What Life Means to Einstein (1929) [pdf]
saturdayeveningpost.com
saturdayeveningpost.com
Funny to think how this has aged since 1915. Over a century later Einstein is an almost universally known figure. The others on this list are, particularly outside of France, names that I would not expect the median person to be able to say something interesting about.
Of course in the grand scheme of things Einstein was probably more influential, but I was more commenting on the fact that Einstein has become a kind of memetic symbol in himself, a bit like Ché, whereas the others haven’t. (Most people probably can’t even name more than a handful of people from WW1.) Maybe that only happened because his work was so impactful, but does the average person really know much about relativity? I was trying to find a paper that traced how Einstein became synonymous with genius but couldn’t come up with anything.
Not of their impact on world history, no, but we are discussing more how the idea of someone lives on after they are dead and for how long, so maybe in that context it maybe deserves to be dismissed, as in there's a reason those figures are not referenced or talked about as much as Einstein is.
So he certainly had an impact, I’m not sure if I would use the term accomplishment though.
> Our time, he added, "is Gothic in its spirit. Unlike the Renaissance, it is not dominated by a few outstanding personalities. The twentieth century has established the democracy of the intellect. In the republic of art and science there are many men who take an equally important part in the intellectual movements of our age. It is the epoch rather than the individual that is important. There is no one dominant personality like Galileo or Newton".
Now, there was probably a good deal of fake modesty in that statement - he was a fairly dominant personality in the first part of the 20th century. But I suspect a key reason Einstein continues to be a widely recognizable name is that current scientists (physicists etc., those who are most equipped to rank / perpetuate his status) continue being in awe of the singular nature of his contributions, more so than any of the other "greats" of that period.
Why so? He could not have predicted it himself back then, but more than a century later his work would not have been "normalized". There was no subsequent breakthrough in fundamental physics that would somehow link geometry/gravity with the rest of the physics "stuff" (or vice-versa). As he relates in the interview, during that time (1929) he was working on a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism but his language suggests he was not at all confident. Till this day the mental models he introduced to help us grasp the workings of the universe remain a thing apart.
> I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.
Meanwhile, I believe, that you can also be a determinist and believe in free will.
Your Einstein quote above doesn’t necessarily deny free will.
anyway, my own view is that ones belief or disbeleif in free will is predetermined - if one could predict the path of every atom and molecule in the galaxy from the start of time until now, theyd be able to predict what choices a random person would make before the person had decided. for example, being able to predict if someone would read the linked article before commenting on it :-)
Compatibilism is a belief that physical determinism and free will are compatible - e. g. it is predetermined that you will read this article, but it's still an act of free will.
Do you care to elaborate more? I am genuinely curious about your opinions.
Have you read/listened to any of Dr. Robert Sapolsky's material on free will? I am curious what you think of his position on the matter.
Given how often we delegate whatever free will we have, intentionally or otherwise, it's easy to conclude (or at least suspect) that whether or not it exists in the first place simply isn't an interesting or important question. Sure, we might have free will, but if we do it's almost overwhelmed by noise.
As far as Sapolsky goes, it's fine to argue that free will is an illusion. But it doesn't follow that we should stop believing in it. Actually, belief in free will is adaptive. Concepts that follow from free will such as punishment, guilt, blame, etc are extremely effective at promoting pro-social behavior and it's not clear how they could be replaced.
If the universe were not deterministic, for reasons like non-deterministic physics, souls existing, etc. you would potentially see difference between the two as they played out separately.
Another way to think about determinism vs non-determinism is that if something is deterministic, then if you have perfect information about it, you can predict it’s future states exactly. On the flip side, if something is non deterministic, no matter how much information you gather about it, you will never be able to exactly predict its future states (only probabilistically).
Einstein is not so subtly telling us “god doesn’t play dice”, that there are no random physical properties of the universe, and that magic (like souls) doesn’t exist, in his opinion.
Free will means we have a choice in what we do next, but if we go and examine your carbon copy in the other universe you will see they did all of the same things you did. Furthermore if we were granted perfect information about the universe and had a good enough gpu, we could from the physical principles of the universe predict the future state of everything in the universe until the end of time, including all of your future choices, hence no free will.
