How did Einstein Think? | Hacker News Reader

How did Einstein Think?

pitt.edu

159 pointssrsamarthyam72 comments

For someone who recently read a lot about Einstein and his work and learn what his theory actually accomplishes, this was a great read. I am glad I took 15 minutes of my time to read this paper. Personally I feel it sucks that almost every educated person can recollect his famous equation but a small fraction actually know what it is all about and how his work changed our understanding of space and time. I recommend anyone interested to learn more can check out this book by Author James Malcolm Bird , its on amazon [1] and free on google play [2].

[1] - http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Theories-Relativity-And-Grav...

[2] - https://play.google.com/store/books/details/James_Malcolm_Bi...

edit: for formatting

You might also appreciate this whimsical approach to Einstein's work:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%27s_Dreams

Or even http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html

I particularly liked the contrast between the algebraic and geometrical views of the world.

The simple illustration of a 'singularity' arising from the slope of a vertical line (y = mx+c with m=infinity) compared with the geometrical view where such a line is simply a vertical line which can be transformed into any other line by rotating will be useful in teaching!

"Der Urquell aller technischen Errungenschaften ist die göttliche Neugier und der Spieltrieb des bastelnden und grübelnden Forschers und nicht minder die konstruktive Phantasie des technischen Erfinders"

- Albert Einstein

https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/einstein/einstein-at-the-pate...

"He was denied any teaching position from just about every major University in Europe. This was mostly based on the fact that Albert approached Physics as a "New age day dreamer" (e.g.: thought experiments) rather than primarily from mathematical models or experimental insights. One way he dealt with the rejections was through a discussion group he formed with other workers at the Patent office that he self-mockingly named "The Olympia Academy", which met regularly to discuss science and philosophy. They studied the works of Henri Poincaré, Ernst Mach, and David Hume, which influenced his scientific and philosophical outlook."

https://www.quora.com/How-many-patents-did-Albert-Einstein-h...

> This was mostly based on the fact that Albert approached Physics as a "New age day dreamer" (e.g.: thought experiments) rather than primarily from mathematical models or experimental insights.

Remains true today. Certainly no paper consisting only of a thought experiment could get published in a top journal. Many self-described physicists have told me that thought experiments have zero scientific value. Brian Greene who wrote The Elegant Universe says he thinks Einstein's original papers would've been round-filed if submitted today. (And they weren't just thought experiments.) I suspect we know about Einstein today only because of the open-mindedness of Max Planck, who was Einstein's original reviewer.

> Brian Greene who wrote The Elegant Universe says he thinks Einstein's original papers would've been round-filed if submitted today.

I'm not sure that tells us very much, the field has changed a lot in the past 110 years. Would other papers of the time be rejected today also? He could have been on par with his peers.

I don't think it was his thought experiments so much as predicting the precession of Mercury's perihelion that got everybody's attention. "You have a vivid imagination? We all do, kid." And then "You figured out the Mercury problem?!?!? Tell me about those thought experiments again?"

If a paper describing the new theory of special relativity would be round-filed today, it tells me that Einstein got lucky. In 1905 he was in the right place at the right time, getting reviewed by Planck, perhaps the only reviewer who wouldn't have summarily rejected the papers. If not for Planck the anomalous perihelion shift of Mercury might well still be a mystery, for Einstein's answer to that came a decade later. Presumably he'd have been ignored if his 1905 papers hadn't already opened the doors to academia.

This might be flippant. If the initial read by an editor resulted in "wow, this is interesting", the lack of citations or the fame of the author is far less relevant. I've reviewed lots of papers that have a mile of citations but lack any spark of inspiration. I'd rather read something that tells me something that I don't know or makes me uncertain of what I think I DO know.

FWIW, Einstein was also an avid musician. In Walter Isaacson's biography, "His Life and Universe", Einstein was caught in the middle of a meal when he began to ruminate on the Theory of Special Relativity. His wife described the next two weeks as a solitary exchange between meditation in his office and fiddling on the piano. He credited music to being a source of inspiration and creativity.

