How Did Einstein Think? | Hacker News Reader

How Did Einstein Think?

pitt.edu

90 pointswsieroci63 comments

Einstein's genius wasn't genesis nor synthesis. His genius was hard work.

http://quantumrelativity.calsci.com/Relativity/Chapter1.html

Georg Riemann lived in Germany from 1826 until 1866. He was Gauss' last and most famous student. To finish his doctoral degree, in 1854 Riemann was required to give a lecture. Gauss asked him to lecture on geometry. In this single lecture, Riemann laid almost all of the mathematical foundation for Einstein's General Relativity. Riemann went on to become an important mathematician, but did little work on curved spaces after this one lecture.

Einstein took 8 years in a boring patent office to understand what Riemann did in a lazy afternoon.

"Staircase wit": http://mathpages.com/rr/s1-07/1-07.htm

Taking a close look at Einstein's work (which that book as a whole does a great job of) shows that certainly, Einstein was surrounded by the tools necessary to do the job (Lorentz, Reimann, Minkowski), some dating back decades... and yet, he is the one who actually used them correctly. It obviously was not an "obvious" synthesis, and in the end I do not think we can come to any other conclusion than that Einstein still did something genuinely important and interesting. It simply wasn't in the vacuum that the popular understanding has it to be, but that's hardly surprising.

Einstein wasn't the guy perspiring in the laboratory doing the hard experiments, like, say, Bohr. I think he was the first to admit this. But he was a superlative connector of dots. Another example of dot-connecting was Watson and Crick, who used the tactic to "steal" the Nobel, after Rosalind Franklin's exacting hard work in the lab had laid the perfect foundation. In the case of Einstein, at least, lightening kept striking again and again. He's a great inspiration to everyone that would rather work smart than hard.

What about all the others, namely Planck? Mach? Doppler? The geologists doing seismology int the era (namely, same university)?

It was the spirit of the times (zeitgeist), for which he successfully claimed credit for through tedious propaganda (the old guard deceased with time, which also helped "new physics" to emerge)

I am at a loss as to how you seem to have read my first sentence, which named names of people who created various tools, as another claim that Einstein invented this all on his own.

It was not the spirit of the times. The spirit of the times was still grappling with some sort of absolute reference frame. If it was the "spirit of the times" it would have been discovered about 20 years earlier. It wasn't.

All Einstein did was apply the Pythagoras theorem properly to the problem, changing it a bit to properly fit the problem. He found that the correct formula was actually quite simple, differing only by a sign from Pythagoras' theorem.

And so Plato was right. "God geometrizes continually"

I would expand that to hard work on important problems. Many scientists worked as hard as Einstein, but few stuck to the major problems as much as he did. After years of no progress most people will opt to solve an easier, lower-priority problem than continue working on a difficult but important one. A good essay on this is Richard Hamming's You and Your Research[0].

A good set of articles focused on the practical issue of overcoming the tendency to focus on easy problems is Eliezer Yudkowsky's Challenging the Difficult series[1].

I particularly like the phrase "Shut up and do the Impossible!" I have found this highly effective in getting myself to work on hard problems (here I'm defining "hard" as problems where my initial reaction is "that's impossible!", or something similar.)

[0]: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

[1]: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Challenging_the_Difficult

I wonder if this focus on tackling hard problems - problems which had the potential to end up being downright unsolvable and a waste of time - might have been facilitated by the fact that he was a clerk in a patent office and had, so to speak, nothing to lose. If he had wasted 8 years, so what? It would not have made his situation any worse.

Whereas an acknowledged figure in the academia needs to defend status and name and function. So they are perhaps less motivated to deal with bet-the-farm ideas.

Exactly right. Einstein had no disincentive from taking on the hardest problems, since he had no responsibility to show results.

On the other hand, Einstein had no direct incentive to work on physics at all. He had a restless mind, and was in some ways fortunate to be thinking compulsively about the right problems at the right time.

That is a very unfair comparison. Riemann discussed these topics in an afternoon after having worked on them beforehand. Additionally, Einstein wasn't working on the math that whole time, he was pondering through the physics/math together. He wasn't solely trying to understand Riemann's lecture.

What happens in HN with this bashing of famous scientists who have a lot of merit?

In the reverse I can say that nowadays a PhD in math can know more and in much less time than Newton on calculus. Or, I can also say that software engineering can do amazing things without needing to know how a transistor works.