My thoughts are that people are mixing up the human concept of free will — freedom to make decisions based on how you feel and what you know - with determinism, that the first state of all matter in the universe determined all future states of the universe, and that these are inevitable. The fallacy is that free will in the sense of determinism is only important to human decision making if we have perfect information about the current state of the universe, which we don’t - so until we do, we have to keep guessing what happens next.
That would be logical if we would be a simulation.
https://philpapers.org/archive/PALTKG-5
Nowadays I doubt the average scientist has read the work of any single philosopher to that degree.
> Schopenhauer was well read by physicists, most notably Einstein, Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, and Majorana. Einstein described Schopenhauer's thoughts as a "continual consolation" and called him a genius. In his Berlin study three figures hung on the wall: Faraday, Maxwell, Schopenhauer. Konrad Wachsmann recalled: "He often sat with one of the well-worn Schopenhauer volumes, and as he sat there, he seemed so pleased, as if he were engaged with a serene and cheerful work."
> When Erwin Schrödinger discovered Schopenhauer ("the greatest savant of the West") he considered switching his study of physics to philosophy. He maintained the idealistic views during the rest of his life. Wolfgang Pauli accepted the main tenet of Schopenhauer's metaphysics, that the thing-in-itself is will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer#Influence_...
That's the kind of thinking that could help Einstein formulate an idea of "spacetime"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity:_The_Special_and_th...
It changed everything.
specifically, the hanes ad.. and i wonder why the hanes brand is still around whereas the motor heater brand is not.
and hotel rooms were $3 per night back then.
sure, thats on the lowend for a hotel these days, but i doubt that hotel knickerbocker was giving their best rooms for $3.
At times the going is tough even if you are a physics professor, because Pais accurately captures the process of discovery which was often messy with unfamiliar equations, strange logical jumps, or subtle mistakes.
I would not recommend the book unless you have taken courses in quantum mechanics, statistical physics and general relativity.
(Historically quantum mechanics and statistical physics were developed together, even though now we see one as more fundamental than the other.)
The travel diaries of Albert Einstein
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174419/th...
Abraham Pais wrote also "Einstein Lived Here" a non-scientific biography, but I did not read it.
Because it is making Einstein out to be some sort of rebel like who wants things to be "relative" as if it is a religion or philosophy of some sort.
Relativity is just what he discovered, not some ideology he set out to prove or invented.
Then the author goes on to try and apply this relativity to all aspects of the world, try to make puns on it despite Einstein specifically telling him that it is explicitly only about those physical and mechanical facts.
It is like the whole article author tried to apply this idea in the exact way Einstein was annoyed about, perpetuating the same misunderstanding described.
or one article being split on 5 pages so I can see some ads in-between (not really the author's fault there though).
Ditto for proofs; it's not hard to believe that Albert Einstein could prove a theorem from scratch and end up with a better argument than one found in a previous textbooks.
The fatal flaw in the article, rather, is exemplified by the quote
> With the advent of Einstein, mathematics ceased to be an exact science in the fashion of Euclid.
Which I am in complete disagreement with. Einstein exploited elegant, novel (at the time), anything but inexact mathematical tools for his theory. That the theory posits uncertainty and, well, relativity of real-world phenomena has no bearing on the exactitude of mathematics. If anyone ever put a dent in that, it should be Gödel :)
The discussion's article writes more like The Atlantic or NYMag interview style than AP News or Reuters. Both styles are suitable in my opinion.
What Einstein is credited for is applying all these maths to the real world, coming up with a theory that is based on observations and testable.
"When he ascends to his attic, she does not cling to his coat tails. When he wishes to be alone, she completely eliminates herself from his life. She spares him disharmonious contacts and protects the serenity of his mind with the devotion of a vestal virgin guarding the sacred fire.
It is by no means impossible that with a less-sacrificing mate, Einstein would not have made the discoveries which link his name with the immortals. Thus love, that moves the sun and all the stars, sustains in its lonely path the genius of Albert Einstein."