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Einstein Unveiled
John_Renne writes "One of the most well known scientists in the near history is Albert Einstein. Pictures of him can be found on allmost everything varying from lunchboxes to t-shirts and cartoons. On the other hand there's little knowledge of who Einstein really was and the human being behind the genius. This article tries to create a view of the inner Einstein. A nice read for everyone interested in the person inside the phenomenon."
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Beautiful! This is truly a Slashdot moment to cherish.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
On the other hand there's little knowledge of who Einstein really was and the human being behind the genius
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You mean, aside from all the biographys written about him, the published letters to his children, the secret FBI file kept about him, etc etc.
BN returns rather a lot on the man, and a number of these items are not lunchboxes.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/resul
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
splitting beer atoms to make fizzy beer? You have to admire anyone who wants to make better beer. Oh, wait, that was just a movie. History, pop-culture, same difference. :-)
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
The Einstein Scrapbook is also a very good read on the life of Einstein. It is mostly just a printing of all of his personal papers/essays/letters that he left to be archived at The Hebrew University.
Some Highlights...
The very thoughtful answer...
the most mysterious thing you'll see today
"Einstein said that he thought in images and even muscular sensations," says John Stachel, a physicist and the founding editor of the Papers Project. "The hardest part for him was to translate his findings back into language that others could understand."
Sounds like the good man was addicted to drugs. And yes, I can image it is really hard to translate an LSD trip into language others can understand. However a real artist will be able to do so.
giel.y contains 2 shift/reduce conflicts
Mine is "Imagination is more important than knowledge".
In any case, I found this site a while back. It's somewhat of a tutorial on Einstein, allowing you to do "Easy" or "Advanced", and fairly informative.
Theory of Relativity
I read a book on Einstein's life (i think it may simply have been called 'Einstein').
Well, the article forgets a whole lot of things, unless i have totally messed recollection of that book.
First, they don't even tell us Einstein got a Nobel Prize... and not even for relativity itself ! IIRC, he got it for explaining some optical phenomena (dual particle / light nature of photons)
Second, article forgets to tell that Israel did propose him to run for presidency there, which he declined.
Third, the 1919 experiment actually had MESSED UP results (that was found later) !!! So it didn't confirm Einstein's theory... which, granted, was confirmed later.
Fourth, Einstein introduced some constant in the relativity's equations so that the universe is static, which was his deep belief.
And don't forget his fun quote: God doesn't play with dice (i do think it's from him)
Tsuyoikoto ha taisetsu da ne, dakedo namida mo hitsuyousa (Strength is an important thing, but tears too are necessary)
On the other hand there's little knowledge of who Einstein really was and the human being behind the genius.
Please. As far as scientists go, there are none whose personality has been more revealed and documented than Einstein - except now, maybe John Nash. Lots of lay people know at least something about Einstein's personality; he's probably the only scientist ever who has been adopted by the media. By contrast, see if the lay people around you know anything about the personalities/loves/quirks of Darwin, Newton, Bohr or Freud.
I went to grade school across the street from Cal Tech, and it was said that Einstein was often seen bicycling around on his 3-speed. Something about that lack of pretense has always charmed me, and I would think he is already one of the most human famous scientists. He spent much of the last 20 years of his life concerned with averting nuclear war.
Einstein on a bicycle. And he didn't wear a helmet.
I think current physicists would rather try to pass their work off as some sort of homage than to come right out and admit that they're chasing a pipe dream.
Another thing that irks me is the whole idea of wanting to know what people like Einstein were "really like." This always results in a deluge of personal details, the publication of which is not only disrespectful of the dead but largely useless. I mean, he was a brilliant physicist: do I really need to read his poetry from when he was 15?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
First, they don't even tell us Einstein got a Nobel Prize... and not even for relativity itself ! IIRC, he got it for explaining some optical phenomena (dual particle / light nature of photons)
Actually, the photoelectric effect was one of the basis of "old" QM and is well-deserving of a Nobel all by itself.
In fact, A.E. deserved at least 3 seperate Nobels : photo-electric effect, SRT, GRT (in reverse order of importance) are all Nobel-worthy just by themselves.
These are the ones I know of , very probably there are more.
However since they never give the Nobel more than once, indeed the Nobel should have been given to relativity theory.
Working for necessity's mother.
A committed socialist, he distrusted capitalism and communism in equal measure and believed that "world government" was the only way to control nuclear weapons and eventually abolish war entirely.
Seems like Einstein would like to see UN weapons inspections for all countries. Personally I'd sleep better if all weapons of mass destruction were banned and all countries were subject to inspection. Let's not wait for millions of people to die before we consider this!
Don't forget his fun quote: God doesn't play with dice
And don't forget this little uncertainty gem either:
"A mouse cannot change the universe just by looking at it." -A.E.
