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.
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.
"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.
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).
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.
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.)
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
Looking at the same questions and reading same papers as his peers Einstein simply went further.
I can guess at least one: Nikola Tesla. May I ask you what other names do you have in mind?
and though obvious, Newton is not to be sneezed at.
Von Neumann.
Erdős.
Euler.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
[1] - http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Theories-Relativity-And-Grav...
[2] - https://play.google.com/store/books/details/James_Malcolm_Bi...
edit: for formatting
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!
- 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...
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.
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?"
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?
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."
