Einstein

A society’s competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity. (Location 330)

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”6 (Location 336)

“It is important to foster individuality,” he said, “for only the individual can produce the new ideas.” (Location 343)

“The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time. These are things he has thought of as a child. But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was already grown up. Consequently, I probed more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child would have.” (Location 365)

Nevertheless, it did show Einstein’s youthful appreciation that elegant theorems can be derived from simple axioms (Location 522)

“As a boy of 12, I was thrilled to see that it was possible to find out truth by reasoning alone, without the help of any outside experience,” (Location 523)

“When a person can take pleasure in marching in step to a piece of music it is enough to make me despise him. He has been given his big brain only by mistake.” (Location 592)

“A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”46 (Location 601)

who believed in encouraging students to visualize images. He also thought it important to nurture the “inner dignity” and individuality of each child. (Location 670)

This type of visualized thought experiments—Gedankenexperiment—became a hallmark of Einstein’s career. Over the years, he would picture in his mind such things as lightning strikes and moving trains, accelerating elevators and falling painters, two-dimensional blind beetles crawling on curved branches, as well as a variety of contraptions designed to pinpoint, at least in theory, the location and velocity of speeding electrons. (Location 687)

His distracted demeanor, casual grooming, frayed clothing, and forgetfulness, which were later to make him appear to be the iconic absentminded professor, were already evident in his student days. He was known to leave behind clothes, and sometimes even his suitcase, when he traveled, and his inability to remember his keys became a running joke with his landlady. He once visited the home of family friends and, he recalled, “I left forgetting my suitcase. My host said to my parents, ‘That man will never amount to anything because he can’t remember anything.’” (Location 903)

He went on to give a remarkably introspective—and memorable— assessment of how he had begun to avoid the pain of emotional commitments and the distractions of what he called the “merely personal” by retreating into science:   It fills me with a peculiar kind of satisfaction that now I myself have to taste some of the pain that I brought upon the dear girl through my thoughtlessness and ignorance of her delicate nature. Strenuous intellectual work and looking at God’s nature are the reconciling, fortifying yet relentlessly strict angels that shall lead me through all of life’s troubles. If only I were able to give some of this to the good child. And yet, what a peculiar way this is to weather the storms of life—in many a lucid moment I appear to myself as an ostrich who buries his head in the desert sand so as not to perceive the danger. (Location 943)

It is easy to see why Einstein felt such an affinity for Marić. They were kindred spirits who perceived themselves as aloof scholars and outsiders. Slightly rebellious toward bourgeois expectations, they were both intellectuals who sought as a lover someone who would also be a partner, colleague, and collaborator. (Location 1020)

“We understand each other’s dark souls so well, and also drinking coffee and eating sausages, etcetera,” Einstein wrote her. (Location 1022)

Throughout his life, Einstein would speak lovingly of the Zurich Polytechnic, but he also would note that he did not like the discipline that was inherent in the system of examinations. “The hitch in this was, of course, that one had to cram all this stuff into one’s mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not,” he said. “This coercion had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.” (Location 1092)

Throughout that fall, he was able to find only eight sporadic tutoring jobs, and his relatives had ended their financial support. But Einstein put up an optimistic front. “We support ourselves by private lessons, if we can ever pick up some, which is still very doubtful,” he wrote a friend of Marić’s. “Isn’t this a journeyman’s or even a gypsy’s life? But I believe that we will remain cheerful in it as ever.”13 What kept him happy, in addition to Marić’s presence, were the theoretical papers he was writing on his own. (Location 1208)

“My scientific goals and my personal vanity will not prevent me from accepting even the most subordinate position.” (Location 1390)

His struggles that year also reveal something more subtle about Einstein’s scientific thinking: he had an urge—indeed, a compulsion— to unify concepts from different branches of physics. “It is a glorious feeling to discover the unity of a set of phenomena that seem at first to be completely separate,” (Location 1413)