Cleverly disguised trolling scattered with obscure facts is an easy way to gain attention and score karma.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1998-05-17/

Can you please elaborate? I have serious problems trying to understand comics.

The comic is about a person who isn't intelligent, but combines big words and random trivia to sound intelligent, which satisfies his ego.

And how is it related to my comment?

I'm trying self-depreciate, but apparently I'm inadvertently simultaneously obtuse.

This sounds very misleading, Riemann was no lesser genius than Einstein, what in the end became this mentioned lecture was certainly not done in a "lazy afternoon" and in fact the paper of his based on this lecture started a major revolution in geometry and is considered to be one of the most important papers ever in this branch of mathematics. What more would you expect? Riemann wasn't a physicist...

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Riemann#Euclidean_geom...

In 1853 Gauss asked his student Riemann to prepare a Habilitationsschrift on the foundations of geometry. Over many months, Riemann developed his theory of higher dimensions and delivered his lecture at Göttingen in 1854 entitled Über die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen ("On the hypotheses which underlie geometry"). When it was finally published in 1868, two years after his death, the mathematical public received it with enthusiasm and it is now recognized as one of the most important works in geometry.

By the way, read this paper of his. It has very little formalism, doesn't presume a lot of background knowledge and contains many brilliant insights.

http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~misha/ReadingSeminar/Papers/Riemann54...

It's a bit of a cliche that the best ideas are obvious in retrospect, isn't it?

The photoelectric effect explanation for which he won his prize didn't require any difficult maths.

Einstein's great insight for general relativity was to treat the equivalence of inertial and gravitational acceleration as a physical truth. He did this intuitively, in a lot less time than 8 years.

To work out all the consequences of that, he needed the mathematical tools that Riemann (and others) had previously invented. It took so long because, and he said himself, Einstein was not great at advanced math.

He needed the math to chase down all the implications, but the insight was not based on Riemann's work.

Reminds me of this Gladwell New Yorker article of Early and Late Bloomers: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_... (posted originally in another thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5737724)

It's odd to me that we don't study creative thinking more. When it comes to technical details, we've got it covered; you can find hundreds of textbooks on any given field, from the arts to the sciences. But the mysterious step that actually lets you recombine that knowledge into new ideas is usually shrugged off as "hard work" or "inspiration".

On the other hand, I suppose it's a pretty difficult question to answer. If you were to ask a musician how they compose their music, they would probably talk about scales and chord progressions and improvisation. But the true answer involves a whole lifetime of experiences and memories, filtered in a specific way through the musician's brain to create certain musical effects, themselves based on years of training. To even talk about that would require a lot of introspection.

What if we could train ourselves to think like Einstein? What would this do for science? What about Mozart and music?

This is true. I got interested in music, wanted to compose electronic music of my own. I went on to read several books about music theory and composition. I then realized that composing good music is extremely difficult, and has very little to do with the study of music theory. I believe most musicians sort of have a recipe book of tricks and patterns they discovered, which they combine with some improvisation. These "known recipes" take a long time, lots of practice and experimentation to acquire, and they are what makes an artist's musical style, or flavor, so to speak. No amount of reading about music theory will give you this. Interestingly, programming might be similar in many ways.

People complain when an artist releases an album, and there's only 2 good tunes, the rest are just "filler". People might assume the artist was just lazy or something, couldn't be bothered to put enough work into the album. I think the reason that's so common is that well, it's just that hard to create good music: 2 songs is all the really good music they managed to create in that time. Also makes you appreciate artists who can produce an album full of good tunes, these people are exceptionally gifted.

>What if we could train ourselves to think like Einstein?

The answer is that we can, and the method is right in front of us: Mathematics. Though many people have either forgot or never understood it, there's a good reason that math is one of the core subjects we learn. It teaches us to think. Understanding and doing real, advanced, mathematics forces you to think creatively and critically, not to mention reasoning logically. Relentless practice and study of Math creates that creative and critical filter in your brain. In short, it forces you to think.

That's why every time I hear of a teacher teaching math as rote memorization of steps or symbol manipulation with no regard to the structure and meaning of a question or concept, I get physically upset. They're completely taking the thinking out of it. It's like taking a reading class, but only making it a requirement to move your eyes over the words.

It really works me up that the not-so-secret to healthy creative and critical thought is being locked away in the marginalization of students who can't or won't do pointless tasks like factoring polynomials for the sake of knowing the steps. As if that weren't enough, those students then turn into parents and teachers who push on to the next generation the broken concept of math that was fed to them.