Or this beauty from his wife (Speaking with an astronomer boasting about his new telescope with which he "examines the workings of the universe"):
"Really? My husband uses the back of an old envelope."
A 2-page article is hardly going to make you a know-it-all on this man. It's a good overview, but please don't go away from it thinking you're an expert on his life. (That's just a pet peeve of mine, like people who saw a Ken Burns series and now think they're Civil War experts).
What the article barely touches on, for example, is that (like Russell) he turned from science and philosophy to political activism later in life, complete with a heaping FBI file. Read his own words if you want to. There's also an interesting story about Einstein's brain!
One thing about Einstein that is often omitted is what he was intellectually bad at. Sure, we know he wasn't good at math, but an even more important point was that he couldn't memorize details to save his life. I remember reading a story about how he called the telephone operator from a pay phone to ask what his phone number and address were -- he couldn't remember them.
Maybe that is a slight exaggeration, but not much of one, because this isn't unheard of. The crux of this boils down to this: One has only a certain amount of cognitive processing power; if the majority is dedicated to one particular type of reasoning, then others will suffer.
So Einstein, as we know, was immensely brilliant at dealing with abstract ideas, but at the same time, he was also miserable at dealing with concrete things, like memorizing a bit of text or some numbers, or for that matter, being able to take in the full sensory experience of a walk in the park, without distraction from other ideas in his head.
I do believe that he was certainly of above average intelligence, but it's important to realize that his total brainpower may not have been AS FAR beyond us as we are taught. As far as he was greater than us in abstract reasoning, he was equally lousy at many of the cognitive things that most people take for granted.
In fact, Einstein was not a fluke or a freak of nature. There are other people like him in the world. They are rare, but they are otherwise normal humans. Rather than being brilliant at Physics, many are brilliant socially or amazing at understanding the thoughts and motivations of other people. Some of them are geeks.
"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
[from Albert Einstein - The Human Side,Selected and Edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press, 1979]
This certainly doesn't make Einstein a devout Jew - the Jewish religion is very much about a personal god. His god is the same as Spinoza's, and Spinoza was excommunicated by his fellow Jews.
For more about Einstein and religion, see this.
Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
It's also important to rememer that his quote, "God does not play dice," was famous, fun, and mostly wrong. That was his opinion on the study of quantum mechanics, which has its limitations, but is widely accepted and has predicted experimental outcomes.
Einstein made a few interesting mistakes. That was one of them. Another was mucking up the theory of relativity when one of its implications was too incredible. Don't get me wrong. He was huge, and that is measured by the fact that he admitted his mistakes.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Marie Curie has also won two Nobel Prizes (Physics 1903, Chemistry 1911)
Also, the Peace Prize granted to Pauling could have just as easily gone to Einstein, as they were both very active in ensuring that mankind did not nuke himself. Both were very strong advocates of peace. However, the noble prize is not awarded posthumorously.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein
There is right now a huge exhibit on Einstein at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. Worth checking out if you're in the area over the next few months.
No, Einstein never denied that Quantum Mechanics fits the known experimental data perfectly or claimed that further experiments would show that QM was wrong. Einstein was himself one of the founding fathers of QM and a master in using the predicting powers of the theory, predicting QM-phenomena like LASERs and Bose-Einstein condensation, decades before they were seen in any lab.
What Einstein never accepted was the interpretation given to the mathematical framework of QM by Bohr, Heisenberg, Born and others. Einstein was not alone in resisting the philosophical/physical interpretation by the "Copenhagen school" , he was joined by people like Planck, Schroedinger, and de Broglie who all knew a bit about QM. (But as always, the old generation dies out and the new generation have gotten used to the new world view.)
Einstein believed in a deterministic universe (just as Newton, Laplace and the other classic mechanics guys before), where when you knew the starting conditions perfectly, you could calculate what happened. This is how to understand the statement "God does not play with dices". "God" knows what is going to happen, He does not only know the odds are for something to happen. This is contrary to Bohr who claim that "God" (or the physicist) can only know the different possible outcomes from some given starting condition and the probability of the different outcomes. According to the uncertainty principle "God" can not even hope to know the starting conditions perfectly.
The answer to QM by Einstein was the so-called "hidden variables" theory, variables that behave in a deterministic way but lead to behaviour that looks random in the experiments that were used to "prove" QM. Einstein also made famous thought experiments to show the inconsistency in the logic of the Copenhagen school, like the EPR paradox.
Today most physicist believe Einsteins objections to QM has been shown to be wrong, and Bohr's interpretation has become the dogma. But who knows? Newton thought light consisted of particles, but was proven wrong. Then Einstein showed that light can be seen as both waves and photon-particles. So, maybe in some hundred years Einstein's objections to QM can be shown to be a "bit" correct :-).
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