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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

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"

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.

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)

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