Einstein is overrated. If he hadn't been born other people would have come to the same conclusions.
Physicists today are working on problems that are dramatically harder to solve. It's true that thousands of people can dogpile in a research area where the opportunities are illusory, but most problems succumb to elbow grease and liberal use of trial and error.
Others would have come to the same conclusions? For special relativity, yes. For general relativity, no - nobody else was walking down that road. For the photoelectric effect? Maybe.
Thanks very much for posting this response. Everything I've read about general relativity has basically said that if Einstein didn't come up with it, it could have been many decades until someone else did. It was just that unique at the time, and Einstein's genius really was as deservedly celebrated as it's been.
Tons tons of people were working on special. Hilbert had sent a paper on nearly every part of it in n before Einstein, it got delayed at the publisher, Einstein submitted his, then Hilbert sent in an updated manuscript with the same results before Einstein published. As a result of this there was a lifelong priority cold war between them.
Hilbert derived general relativity 5 days before Einstein [1]. Einstein won the public relations difference because his previous work.
It was that close.
Recall Hilbert was vastly better at the math, and was catching up leaps and bounds on Einsteins intuition at the time.
Dozens of others were also close. Minkowski, Cartan, Poincare, all were doing the same stuff, trying to unify the same items.
So had Einstein done nothing, many others were immediately going to reach the same results.
Thanks for the link - reading it, though, it’s not clear that your summary is fair. Plenty of scope for Hilbert to have been building on things he learnt from Einstein.
Einsteins famous quote about his difficulties in mathematics stems from this period. Hilbert had mastered the be relevant mathematics, and was closing in on relativity much faster than Einstein. Hilbert was teaching Einstein the tools Einstein needed.
Recall at this time Hilbert was a god in mathematics, and one of the best that ever lived. He did groundbreaking work in n many areas of math and physics.
Of the two, each left alone, it's far more likely Hilbert would have arrived first. Working while corresponding likely made Einstein much faster and Hilbert slightly faster.
Einstein took 8 years to work out general relativity. Hilbert started working on physics in 1912 and by 1915 had gotten to where he was deriving general relativity. The speed he worked in physics and the broad range of topics he influenced in physics far outshines Einstein. Hilbert famously said physicists don't know enough math to do physics. He was right at that time - his math mastery let him plow through physics much faster.
To see the scope of things attributed to Hilbert versus attributed to Einsteins simply look over their Wikipedia pages.
This is just not true. Einstein's earliest GR work is a collaboration with Marcel Grossman. Hilbert's work is so close and overlapping that it takes quite a bit of effort even to verify that Einstein's work was genuinely independent.
The problem isn't who we praise, it's who we don't praise.
Maybe we live in a different world today but my sense is scientific innovation happens in a very different way from the genius model.
Sometime long ago I came across an article arguing that we've replaced the concept of a saint with a genius, as the worldview shifted from religion to science. It was very compelling.
Increasingly I feel like there's only collective recognition. If you're too far ahead of the curve or behind it's all the same. Being at the curve just means you're recognizing everything at the same time as everyone else.
> If he hadn't been born other people would have come to the same conclusions.
Definitely. But in his generation?
Some things, like Calculus, pop into human understanding because there comes a time when our existing tools + our understanding of peripheral stuff inevitably intersect.
Other things maybe not.
One of my favorite sci fi short stories, The Road Not Taken, has as its premise that some scientific discoveries might be low-hanging fruit that we happen to overlook in one generation after the next, so we develop along one road and not another.
In this case, simply because no particular Einstein comes along to explain it to us, and because our other discoveries, impressive as they might be, are always one or two circles of overlap removed.
Poincaré was very close to the special theory of relativity when Einstein published "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" in 1905. And David Hilbert discovered the Einstein Field Equations a few days before Einstein. (They really should be called the Hilbert-Einstein Field Equations.) If Einstein hadn't existed we wouldn't have had to wait generations to learn of relativity.
There is no way Hilbert would have been working with that without Einstein's work. Hilbert was a mathematician, not a physicist, who based it all on Einstein's premises.
I think Einstein had a particularly unique way of thinking. In fact, he discovered relativity by doing thought experiments, purely by combining his intuitive understanding of light with imagination. Such experiments can only really be conceived in a singular mind.
Individuals matter.