He made her promise, however, that marriage would not turn them into a comfortable bourgeois couple: “We’ll diligently work on science together so we don’t become old philistines, right?” Even his sister, he felt, was becoming “so crass” in her approach to creature comforts. “You’d better not get that way,” he told Marić. “It would be terrible. You must always be my witch and street urchin. Everyone but you seems foreign to me, as if they were separated from me by an invisible wall.” (Location 1553)

soon learned that he could work on the patent applications so quickly that it left time for him to sneak in his own scientific thinking during the day. “I was able to do a full day’s work in only two or three hours,” he recalled. “The remaining part of the day, I would work out my own ideas.” His boss, Friedrich Haller, was a man of good-natured, growling skepticism and genial humor who graciously ignored the sheets of paper that cluttered Einstein’s desk and vanished into his drawer when people came to see him. “Whenever anybody would come by, I would cram my notes into my desk drawer and pretend to work on my office work.”69 (Location 1610)

addition, his boss Haller had a credo that was as useful for a creative and rebellious theorist as it was for a patent examiner: “You have to remain critically vigilant.” Question every premise, challenge conventional wisdom, and never accept the truth of something merely because everyone else views it as obvious. Resist being credulous. “When you pick up an application,” Haller instructed, “think that everything the inventor says is wrong.” (Location 1621)

As the mathematician and astronomer Laplace exulted about Newton’s universe, “An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world; to him nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to his eyes.” (Location 1816)

The bushy-bearded Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) subsequently devised wonderful equations that specified, among other things, how changing electric fields create magnetic fields and how changing magnetic fields create electrical ones. (Location 1831)

Note: theories always come out of practice

“A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way,” Einstein once said. “But,” he hastened to add, “intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”8 Einstein’s (Location 2195)

But neither Lorentz nor Poincaré made the full leap: that there is no need to posit an ether, that there is no absolute rest, that time is relative based on an observer’s motion, and so is space. Both men, the physicist Kip Thorne says, “were groping toward the same revision of our notions of space and time as Einstein, but they were groping through a fog of misperceptions foisted on them by Newtonian physics.” (Location 2560)

“Yes, there is,” Einstein said, pointing to some discrepancies in the data, “for otherwise that and that would become that and that.” It was a vivid example of Einstein’s great strength: he could look at a complex mathematical equation, which for others was merely an abstraction, and picture the physical reality that lay behind (Location 3042)

it. (Location 3045)

One of his strengths as a thinker, if not as a parent, was that he had the ability, and the inclination, to tune out all distractions, a category that to him sometimes included his children and family. “Even the loudest baby-crying didn’t seem to disturb Father,” Hans Albert said. “He could go on with his work completely impervious to noise.” (Location 3060)

Even before Einstein moved to Berlin, he and Elsa began to correspond as if they were a couple. She worried about his exhaustion and sent him a long letter prescribing more exercise, rest, and a healthier diet. He responded by saying that he planned to “smoke like a chimney, work like a horse, eat without thinking, go for a walk only in really pleasant company.” (Location 3417)

It was a task that would take him almost four more years, culminating in an eruption of genius in November 1915. (Location 3583)

Until then, Einstein’s scientific success had been based on his special talent for sniffing out the underlying physical principles of nature. He had left to others the task, which to him seemed less exalted, of finding the best mathematical expressions of those principles, as his Zurich colleague Minkowski had done for special relativity. (Location 3621)

Einstein’s “physical strategy” began with his mission to generalize the principle of relativity so that it applied to observers who were accelerating or moving in an arbitrary manner. Any gravitational field equation he devised would have to meet the following physical requirements:   • It must revert to Newtonian theory in the special case of weak and static gravitational fields. In other words, under certain normal conditions, his theory would describe Newton’s familiar laws of gravitation and motion. • It should preserve the laws of classical physics, most notably the conservation of energy and momentum. • It should satisfy the principle of equivalence, which holds that observations made by an observer who is uniformly accelerating would be equivalent to those made by an observer standing in a comparable gravitational field.   Einstein’s “mathematical strategy,” on the other hand, focused on using generic mathematical knowledge about the metric tensor to find a gravitational field equation that was generally (or at least broadly) covariant. (Location 3682)

Tags: mental-model

Note: top down bottom up

Back when Einstein had moved to Berlin in the spring of 1914, his colleagues had assumed that he would set up an institute and attract acolytes to work on the most pressing problem in physics: the implications of quantum theory. But Einstein was more of a lone wolf. Unlike Planck, he did not want a coterie of collaborators or protégés, and he preferred to focus on what again had become his personal passion: the generalization of his theory of relativity. (Location 3946)

Part of Einstein’s genius was his tenacity. He could cling to a set of ideas, even in the face of “apparent contradiction” (as he put it in his 1905 relativity paper). He also had a deep faith in his intuitive feel for the physical world. Working in a more solitary manner than most other scientists, he held true to his own instincts, despite the qualms of others. (Location 3990)

