The life’s work that proved Einstein right | Hacker News Reader

The life’s work that proved Einstein right

bostonglobe.com

96 pointspcl27 comments

Man, the days when a kid without particular academic accomplishment could just be "guided" to MIT by a teacher impressed by his intelligence and passion. Or when a dropout could just wander into a physics lab and land a job as a research assistant. Neither sounds remotely feasible in 2016- these days, the available human potential and ambition outstrips society's resources to actualize it, by an order of magnitude. Coming decades will have to do without their Weisses.

On the other hand, there were the days when you had to be born into the right social caste to have any chance for an interesting life at all, otherwise being doomed to a lifetime of menial labor.

I really do prefer our current situation to 99% of the history of mankind.

Those days are today: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/recruitm...

That was an awesome read. Thanks...

Absolutely true- things are more competitive now in large part because a much larger segment of the population gets a shot at it. I'm not saying things are objectively worse on a social level, far from it... but they were more relaxed. We could have both.

Being at the right place at the right time is one of the most important skills in life.

If you look back at these sorts of places across history, how often did they have systematized gatekeeping? Never. There's no shortage of these places and opportunities for any given field, you just need to cultivate the ability to surface them.

I think you'll find MIT's gatekeeping is extensively systematized. : )

Which is not to say that MIT admissions don't sometimes revolve around human elements, and moreso the process of landing RA positions, but the sheer number of people gunning for these opportunities its its own kind of gatekeeping. These human factors, the networking and outreach and so forth that goes into "surfacing opportunities," are fiercely pursued now, to the point that it becomes another hoop to jump through even past the grades and SATs and internships that we think of as the "system." One can certainly learn to play the game, but it'd be awfully nice if we didn't have to.

I thought about that the other day. Then I realized that the world is changing very fast these days, more likely than not the places that will become influential currently does NOT have any gatekeeper. It's just very tough to realize what they are if you're not used to ignoring social signals.

Think of YC back then in 2006. The main problem is that we only read and know about the path of people 50 years in the past, and nowadays, even 10 years could be too long of a timeframe for that to be applicable.

You still need to be lucky, but I hope it's easier (to be lucky) than we perceive

I worked on LIGO as a graduate student, where I had the privilege of interacting with Rai Weiss. He is a role model for us all: brilliant, hard-working, and human. After he retired from his teaching duties at MIT, he could often be found late at night in the electronics shop of our Louisiana lab, working to eek out a little more sensitivity in the detector, a half decibel by a half decibel. As a graduate student, I appreciated his sincere concern and advocacy for our dissertation work.

He also has wonderful stories from a long career in physics: inventing atomic clocks, launching balloons to map out the cosmic microwave background radiation, being pitched the proposed Space Shuttle program by Werner von Braun himself, serving on the JASON committee... He is probably too modest to write an autobiography, but it would be a captivating tale.

If this article can't be read because of a pop up, just close the tab and open click on the link again.

Why reward the paper (or its advertisers) for abusive practices?

Did somebody hit you over the head with a tent-pole, CamperBob? What abuse are you possibly talking about? This story is a tremendous work of journalism, crafted by an author who really ought to get paid for his work. Or do you work for free too?

If one believes that allowing pop-up ads (in particular, as opposed to ads in general) on one's site to be unethical, then what they said does not seem that unreasonable?

I'm not really agreeing with them, but I don't think their viewpoint is absurd.

It may be overestimating how harmful pop-up ads are, but , it doesn't seem /that/ unreasonable?

Don't you believe that there are degrees of obnoxiousness in advertising?

How would you feel if this tremendous work of journalism was only accessible after filling in a 20 page lifestyle questionnaire? Do you think that's ok if it means they are getting paid for their work?

Alternatively they could choose less obnoxious advertising that still enables them to earn a living without detracting from the reader's enjoyment.

I'd gladly micropay for everything decent I read. Just don't torment me with malspamvertising.

edit - on reflection, it's about the parasitic middlmen as usual. micropayments directly to sites and authors skirts that whole species.

From the official guidelines:

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Cue dang to "detach this thread and mark it off topic." Aaaaany minute now.

To answer your question: yes, I'm paid for my work, but I don't have to harass my customers to make it happen.

Oh, wait. I'm not the customer in this case, am I? I'm the product.

I'm using a default Chrome install and didn't get a pop-up. It was a great article worth reading IMHO.

I wonder if "proving Einstein right/wrong" will still be the #1 clickbait headline for physics articles 100 years from now.

That's a very loaded question in physics circles

Of course -- it would be much more exciting to prove Einstein wrong.

Also, all the press about the detection of gravitational waves "proving Einstein right" is a bit funny in light of the fact that Einstein himself did not initially believe in the existence of gravitational waves.

I never got the reasons for the whole idolization/obsession with Einstein. Seeing all the guys that were his contemporaries - discovering fundamental stuff about the universe was a favorite pastime back then. I guess he was probably the first to break out as a celebrity.

Einstein's modification of Classical Newtonian Physics is still unparalled today.

But this infallible picture of Einstein almost discounts all the work the man put in. Yes, he was extremely intelligent but he also worked hard as hell to learn the mathematics necessary for his work in physics. And it took him years before he dropped the stubborn idea of a static universe because Hubble was able to see the galaxies outside our local group getting further away, an expanding universe no doubt. [1] It does everyone a favor these days, to actually know that Einstein's accomplishments are in reach for many fields like number theory and physics. Intelligence and creativity, an intuition and desire to understand what makes ones' heart/brain/physical body tick. I hate the bastardization of the immense work that Einstein undertook, he didn't just genius out these ideas. He worked for them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant

In his time we also had Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger - whose contributions are as foundational and unparallel too.

But nobody is the media is obsessed with proving Max Planck wrong. Or Schrodinger.

"Will scientists finally prove XXX wrong", XXX is always Einstein.

yes, the others, if Heisenberg (or other German scientists) would be a bit more smarter then WWII may have ended differently and in that new world no one would be praising Einstein, for obvious reasons: http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/8491/did-heisenbe...

>> He was at MIT as an undergrad "for two years before flunking out, losing his way while pursuing a girl he met on a ferry."

Sound like something I would do.

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