What were we talking about again? Oh yeah, math is awesome.

creative thinking is like all creativity: improvisational shift-reduce combinations on memorized patterns. You combine this analytical intelligence with non-trivial amounts of categorical intelligence and a lot of hard work, you get creative thought in a technical field. It's rare because categorical and analytical intelligence are practically independent variables and you need a lot of both, otherwise you're an accountant or a musician/poet.

There is some research starting to be done on this, e.g. this study on what goes on in improv jazz musicians' brains when they are playing: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

I seems like interesting material, but why is it typeset this way?

I was pondering the same thing myself. At points I found it more distracting than anything.

View source. Pretty sure it's hand-written HTML, perhaps based loosely on philg's Software Engineering for Internet Applications reference chapter on HTML: http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/html

I am perhaps a dwindling segment of the population that appreciates the effort.

yep. it's hard to get over the whole typography of this essay. huge Serif fonts, pink background on highlighted terms? multiple narrow columns.. it's like staring at the sun

It seems like if you copy-paste the text into notepad, it pastes correctly.

The layout of the text is peculiar, but I can't say it made me not want to read it.

I figured it was intended to be slides, or printed out on paper.

Perhaps there are/were pictures that aren't loading?

I read your comment before clicking on the link and now it's impossible to read.

I read your comment and now I'm not even clicking the link :)

That's sad and unwarranted

I just finished listening to Walter Isaacson's biography "Einstein" (on CD). What was distinctive about Einstein was not how he thought but what he thought about.

His special theory of relativity is a solution to the contradiction between Newtonian dynamics and the new (at the time) Maxwell's equations of electrodynamics. It was a creative solution to a difficult problem.

Today we have a similar theoretical contradiction between Einstein's General Relativity (large, galactic scale) and Quantum Mechanics (small, sub-atomic scale) but no one is able to reconcile these two theories and it has been shown that, as formulated, they are mathematically incompatible.

For years physicists ignored this problem because satisfying, productive careers in physics could be based on pursuing all the implications of Einstein's ideas and the parallel developments in Quantum Mechanics. This period is now ending and I believe that somewhere in the world is the modern equivalent of a "patent clerk" who is working on a new conceptual approach to physics that will allow the reconciliation of GR and QM.

"For years physicists ignored this problem..."

Physicits have not been ignoring the problem. String theory is but one attempt to solve the problem. Physicists have failed to solve the problem, but that is not the same thing. Look at all the older dates discussed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory#History

(Note I'm not advocating String Theory, just using it to prove my local point here that the problem has not been ignored.)

The context I was referring to was the era soon after the Einstein-Bohr debates culminating in the Copenhagen interpretation of QM. This was an uneasy truce and the attitude at the time was "shut up and calculate" -- meaning shut up about the philosophic meaning and contradictions of the fundamental theories of physics and just apply them or flesh out the implications. This was fine until the late sixties when cosmology and black holes forced the issue of reconciling GR and QM, of which String Theory is one avenue taken.

Personally, I think String Theory is a dead-end. However in my original comment when I wrote that the current theories are incompatible "as formulated", I leave open the possibility that a mathematical reformulation, such as String Theory, may resolve the issues.

Personally, I think the problem will be solved by a new conceptual approach, on the order of Einstein redefining the meaning of space and time. I also think that it will come from someone outside of or on the fringes of mainstream physics, such as Julian Barbour or someone, like Einstein, just starting their career with nothing to lose on taking on such a grand challenge with no guarantee of success.

"Personally, I think the problem will be solved by a new conceptual approach,"

As a computer scientist, I have to admit to being partial to more discrete theories like loop quantum gravity. But whereas I'm willing to stick my nose into some science's business and declare they're all Doing It Wrong, this is not one of them. String theory is often criticized for having a lot of predictions and not much evidence, but I think that to be fair, that's true of all the competition, too. There just isn't enough evidence right now.

I think it's likely that relativity and quantum mechanics will be reconciled by an information-centric theory--which could easily come out of computer science.

We call some patterns of energy "information" (like an algorithm) and other patterns of energy "matter" (like a proton). It seems to me that the recent mathematical study of information could be extended to cover matter as well.

Information theory is also a much younger branch of study than physics, which would seem to indicate a longer runway for fundamental discoveries and applications.

We still have patent clerks.

Who is Edward Whitten?

This professor also has a book called "Einstein for Everyone", available for free online here:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/

On the subject of relativity I can recommend the "ABC of Relativity" by Bertrand Russell. After reading I can't say I really grok relativity but I can at least give a decent explanation.

