes the Universe billions of years to produce a cow. It takes that cow less than a year to produce many more cows.

Just one cow actually. If you're lucky you might get twins or three cows in two and a bit years but not many cows. Almost always just one. Sorry to be a pedant ;)

Whoops, I was thinking of puppies when I wrote cow. Need to get more sleep!

While 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.

> 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.

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]

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.

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.

There is no shift. The question of whether individuals are primary influence on events or whether things are "in the air" and thus almost bound to happen (albeit caused by some individual or other) has been kicked around for at least a couple centuries. Napoleon was one of early examples often used. Was he a unique individual who exerted enormous influence on course of world events? Certainly. Were conditions in the world ripe for an individual to exert forces like Napoleon did, and would someone like Napoleon have arisen if Napoleon had never been born? Also, perhaps, yes.

Evidence for the "in the air" version clearly exists in science and mathematics, where progress leads a certain direction, then a particular individual is the one who makes big advance or discovery. Often more than one person is independently making the same advance at the same time. Think of Newton and Leibniz, who independently and at same time developed calculus. Or Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, same thing with theory of evolution. All of these guys did extremely impressive things. But do you really think nobody else would have developed calculus or discovered evolution if these guys had all died in childbirth?

I'm not saying all advancements are 100% "in the air" and that individuals basically do nothing. But, certainly, for many of these individuals -- who we (rightfully) revere -- the same advancements (or discoveries, or destruction, or whatever) would have been accomplished by someone else if they had never been born.

Right, but the conditions being ripe for a Naploean still requires Napolean. Saying that "the time was such that someone like so and so HAD to rise up" is meaningless. Nothing HAS to happen, in the realms of human behavior. People may be likely to do something, or the potential to do a great thing might be more potent at one point in time than another, but that potency still requires an efficient cause to become real. People with vision and talent and will can, and do, and have been changing the world.

If you're interested in a smarter man than me going on about this idea, I suggest you read the Foundation series by Issac Asimov.

Perhaps the conditions being ripe for Napoleon require a Napoleank not the Napolean, which is the crux of this individual vs circumstances debate. The interesting question is whether Napoleon (or Hitler or Stalin) was a unique individual necessary for the progression of events we call history or could that role have been fulfilled by another narcissistic, paranoid egomaniac (which Napolean, Hitler, and Stalin arguably were)? Was it fate, random chance, or is it a case of the nature of those randomly in power deciding the destiny of all? We'll probably never know.

Yeah, kind of undecidable, in similar way to nature vs. nurture debate. However, I would say that the case for scientific advancements being "in the air" and nearly inevitable is much stronger than, say, the inevitability of a paranoid egomaniac arising as a leader, rather than a more even-keeled and humane figure. Political action often seems balanced to go either way, for ill or for good, while scientific progress is in comparison mostly in a single direction, onward and upward.

I'd say that the case of scientific, as well as technological 'advancements being "in the air" and nearly inevitable' is much stronger than individuals effecting social changes. For example, Reformation happened not because of Martin Luther per se, but because of printing press that gave common people the Bible, and that spread the Luther's theses around Germany in a matter of weeks, and around the world in a matter of months (arguably, this was one of the first cases of pre-Internet outrage). If you were to remove Luther, a similar movement would likely start anyway, given that it was actually growing elsewhere in parallel! People we name and attribute changes to seem to be just puppets of the circumstances.

EDIT

Scott Alexander covers that one too:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/07/we-wrestle-not-with-fle...

The conditions require someone like Napoleon to be there, which probably applies to many people. The first one to rise up usually wins. You can see it actually pretty clearly in science - multiple independent discoveries are more common than not, leading to the conclusion that if you were to kill Einstein in 1904, somebody would have published about relativity and photoelectric effect within a year or three.

An idea who has time has come

I don't know but I used to have a kind of contrarian opinion on early einstein work and I just want to share it for the sake of the discussion. When I was a child and the concept of relativity where explained to me I used to think of einstein has having done something unique in the history of mankind. But the more I started to study and really get soaked in the spirit of the time of the evolution of maths, of physics of other brilliant ideas. the more I came to think of einstein as someone how had a "strategic" action managed to leverage that to the maximum effect. Now in that light he still "qualify" as a genius but not of the lone genius kind. To draw a comparison, I 'll rather put einstein in a "zuckerberg" genius bucket than a "jeff dean" (of google) genius. It's just a picture though, so take it with a grain of salt.

I don't think it's revisionism, more like giving flesh to the skeleton of the popular version of a markable person. No one denies that it was Einstein that published those papers.

History is quite incomprehensible without giving a social context. Genghis Khan could have not conquered without the mongols being trained in hunting and herding, thus leading to the tactics that resulted in overwhelming victories.

Einstein could not have written the papers he did without the corpus of the scientific knowledge and the people around him. It was his will that drove him forwards but to truly undertsand his conditions better we need the historical context.

Maybe a stone age Einstein would have invented bronze. Who knows. But, theory of relativity even as a concept would have been beyond incomprehensible.

People do not exist in a vacuum. The social context is the ocean, the individual is the surfer on the waves. Individual impetus drives the person forwards but if the weather is not agreeable to his ambitions he cannot surf.

His work on the photoelectric effect is definitely the work of a lone genius. Is it not fair to say though, that for the theory of relativity, he had to collaborate with others? This article seems pretty exhaustive to me.

In 1905 Einstein was not only working as a patent clerk, he was also finishing his PHD thesis. (He got it for his paper on Brownian motion.) The other two papers, special relativity, for which he is famous, and the photo electric effect, for which he got the Nobel, are actually using the same trick, just take the (already existing) equations seriously. Granted that is the closest to "one weird trick" you will ever see and it is perhaps even more important for modern physics than his tangible contributions, but it is simply not the case that he was working in a vacuum.

> "one weird trick"

Reading this, I couldn't help but think "Maintain correct time in orbit by using this one weird trick discovered by a patent clerk. Click to find out how!"... :)

For the machine learning folks: http://www.oneweirdkerneltrick.com/

> You Only Learn Once: A Stochastic Weight Aggregation approach to Online Regret Minimization

oh cool, this is relevant to my interests, I'm reading papers on monte carlo tree search for adversarial games

wait... what is this? I don't even

"Lone wolf patent clerk rewrites 10 most important physics equations. #7 will shock you!"

"This Lone Pattern Clerk Dozed Off At His Job, Dreaming About Light. You Won't Believe What Happened Next!"

"Newtonians HATE him!"

Yes- 1905 is part of the Annus Mirabilis series because of Einstein's work

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_mirabilis#1905_.E2.80.93...

He married Mileva Marić in 1903, who was also a physicist. At a minimum, she would have been reading his work and giving him feedback.

That really takes away from his "lone genius" status.

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?

It's very difficult to get to the cutting edge of a field without learning from (or with) other people in that field.

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.

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?

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

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

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".

Also worth mentioning, general relativity appeared to violate the conservation of energy until Emmy Noether's contribution:

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."

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.

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

Certainly not a myth.

Just stating another thing worth mentioning.. that is all :)

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.

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.

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

in 1881:

m=E/c^2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hasen%C3%B6hrl

Einstein: E=m x c^2

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

Apparently 107 billion humans have ever lived. 1% of that is greater than a billion.

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.

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.

How do i up vote this. I have the genius but lacking the opportunity i think

> 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.)

I believe IQ is actually logrythmically distributed.

> IQ is normally distributed, [...]

But only by definition. IQ tests are graded on a scale.

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.

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