Thanks for sharing; music is a common theme that crosses cultural boundaries yet exists in all cultures. Some of the most interesting research, to me, is how musicians can 'turn off' part of the conscious mind to fully engage in soloing. Harmony is to the beholder, and music is a way to achieve an outward exuberence of that sensation...which is probably why the "Pachebel's Canon" joke about so many pop songs using the same structure and notes keeps holding up year after year haha.

And also a music teacher.

See "The Night I Met Einstein"

http://www.rd.com/true-stories/inspiring/the-night-i-met-ein...

See also previous HN commentary at:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=the%20night%20i%20met%20einste...

Many big names are so it seems. Here's Minsky and a piano https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnOcjCLTjGc . Feynman was also said to enjoy percussion (even though what I saw wasn't paying a great enough tribute to his understanding of physics ;)

Feynman also had a semi-successful career as a local artist in California. He used a pseudonym so as to not let his Nobel fame affect his sales (physicists were big celebrities back then -- many people would have known his name).

Maybe he faked noobness when being Feynman to avoid attracting to much attention.

Investigating how a great scientist thought is interesting, but should come with a YMMV warning. We see the same thing in the business press that focuses on "the characteristics of successful CEOs" and the like.

The interesting question is not "How many successful people in field X have characteristics Y?" but "How many unsuccessful people in field X also have characteristics Y?" If we don't have an answer to that--and we generally don't, because unsuccessful people are relatively hard to identify compared to the successful ones, and are generally considered a less interesting subject to study--then we can't say much about the degree to which characteristics Y contribute to success in field X.

There is no doubt Einstein's doggedness, patience, willingness to learn new methods, physical intuition and deep study of the physics of his time all contributed to his success, but there were likely quite a few people who had similar characteristics. That Einstein succeeded where they did not may be due to various factors, including various forms of luck.

As the article suggests, Einstein's strengths were well-suited to the problems he focused on in his early career, and less well-suited to the problems he focused on in his later career. That is a form of luck, albeit a more subtle and powerful one than "his guesses just happened to be right."

"The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought."

This is interesting to me. When I'm working on something difficult I often find my thought process to be very "verbal." Kind of like an internal monologue, talking myself through the problem. It's fascinating to think that my mental experience might be so profoundly different from someone else's.

> talking myself through the problem

Also interesting is that there must be at least two people to have a conversation. Who's talking and who's listening when talking to yourself? Wouldn't the person listening already know what the person talking is going to say before they say it? Then why have the conversation?

If he was imagining particle physics as little billiard balls I'm not sure vocalizing the problem mentally would help. Visualizing it is more helpful.

Try playing both sides of say a game of chess. I bet if you do it seriously you can't predict the outcome.

Yep, yours is probably different from physicists' mental experiences, not software developers'. One thing I've learned from discussions about physics is that the thought processes that are common to software development are largely foreign in the realm of physics.

Take for example Einstein's Relativity of Simultaneity thought experiment. [1] This is akin to discussion about a bug among software developers. Like developers can agree that a bug exists after discussion alone, a software developer could read the thought experiment and conclude there's a bug in physics (i.e. the general consensus at the time). But physicists don't seem to work that way. In discussions with many super smart physics-minded people, I've found that most reject that thought experiment, nay any thought experiment, as having value. Only a mathematically-based argument suffices for them. Imagine showing software bugs only mathematically!

[1] In Einstein's words: http://www.bartleby.com/173/9.html

Physicists reject that thought experiments have value? I'd say the context in which I most frequently hear the phrase "thought experiment" (or "Gedankenexperiment") is physics! Indeed, that is historically where the term originated. (And we must also consider examples like the very one of Einstein's you pointed out).

I also don't see any reason why thought experiments and mathematical arguments should be thought of as exclusive... I would think an important part of a thought experiment is often its mathematical analysis.

The way I see it, you hear about thought experiments in physics because of Einstein. Because of him they can't avoid giving them some credence. But the odds of a new thought experiment purporting to show a bug in general consensus physics being given consideration today is nil, and I'm talking about before the text is read. Using thought experiments to discuss current physics is fine as a starting point only. For new physics they are junk that immediately labels one as a crackpot.