Maybe we'd have had to go another few hundred years before someone else conceived it. While we can't prove a negative (we don't know what the alternate Einstein-less universe turns out like), certainly there have been examples of technology that has been forgotten or lost and it can take another thousand years before it is rediscovered.
Except we were on the verge of discovering it even then through multiple people. So we can be pretty sure most of it would have come to pass within a generation. Agree he had a unique way of thinking but there is a lot that is over attributed to him and exceptionalism in general. Still a great thinker of his generation, but there were many such individuals.
Einstein is definitely genius and I get what Naval is saying here. Still you are right that Einstein got credit for everything yet his wife was excellent mathematician and did math proofs for him, made his imagination possible, he also relied on a work of other people.
I think we would come to same discovery, but it would be significantly different ie. it would might be more complex. His theories are definitely flavored by his thinking.
Unless one controls for all other environmental variables, how can one say there is a difference in the number of innovators without even having a good definition of what an innovator means?
And, to be honest, most of the innovators I know don't have PhDs.
That last comment is also highly reliant on what the definition of innovation is. This is grossly oversimplified:
If it's creating new value in the form of serving a particular need (such that a new product is created, for example), I think it's safe to assume most of those folks _won't_ hold PhDs.
If innovation is discovering some new fundamental truth about the way the universe works, there _may_ be folks without PhDs doing that work, but most of it _will_ come from PhDs.
> That last comment is also highly reliant on what the definition of innovation is.
Indeed. Still, most of the breakthrough I’ve seen in my life came from people joining multiple fields in unexpected ways rather than narrowing knowledge further and deeper.
I'm sorry to say that. But you're wrong. Yes and no. It just the one side of the penny the author describe.
It's true. They have a lot of output. But, they are a lot. Just scale to this enormous count of students. If the author would just assume 2 percent of one year's graduates are good, it will be still more than with us here, where we also can - and fairly have to - assume these 2 percent, too.
Also, the author didn't consider the fact, that the pupils in schools are under such a pressure, they LEARN. They really learn to be able to study. They learn a lot but, they just memorize quite a lot without properly being able to transfer the gained knowledge into practical doing, because they are trained from the smallest on with memorizing the Chinese characters. They have a magnificent visual memory.
That's a problem, as it has been pointed out by the author.
But:
The author should have considered the massive amount of students abroad. They are doing very well abroad. They are used to learn and get everything memorized fast and see & learn the way western students work & learn. Been skilled the same things, they're are faster with memorizing.
When they finish here, a few stay, a few go back. The ones returned home, maybe go and teach others with their skills unintentionally in higher schools/universities.. or just go on and start working. They have an advantage against the ones who did not study abroad.
And so it goes. If you have a Chinese boy/girl, who did it in the exams and has the possibility to join the jin hua university - may be join it for a few semesters - and then go abroad for studies.. you will have a killer - one proud to be Chinese.
Of course... here too that 2 percent...
Just have a look at the publications.. authored or co-authored at least by one Chinese student (judged by name) or professor. From the bests of educational places.
They already have the supremacy in fastest knowledge generation and made it an "import" thing, or just took it by espionage/do-not-so-good where they had the possibility to. They just don't tell it.
Just think of the ban of US to the silicon market. China started to develop on theirs own. And.. they have build like 2 exascale supercomputers which are both faster than the top 500 without any US technology. You can't do it without deeply understand what you do, or, do not have the money to get the proper people together. No matter where they come from. I think it's more to the direction of the first point "understanding".
And yes. There is a lot of furrr flying around. But in the end, it's the same with us.
I work with students, they become dumber and dumber from year to year. May be it's a symptom of Facebook usage.
I sort of agree that won't get as many unconventional thinkers in a rigid system, but that only goes so far. You can't control the number of Einsteins you get anyway (exactly one so far), but you can get a lot out of training a ton of people to make steady, incremental progress while you hope for another once in a century genius to come around. You also need people to actually understand the theories and run experiments to validate the work of your geniuses, not to mention build things with them and even extend them. And, of course, Einstein didn't work in a vacuum either, so you can't entirely pretend the legions of lesser, hidebound physicists around didn't pave the way for him to emerge.
There are many great researches, but "who discover stuff that otherwise wouldn't have been discovered for generations"... Aristotle (as a long-standing basis for pre-sciences) and a plethora of ancient scientists (Archimedes... Democritus...), Newton (who, of course, stood on the shoulders of Galilei, among others, but still saw far)...
