There is no way that men like Da Vinci and Newton were easy to be around, they were so beyond the norm in intelligence that they probably came off as abrasive and severely arrogant.
It's a bit like the portrayal of Steve Jobs. Sure, I can read testimonies about how he was an asshole - but how would I know for sure?
Also Leonardo was a vegetarian, and that's another data point. It's all based on correlation basically.
Another fun fact from the letters - Newton invited the con artist George Psalmanazar over for lunch at some point circa 1703. Psalmanazar claimed to be a Taiwanese prince but had long blonde hair and a faint French accent. Unclear if Newton was taken in, but Halley was able to stump him with an astronomy-based question. Sounds like something from the Baroque Cycle but it all really happened.
Why would a Taiwanese prince have to be an expert in Astronomy?
Let's not forget that Jobs underwent a surgery to remove the first round of cancer, and then ended up getting a liver transplant (probably because his pancreatic cancer has metastised into this organ as well). Because of the immunosuppressive medication one has to take for the rest of one's life after a transplant, recurring cancer is extremely dangerous because the cancer can grow unbounded.
I don't really see how surgery and a transplant align with "smarter than medicine."
This fashion for conflating intelligence (of all kinds) and egotism is utterly beyond me.
I would beg to differ. Most of the people I know of high intelligence seem to be a jack-of-all-trades, with almost all of them having, if not a heavy love of language, a decent dollop of it.
Ultimately, there is art and creativity in everything, you just need to know where to find it. The type of creativity that creates a stunning artistic composition is the same sort of creativity that creates a masterful Rube-Goldberg system, and the same sort of creativity that creates complex formulas to describe and generalize real life occurrences. Your brain knows the constraints, sub-patterns, and has an array of tools that allow it to intuitively define the form, and you go through processes to fit it.
It's not difficult to come to opinion when you work with programmers :-)
Isn't this analogous to noting that "founding fathers owned slaves!"
http://www.listsofnote.com/2012/04/einsteins-demands.html
No trying to demonize him but this definitely a little unusual.
Keep in mind that often times wives were essentially viewed as property, and subject to extreme (physical) abuse.
And of course that hasn't stopped.
I'm not supporting that behavior, of course.
I guess I can relate to what was happening there, and I can't dismiss the possibility of (extreme) psychological abuse from the other side.
I think Einstein's perceived humility was mostly a consequence of the fact that he was mostly right on everything he said, and people quickly acknowledged as much. Relativity overtook aether theory shockingly quickly for instance. There's the old quote that science progresses one funeral at a time. The meaning there being that people tend to obstinately hold onto past beliefs, so it is frequent that it takes the passing of one generation for progress to be effectively made by another. One of his only views that was not widely accepted was that of his view of quantum mechanics - and that's where his snidery started to emerge. But in other cases having your revolutionary ideas rapidly and universally adopted is going to make it rather easier to speak softly knowing your big stick is certainly up to task. And that's probably one too many quotes for a single post...
> A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...
The dice quote makes more sense when you consider Einstein's personal philosophy, which had led him to discover relativity and aspects of QM. He strongly believed that once you uncover nature's secrets, not only do you understand the universe more, but you see why nothing else could possibly have been the case. Quantum mechanics as it was formulated/interpreted in his time violated this principle, thus he was motivated to look for the deeper secret. We're still arguing whether there's something deeper to this day. The particular type of model Einstein was exploring may have been dismissed, but you cannot fault his motivation - all physicists need one.