Until the time of ~Einstein thought experiments were feasible enough because only the intuitive-upon-closer-inspection parts of physics were discovered.

The big problem is that the finer points of the new physics are just straight-forward unintuitive. To understand even quantum physics (which is very basic) on an intuitive level is sufficiently impossible and has baffled the community for some time (see also the resolution[1]). It is however quite possible to develop a good intuition for the maths describing it.

Sadly, the history of thought experiments and these discussions still linger in the vocabulary used to describe the phenomena. Many words are common words that inspire some people to invent their 'intuitive' own version of the theory, based on what the words mean in every-day discourse[2].

[1] http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/l...

[2]http://www.energyhealing-quantumhealing.com/ for a particularly amusing example

Maybe there is no difference. You said when "difficult" you go verbal. Well language, be it natural or math, is the means by which to think rationally and highly conscious. On the ohther hand creative thinking is more done in "pictures". I think they are calles schemas. Einstein said that he first created ideas by thinking physiscs and then rationalised over it by thinking math.

I love how this paper doesn't overreach, but instead carefully admits what we can and can't conclude from the historical evidence.

The end of the article laments Einstein's retreat to 'simple mathematics' instead of following Bohr and company toward the complexity of Quantum Mechanics -- but this recent wired article suggests that perhaps Einstein was right all along: http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-reality/

No, it is nearly impossible that "Einstein was right all along" in the EPR 'thought experiment' he was convinced that 'local realism' was the answer so the 'spooky action at distance' that QM predicted was wrong, except that all the experiments done so far show the opposite..

In one way, this is also a proof of Einstein's brilliance he was one of the few to understand this implication of QM..

That said, this is really a pity that it took so long between the 'thought experiment' and the real experiment: if the Bell tests experiments could have been done earlier who knows what Einstein would have achieved?

Like many people, Einstein's life and work has been fascinating to me, but in comparison to other brilliant scientists of the twentieth century, there are at least a handful if not a dozen or couple of dozen people who were and are equally as intelligent, brilliant, and more prolific.

That said, I find Einstein-worship annoying.

The cultural obsession with Einstein and cult of personality detracts from the reality that scientific achievement, knowledge, intelligence and wisdom all lie on a multi-dimensional spectrum, they aren't innate, and like any skill, mathematics and scientific knowledge can be learned.

Even more so to say that there have been other geniuses at least at the level of Einstein who didn't land in the position of theoretical physics that afforded them the same level impact.

As for special relativity, based on the development of physics and mathematics of the time 1880-1910, I think it was a toss-up who would have discovered it if Einstein had actually fallen off that mountain in Switzerland in grade school and not been save by his classmate.

yeah, same here. Einstein, through a combination of skill, connections and luck, rose to prominence at a pivotal time in science coinciding with the discoveries of both quantum and macro physics theory, as well as the advanced mathematics needed to describe it. No doubt Einstein was talented and a genius no doubt, but he was by far not the only one, and I'm sure he knew this. Pr ogres in physics has now become so incremental and slow; all the low hanging fruit has long been picked. Einstein seems smarter because he made more progress, but the field was in its infancy compared to today where it's very saturated and difficult.,

I'm not sure I'd describe GR and the foundations of QM as 'low hanging fruit.'

Einstein seems smarter because he was smarter. He didn't transform one small area of physics, he solved a lot of problems that were out at the edges and introduced new ideas that made them tractable.

Of course other people helped, and some of those other people might have created GR eventually.

But he was the only one to pull it all together.

In physics now there are plenty of people with world-class math talent, but no one with Einstein's intuition, insight, and creativity.

Which is why I think progress on the really hard problems has become glacial. Those problems always need deep creative insight, and math alone isn't enough.

> In physics now there are plenty of people with world-class math talent, but no one with Einstein's intuition, insight, and creativity.