By the way, special relativity could - speculatively - be discovered relatively soon by somebody else, at least such an opinion is rather well known and some support. General relativity was a focus of work of David Hilbert - it maybe less clear, but it could also be discovered within decades. Photoelectric effect and quantum phenomena (ER bridge...) maybe less well known, but at least solutions of GR equations started to appear rather early. So even Einstein maybe not that unique.
Why Galilei and not Kepler?Newton obviously derived the law of gravity from Kepler's laws. Kepler was an absolute giant, and his contribution would not have been possible without Tycho Brahe, another giant. We will never know who the "giants" were, or maybe it was just a pure expression of modesty, but if there were some, I think they were Kepler and Brahe, not Galilei.
I think - just an opinion - both Newton and Galilei thought about higher level things than Kepler and Brahe, more general - be that "basic principle of relativity" or general motion of matter. I'd like to listen to science historians on this matter.
I don't see why not. I know someone who is quite a bit smarter than me, and was definitely more dedicated in high school, yet spent decades working security (not Walmart, but not rocket science either) and 1-2 other jobs to pay their mortgage because their parents couldn't support them through college like mine could (and numerous other factors that set them back). While they have now gotten a degree and a better job I essentially got a 20-year head start on them.
Despite what people like to believe, even in America the single biggest predictor of a child's success is their parent's income.
Communism had - and has - their share of Einsteins. It's not enough for communism to win. Especially in today's world, where Einstein from a communist country moves elsewhere early on.
Communism did not produce more Einsteins than capitalism did. It arguably produced less. But regardless, OP is arguing that there are countless people currently working in retail who, if but for a $1000 a month UBI payment, would be producing groundbreaking innovations in science and technology.
My point is merely that this experiment (of government providing for basic needs) has already been tried countless times and does not yield more geniuses.
It takes balls , arrogance and self-confidence to publish what Einstein published.
Those are independent variables and affect the global population as a whole, not just theoretical physicists.
All those factors are down bad globally, and should probably go up again.
But you also have to embrace the fact that in such system it's not possible to get Einsteins without also getting Hitlers.
Again, arrogance and self-confidence affect everybody and it's an independent variable so theoretical physicists, but also politicians, generals, gang members, mafia bosses etc.
It also means bar brawls would come back, so will fights and stimulants use (ranging from nicotine to cocaine)
> It’s quite the opposite, because they’ve been trained in a particular way. They’re being trained to memorize this textbook, respond to this exam. They can’t think outside of the box.
Blanket statement citation required? Despite the fact that Korea / Japan with similarly rigid education systems produce innovators?
> Give me 10 innovative, creative, young physics graduates over 50,000 physics graduates who all are able to pass the exam with 100% efficiency any day.
Lets define an arbitrary boundary where the definition can change to support any conclusion and then derive a desired conclusion.
I don't think Einstein was underrated. I'm a fanboy who has been reading his biographies since elementary school.
But even so, his prominence as an icon seems to even outweigh his accomplishments. He has become one of the recognizable figures in human civilization, previously attained by only religious figures. His fame is somehow Christ-like. He's the figurehead of the religion (my religion) of science, overshadowing even Darwin, Newton and Aristotle.
I think we can blame this excess on the combination of his unique persona and his accomplishments. He was somehow striking and goofy and warm and wise, personable, a walking breathing scientist meme. If not for that charisma, he'd be just another great among many to the zeitgeist.
It’s a very common western insult to say that all Asians are the same. But then they test a supersonic weapon or organize a flotilla in an unexpected way and everybody freaks out.
The net result is correct but the analysis fails to be pessimistic enough. China vs west argument aside, The median scientist is worth negative, i.e. their idiocy, incompetence, lack of creativity or inability to hold true to the scientific ethic in the face of advancement politics sets the scientific endeavor backwards.
There is a way in which dumping funds into science risks tapping into a super linear negative effect (partially because the aggregate power of idiots in science scales that way and partially because the futility of trying to do good when it doesn't pay off causes good scientists to burn out, flip tables, switch to programming, go into wall street, etc.) that is worth net negative more than "finding geniuses that would have gone undiscovered without the funding", which is what you are hoping for by goosing the science money pool.
This is an assertion that seems designed to resonate with a skeptical crowd, but which lacks any support aside from vague intuition. On what basis do you base your claim that the median scientist creates negative value?