Unfortunately I can not find a free version of this one but it should not cost much.

perhaps not.

“I treat my wife as an employee whom I cannot fire.”- A.E.

Perhaps not what? The OP didn't mention anything that "perhaps not" would even be remotely warranted as an answer to.

It sounds like you were just looking for an opportunity to discredit the guy and got tired of waiting.

What is your quarrel with Einstein? You're not adding much to the conversation in this way.

I don't think we should idolize him for everyone to follow. The quote comes from him, not me -- which makes your downvote revealing.

But please, do not believe a word from me. Read the full story and perhaps reconsider your stance on Einstein.

I can't downvote and, in this case, wouldn't do so even if I could. I respect your opinion and I fully agree with you that in the relation with his wife Einstein was no saint.

However, I do not think it is relevant and the quote is also not very obscure. Furthermore, claiming he used tedious propaganda to claim credit is taking it to far without citing sources. I think I would downvote that if I could. From what I've read his insights and work in physics were respected by his peers and revolutionary. So for me how Einstein thought and attacked problems is quite interesting. How he thought about that is something I do want to mimic.

Amazingly this article doesn't mention Immanuel Kant. If you read the autobiographical notes, Kant is the first name that appears. And from there it is quite a different step to the theory of relativity.

This is more important than anything about Yahoo and Tumblr. I read Isaacson's biography in the hopes of extracting the answer to exactly this question. Upon reading it, I found myself enormously relieved that my approach to Project Euler problems, and math and physics problems in general, follows the same form.

This does not seem to be how I approach medical problems. These seem to be quite a bit more like a flow chart, maybe in the best cases it's a Bodie plot.

Research, however, does generally seem to follow this mold a bit better.

That's kind of like asking "how did Bruce Lee fight?" innit?

While most fighters stick with the preset moves they learned in their dojo, Bruce Lee would mix those moves with new moves he created himself. He was so able to understand and control his physical self that he could generate new martial arts moves spontaneously during fights.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeet_Kune_Do

http://www.giagia.co.uk/2010/03/23/ada-lovelace-day-2010/

I've been working through the following book:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Create-Mind-Thought-Revealed/dp/06...

And it has a chapter (2 and 3) on stepping through exactly what algorithms and data structures Einstein used to figure out that time itself slows down for you to explain why traveling at fractions of the speed of light does not change how fast light passes you by. More important than guessing time as the variable property, he was expert at creating experiments to disprove his hypothesis. "If this is the case, we should be able to do this exact experiment to expose the exact value for time dilation as you approach speed of light."

The book is about creating a program which exposes the operating principles of Einstein's neo cortex that can do what Einstein did. To create simplistic models that explain the underlying principles of physics, and has the ability to say: "If we model the phenomenon like such, than we should be able to observe the following phenomenon". Then to go out and perform a test gathering evidence or disproving it. Then brute forcing this process and selecting for the most simple model that explains all available data.

Show all hypothesis that explain all available data, that have not been disproved, sorted by complexity of the model with most evidence collected for it, and least evidence levied against it.

If each of these processes could be automated, we could use the world's supercomputers to crunch out 500 years of physics scientific discovery in a few years.

We can see how Einstein thought through this modern day Einstein: meet Jacob Barnett (aka Einstein), a 14-Year-Old Master's degree student on his way to earning a PhD in quantum physics. Truly a genius.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/11/jacob-barnett-autis...

Did you read OP article even? One of the main ideas is that his 'genius' took years of meticulous work.

He just reminded me of a 'modern day Einstein'. I understand the main point of the article was that Einstein's genius took a lot of hard work, same as the kid. They do have a lot of similarities in their process of acquiring knowledge and understanding.

besides, obtaining a PhD, even at an early age, doesn't make you a genius... well, at least not an Einstein-like genius.

I look at it through the way they both think, how they both process information. He's a pretty interesting kid.

He is in the process of proving Einstein wrong.

Baffling.

Oh god. I am so tired of hearing that bullshit "einstein was wrong" line.

People always toss that around as code for "nyah nyah! I'm even SMARTER than einstein" or "hey guys, physics is in crisis mode because einstein was actually dumb. also, the sky is falling."

Come on. Wrong about "what"? That you CAN'T transform matter into energy? That heavier elements DON'T form as a byproduct of stellar processes? Okay, guy. Go prove that. Or next time be specific about precisely WHAT will be proven wrong.

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