I think because physics is now an industry in which deep creative insight is pretty worthless. For example, someone who could convince the gov't to award a $10 million grant to seek physical evidence of dark energy is likely going to have more success than a theorist who can show that dark energy is superfluous.

In Einstein's time physics was more like a hobby. An Einstein today, if they started as a patent clerk they'd more likely progress to IT than physics. At least in IT their creativity can be employed.

Not sure why people are always so interested in cutting down other peoples' heroes.

"Oh, Einstein wasn't special, if he didn't get it, the next guy would have. Check out these folks instead." Somehow not sensing the irony that if we all did then worship the other ones you're talking about, you or someone like you would then just make the same claims on those people.. that they're not special, it was about timing and luck.

It's really not about the achievements for some people. (You.) It's just about having a person who only an elite recognizes. You're part of that elite and you're smarter for it because you see this other person's specialness and the rest of the world doesn't and you're better than them for it.

Einstein was great and original and irreplaceable. Your need to have found something better than what the common man worships doesn't make the other heroes you come up with worth any more, or Einstein any less. You just gotta get over it.

No, sorry. It's not about me at all. If I felt like I was special for having different heroes than everyone else then I wouldn't bother trying to draw attention to their accomplishments. It's about our culture's disproportionate focus on one particular person and their contributions to the exclusion of a much more complicated reality.

You know, whether right or wrong in this case, I think you're on to something. As a culture, we do like to focus on singletons - we like the idea of lone geniuses toiling away and changing the world and skip over the amount of team-work/collaboration that goes into real advances.

So I wonder: is this specific to our culture or is a multi-cultural thing? If it is multi-cultural, then an explanation might be that hyper-focus on individual accomplishment was a more accurate perspective in our hunter-gatherer days; fewer people means that each person has a bigger relative impact.

Well there's a very obvious reason for that: we want to learn from the best. Why would you pick someone which is only good, or anything else but the best, most creative, most inspiring? Surely having an ensemble of good performers is nice, but the 'genius' by consensus is who anyone would wish to learn foremost.

I do have a specific opinion on what it means to learn form someone. People often overreach and obsess with details from the lives of those, when in reality learning from Einstein is as simple as reading what he wrote and the way he described his theories. This goes for many other geniuses -- they are geniuses in their fields, and we shouldn't expect everything they did to be right.

"...learning from Einstein is as simple as reading what he wrote and the way he described his theories."

"If you want to find out anything from the theoretical physicist about the methods they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: don't listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds."

I was thinking something quite similar few hours ago. It seems people like to praise a leader (my shallow tribal interpretation) and not focus on the subtle intricacies of what really happened in details; unless they develop a taste for precision and systems.

People often forget that, in addition to being brilliant, Einstein also had some of the best training available. He was a student to some very big names.

> there are at least a handful if not a dozen or couple of dozen people who were and are equally as intelligent, brilliant, and more prolific.

I can guess at least one: Nikola Tesla. May I ask you what other names do you have in mind?

John Von Neumann, Grace Hopper, Turing. Bernoulli, Euler, Riemann.

Don't forget Emmy Noether: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether

"In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began. In the realm of algebra, in which the most gifted mathematicians have been busy for centuries, she discovered methods which have proved of enormous importance in the development of the present-day younger generation of mathematicians."

- Albert Einstein

She was brilliant, but lets not go overboard. She's not even the biggest name in the fields of math she contributed to.

I don't know what she did for math but Noether's Theorem in physics, that symmetries in nature are connected to conservation laws, is impressive.

No idea how far up the totem pole that puts her.

she was involved in commutative algebra. she had a nice little section in my undergrad abstract algebra book. i'm not saying anything negative about her, just that if you are going to list the most brilliant/productive scientists of all time then shes not going to be on the list. she was brilliant of course.

She's certainly far less well known than many of her contemporaries, but Noether's theorem is an incredibly important tool in theoretical physics, and has been described as "certainly one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics, possibly on a par with the Pythagorean theorem". [1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether#cite_note-FOOTNOTE...

Exactly what has G. Hopper done that warrants her inclusion in this list?