56 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadEinstein is overrated. If he hadn't been born other people would have come to the same conclusions.
Physicists today are working on problems that are dramatically harder to solve. It's true that thousands of people can dogpile in a research area where the opportunities are illusory, but most problems succumb to elbow grease and liberal use of trial and error.
Hilbert? (I don't actually know.)
I think the most profound work in mathematical physics of Einstein’s generation was done by Emmy Noether and Einstein thought so too.
Her trail really induces modern physics as we no it.
Hilbert derived general relativity 5 days before Einstein [1]. Einstein won the public relations difference because his previous work.
It was that close.
Recall Hilbert was vastly better at the math, and was catching up leaps and bounds on Einsteins intuition at the time.
Dozens of others were also close. Minkowski, Cartan, Poincare, all were doing the same stuff, trying to unify the same items.
So had Einstein done nothing, many others were immediately going to reach the same results.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity_priority_...
Recall at this time Hilbert was a god in mathematics, and one of the best that ever lived. He did groundbreaking work in n many areas of math and physics.
Of the two, each left alone, it's far more likely Hilbert would have arrived first. Working while corresponding likely made Einstein much faster and Hilbert slightly faster.
Einstein took 8 years to work out general relativity. Hilbert started working on physics in 1912 and by 1915 had gotten to where he was deriving general relativity. The speed he worked in physics and the broad range of topics he influenced in physics far outshines Einstein. Hilbert famously said physicists don't know enough math to do physics. He was right at that time - his math mastery let him plow through physics much faster.
To see the scope of things attributed to Hilbert versus attributed to Einsteins simply look over their Wikipedia pages.
This is just not true. Einstein's earliest GR work is a collaboration with Marcel Grossman. Hilbert's work is so close and overlapping that it takes quite a bit of effort even to verify that Einstein's work was genuinely independent.
Maybe we live in a different world today but my sense is scientific innovation happens in a very different way from the genius model.
Sometime long ago I came across an article arguing that we've replaced the concept of a saint with a genius, as the worldview shifted from religion to science. It was very compelling.
Increasingly I feel like there's only collective recognition. If you're too far ahead of the curve or behind it's all the same. Being at the curve just means you're recognizing everything at the same time as everyone else.
Definitely. But in his generation?
Some things, like Calculus, pop into human understanding because there comes a time when our existing tools + our understanding of peripheral stuff inevitably intersect.
Other things maybe not.
One of my favorite sci fi short stories, The Road Not Taken, has as its premise that some scientific discoveries might be low-hanging fruit that we happen to overlook in one generation after the next, so we develop along one road and not another.
In this case, simply because no particular Einstein comes along to explain it to us, and because our other discoveries, impressive as they might be, are always one or two circles of overlap removed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_stor...
Also famously and indisputably invented by one singular unique mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz–Newton_calculus_contro...
Individuals matter.
Maybe we'd have had to go another few hundred years before someone else conceived it. While we can't prove a negative (we don't know what the alternate Einstein-less universe turns out like), certainly there have been examples of technology that has been forgotten or lost and it can take another thousand years before it is rediscovered.
I think we would come to same discovery, but it would be significantly different ie. it would might be more complex. His theories are definitely flavored by his thinking.
And, to be honest, most of the innovators I know don't have PhDs.
If it's creating new value in the form of serving a particular need (such that a new product is created, for example), I think it's safe to assume most of those folks _won't_ hold PhDs.
If innovation is discovering some new fundamental truth about the way the universe works, there _may_ be folks without PhDs doing that work, but most of it _will_ come from PhDs.
Indeed. Still, most of the breakthrough I’ve seen in my life came from people joining multiple fields in unexpected ways rather than narrowing knowledge further and deeper.
It's true. They have a lot of output. But, they are a lot. Just scale to this enormous count of students. If the author would just assume 2 percent of one year's graduates are good, it will be still more than with us here, where we also can - and fairly have to - assume these 2 percent, too.
Also, the author didn't consider the fact, that the pupils in schools are under such a pressure, they LEARN. They really learn to be able to study. They learn a lot but, they just memorize quite a lot without properly being able to transfer the gained knowledge into practical doing, because they are trained from the smallest on with memorizing the Chinese characters. They have a magnificent visual memory. That's a problem, as it has been pointed out by the author.