She's not Einstein, and she's not well known outside of computer scientis. Seems to line up perfectly with ok_craig's comment.

Of course she was brilliant, and influential, but putting her in the same list as Newton or Einstein feels like intellectual hipsterdom.

She's also not well-known inside computer science. I certainly don't know her. Wikipedia isn't a reliable source, so I am not sure what she has done. It appears that she was part of a team that might have developed one of the early loaders/linkers.

Why is grace hopper on here? She was brilliant, but the gap between her and euler is immense. There were a ton of brilliant minds, but it doesn't make a ton of sense to throw her in.

I can name: hilbert, marcel grossmann, Tullio Levi‑Civita (all at least on-par with Einstein). They all helped develop GR

Maxwell

and though obvious, Newton is not to be sneezed at.

Asimov wrote on Newton in particular, as the greatest scientist of all time. All others compete for 2nd place. Optics, Physics, Calculus. Nobody holds a candle to that accomplishment. Also, he invented the doggy door, and milled edges on coins (to discourage filing, a common 18th-century way to steal precious metal)

Do you recall if Asimov had anything to say about Newton's disastrous investments?

BTW: I saw Asimov speak way back when I was in high school, circa 1981. He was great in person.

ed witten and stephen hawking come to mind as current-day scientists on par with einstein

Gauss.

Von Neumann.

Erdős.

Euler.

Not sure I would agree with that sentiment. Einstein was considered to be exceptional even by his peers. I've read quite a few biographies of of prominent/famous scientists, including Teller, Bohr, Fermi, Pauli, Landau, Feynman, Bethe, Von Neumann, Abraham Pais, Weisskopf, Wigner, etc.. and almost all revere Einstein and put him on the same pedestal as Isaac Newton (and in Mathematician case -- Karl Gauss). Based on a brief appraisal of his accomplishments, one can objectively come to the conclusion that he was head and shoulders above the rest, such as: 1) Brownian Motion -- showing the existence of atoms. 2) Photoelectric Effect -- demonstrating that light can be thought of as a particle. 3) Special Relativity -- Relating mass with energy. 4) General Relativity -- generalizes the special case and incorporate gravity as well.

Many other contributions including Bose-Einstein effect that he would like consider secondary contributions, but have non the less have gone on to generate enormous research in the field (and lead to not a few noble prizes if that matters to people).

Heisenberg is probably the only one that can be honestly said to have made a profound discovery rivaling Einstein.

Just my two cents here.

Supposedly Landau made a 1-5 scale of physicists productivity. If I recall correctly, Newton and Einstein were the only ones he put in the 1 bracket.

But only because von Neumann was a philosopher.

Before Newton, physics used to be called natural philosophy. Newton made it tractable.

Before von Neumann, strategy was philosophy.

("But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy's? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.")

After von Neumann, strategy became tractable.

(Obviously, this view of history is very simplified.)

Yap, and he made a 1-5 scale for good looking girls as well when he was studying in Germany. Like science, he felt that the best physics development have already been done, and all the best looking girls taken. (Disclaimer: no relation to Lev, even though we share the same name).

The fact that there was a close grouping among physicists at the time works in Einstein's favor. Poincare could have easily realized E=mc^2, he was right there, but he didn't see it.

Looking at the same questions and reading same papers as his peers Einstein simply went further.

"there are at least a handful if not a dozen or couple of dozen people who were and are equally as intelligent, brilliant, and more prolific."

This might be hard to prove. They'd have to have something comparable to Einstein's 1905 output, while working at some (dreary?) job to pay the bills. Maybe the Nobel (non-Peace) price isn't the best metric, but there are very few people with more than one and the 1905 work might have generated two that year...

It might be hagiography, but it seemed he had a clarity of thought that enabled asking the right question and no concern about what the answer might be. Most of us are prisoners of our world view, few are blessed with the ability to change it.

Maybe I'm going slightly too far, but I can imagine a world in which we don't know relativity but use quantum mechanical effects daily (e.g. at the microchip level.) Can you not imagine such a world? Granted space exploration would have had to not-happen. It's at the limit of what I can imagine in a world. Can you imagine the above historical scenario today? (2015) One hundred years on from when General Relativity actually was published. How could we have not discovered it for 100 years if Einstein had not thought it up?

One exercise you can do is ask what recent discoveries could have been made 100 years earlier. Off-hand:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-a-Graphene-Supercapacit...

"why wasn't this discovered 100 years earlier"? is very close to "why couldn't GR have been discovered 100 years later."

It was discovered via scotch tape and a block of graphite.

reference following http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene leads to,

"Scientists often find ingenious ways to attain their research objectives, even if that objective is a truly two-dimensional material that many physicists felt could not be grown. In 2003, one ingenious physicist took a block of graphite, some Scotch tape and a lot of patience and persistence and produced a magnificent new wonder material that is a million times thinner than paper, stronger than diamond, more conductive than copper. It is called graphene, and it took the physics community by storm when the first paper appeared the following year".

In point of fact, perhaps it could have happened in 1903. True, Scotch tape was invented in 1930 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch_Tape

But, again, why couldn't it have been invented a bit earlier?

And so forth. The fact is, what we know from the circumstances is that GR is a "great person" contribution to the world at a specific historical time. If it had not happened then, it is not appropriate to say it surely would have happened soon.

graphene was imminent for decades until it was discovered. (Other ideas were imminent for hundreds of years in science. It really doesn't mean anything.)

And why not integrated circuits, the instant photography was invented? Some interesting steampunk science fiction could be written around that.

Quantum Mechanics includes special relativity.

I think you're really underestimating how influential Einstein's work was. I can't think of another physicist besides Newton himself whose impact is comparable to Einstein's. Maxwell might be a close runner up (and Einstein himself said as much). In terms of lasting impact, Einstein clearly deserves the credit he gets.

At the same time, I think you're also underestimating how much credit other physicists get. Anybody who has studied some physics knows how profound and significant Feynman, Maxwell, Dirac, Schrödinger, Landau, Pauli, Fermi, etc., all were. In fact, Feynman might get even more adoration among physics undergraduates than Einstein.

But Feynman's work on renormalizing quantum electrodynamics, while one of the great accomplishments of 20th century physics, still did not have the sheer impact of general relativity, which had such far-reaching and grand predictions about the cosmos that many of them took 50+ years to verify. Kip Thorne doesn't identify the "golden age" of GR as even beginning until 1960, when scientists were finally able to not only understand its implications better but also verify them.

Even today Einstein has some predictions that remain to be completely verified (e.g., gravitational waves).

> Like many people, Einstein's life and work has been fascinating to me, but in comparison to other brilliant scientists of the twentieth century, there are at least a handful if not a dozen or couple of dozen people who were and are equally as intelligent, brilliant, and more prolific.

Looking backward, it is pretty clear that there were lots of people coming up with the formulations for quantum mechanics. Even without Einstein, somebody probably would have handled that stuff.

However, general relativity was definitely ahead of its time. It took decades until we could even test it.

Finally, while Einstein "lost" the Bohr-Einstein debate about the nature of quantum mechanics, the problem was actually the experiments of the day. One of the strikes against Einstein was the fact that the field formulation predicts that excited electrons in atoms do not decay which everybody knew was an incorrect prediction. Except that Einstein WASN'T wrong--if you put an excited atom in a photon trap and isolate it from the rest of the universe it's decay time goes way up. See: "Collective Electrodynamics" by Carver Mead http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/collective-electrodynamics

I once read a crazy but amusing "psychoanalytic" interpretation about Einstein discoveries. His name "Einstein" can be parsed: Ein-s-t-Ein, which can be seen as "one - space - time - one" (ein is german for one). He was predetermined to see space and time as a single thing!

Off-topic: That's a bizarre layout.

It's for this antiquated technology called a "book", where you lay out every other page to the right or left, respectively, to account for this thing that people once called a "margin".

no need to be a condescending about it

That isn't what's bizarre about it.

the random pink highlighting is bizarre

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