But: The author should have considered the massive amount of students abroad. They are doing very well abroad. They are used to learn and get everything memorized fast and see & learn the way western students work & learn. Been skilled the same things, they're are faster with memorizing.
When they finish here, a few stay, a few go back. The ones returned home, maybe go and teach others with their skills unintentionally in higher schools/universities.. or just go on and start working. They have an advantage against the ones who did not study abroad.
And so it goes. If you have a Chinese boy/girl, who did it in the exams and has the possibility to join the jin hua university - may be join it for a few semesters - and then go abroad for studies.. you will have a killer - one proud to be Chinese. Of course... here too that 2 percent...
Just have a look at the publications.. authored or co-authored at least by one Chinese student (judged by name) or professor. From the bests of educational places.
They already have the supremacy in fastest knowledge generation and made it an "import" thing, or just took it by espionage/do-not-so-good where they had the possibility to. They just don't tell it. Just think of the ban of US to the silicon market. China started to develop on theirs own. And.. they have build like 2 exascale supercomputers which are both faster than the top 500 without any US technology. You can't do it without deeply understand what you do, or, do not have the money to get the proper people together. No matter where they come from. I think it's more to the direction of the first point "understanding".
And yes. There is a lot of furrr flying around. But in the end, it's the same with us. I work with students, they become dumber and dumber from year to year. May be it's a symptom of Facebook usage.
(i.e. people who discover stuff that otherwise wouldn't have been discovered for generations)
By the way, special relativity could - speculatively - be discovered relatively soon by somebody else, at least such an opinion is rather well known and some support. General relativity was a focus of work of David Hilbert - it maybe less clear, but it could also be discovered within decades. Photoelectric effect and quantum phenomena (ER bridge...) maybe less well known, but at least solutions of GR equations started to appear rather early. So even Einstein maybe not that unique.
Why Galilei and not Kepler?Newton obviously derived the law of gravity from Kepler's laws. Kepler was an absolute giant, and his contribution would not have been possible without Tycho Brahe, another giant. We will never know who the "giants" were, or maybe it was just a pure expression of modesty, but if there were some, I think they were Kepler and Brahe, not Galilei.
Einsteins not so much.
There are a lot of invisible Einsteins stocking shelves at Walmart.
This is why we need UBI.
Despite what people like to believe, even in America the single biggest predictor of a child's success is their parent's income.
My point is merely that this experiment (of government providing for basic needs) has already been tried countless times and does not yield more geniuses.
More free time is obviously the thing to do.
Those are independent variables and affect the global population as a whole, not just theoretical physicists.
All those factors are down bad globally, and should probably go up again.
But you also have to embrace the fact that in such system it's not possible to get Einsteins without also getting Hitlers.
Again, arrogance and self-confidence affect everybody and it's an independent variable so theoretical physicists, but also politicians, generals, gang members, mafia bosses etc.
It also means bar brawls would come back, so will fights and stimulants use (ranging from nicotine to cocaine)
> It’s quite the opposite, because they’ve been trained in a particular way. They’re being trained to memorize this textbook, respond to this exam. They can’t think outside of the box.
Blanket statement citation required? Despite the fact that Korea / Japan with similarly rigid education systems produce innovators?
> Give me 10 innovative, creative, young physics graduates over 50,000 physics graduates who all are able to pass the exam with 100% efficiency any day.
Lets define an arbitrary boundary where the definition can change to support any conclusion and then derive a desired conclusion.
But even so, his prominence as an icon seems to even outweigh his accomplishments. He has become one of the recognizable figures in human civilization, previously attained by only religious figures. His fame is somehow Christ-like. He's the figurehead of the religion (my religion) of science, overshadowing even Darwin, Newton and Aristotle.
I think we can blame this excess on the combination of his unique persona and his accomplishments. He was somehow striking and goofy and warm and wise, personable, a walking breathing scientist meme. If not for that charisma, he'd be just another great among many to the zeitgeist.
I agree that the top 2 scientists in history were Newton and Darwin. But what's up with Aristotle? I don't really think he was a scientist at all.
China bad, United States good.
There is a way in which dumping funds into science risks tapping into a super linear negative effect (partially because the aggregate power of idiots in science scales that way and partially because the futility of trying to do good when it doesn't pay off causes good scientists to burn out, flip tables, switch to programming, go into wall street, etc.) that is worth net negative more than "finding geniuses that would have gone undiscovered without the funding", which is what you are hoping for by goosing the science money pool.