In return, he wanted the right to have his sons visit him in Berlin. They would not come into contact with Elsa, he pledged. He even added a somewhat surprising promise: he would not be living with Elsa even if they got married. Instead, he would keep his own apartment. “For I shall never give up the state of living alone, which has manifested itself as an indescribable blessing.” (Location 4244)

“One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness,” Einstein said. “Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.”25 (Location 4319)

early 1917, it was Einstein’s turn to fall ill. He came down with stomach pains that he initially thought were caused by cancer. Now that his mission was complete, death did not frighten him. He told the astronomer Freundlich that he was not worried about dying because now he had completed his theory of relativity. (Location 4323)

“I have always thought that the German university’s most valuable institution is academic freedom, whereby the lecturers are in no way told what to teach, and the students are able to choose what lectures to attend, without much supervision and control,” he said. (Location 4473)

The marriage was, in fact, a solid symbiosis, and it served adequately, for the most part, the needs and desires of both partners. Elsa was an efficient and lively woman, who was eager to serve and protect him. She liked his fame, and (unlike him) did not try to hide that fact. She also appreciated the social standing it gave them, even if it meant she had to merrily shoo away reporters and other invaders of her husband’s privacy. (Location 4572)

He was as pleased to be looked after as she was to look after him. She told him when to eat and where to go. She packed his suitcases and doled out his pocket money. In public, she was protective of the man she called “the Professor” or even simply “Einstein.” That allowed him to spend hours in a rather dreamy state, focusing more on the cosmos than on the world around him. All of which gave her excitement and satisfaction. “The Lord has put into him so much that’s beautiful, and I find him wonderful, even though life at his side is enervating and difficult,” she once said.64 When (Location 4575)

Tags: marriage

When the conventional wisdom of physics seemed to conflict with an elegant theory of his, Einstein was inclined to question that wisdom rather than his theory, often to have his stubbornness rewarded. (Location 4694)

While in Boston, Einstein was subjected to a pop quiz known as the Edison test. The inventor Thomas Edison was a practical man, getting crankier with age (he was then 74), who disparaged American colleges as too theoretical and felt the same about Einstein. He had devised a test he gave job applicants that, depending on the position being sought, included about 150 factual questions. How is leather tanned? What country consumes the most tea? What was Gutenberg’s type made of?* The Times called it “the ever-present Edison questionnaire controversy,” and of course Einstein ran into it. A reporter asked him a question from the test. “What is the speed of sound?” If anyone understood the propagation of sound waves, it was Einstein. But he admitted that he did not “carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books.” Then he made a larger point designed to disparage Edison’s view of education. “The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think,” he said.55 (Location 5463)

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Note: Critical thinking over knowledge

That raises another question: Why was Einstein so much more creative before the age of 40 than after? Partly, it is an occupational hazard of mathematicians and theoretical physicists to have their great break-throughs before turning 40.17 “The intellect gets crippled,” Einstein explained to a friend, “but glittering renown is still draped around the calcified shell.”18 More specifically, Einstein’s scientific successes had come in part from his rebelliousness. There was a link between his creativity and his willingness to defy authority. He had no sentimental attachment to the old order, thus was energized by upending it. His stubbornness had worked to his advantage. (Location 5763)

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By far the most important manifestation of Einstein’s midlife transition from a revolutionary to a conservative was his hardening attitude toward quantum theory, which in the mid-1920s produced a radical new system of mechanics. His qualms about this new quantum mechanics, and his search for a unifying theory that would reconcile it with relativity and restore certainty to nature, would dominate—and to some extent diminish—the second half of his scientific career. (Location 5827)

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“It is a weakness of the theory,” Einstein conceded, “that it leaves the time and direction of the elementary process to ‘chance.’” The whole concept of chance—“Zufall” was the word he used—was so disconcerting to him, so odd, that he put the word in quotation marks, as if to distance himself from it.37 (Location 5885)

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For the rest of his life, Einstein would remain resistant to the notion that probabilities and uncertainties ruled nature in the realm of quantum mechanics. “I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will not only its moment to jump off but also its direction,” (Location 5892)

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Heisenberg’s more famous and disruptive contribution came two years later, in 1927. It is, to the general public, one of the best known and most baffling aspects of quantum physics: the uncertainty principle. (Location 6021)

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It is impossible to know, Heisenberg declared, the precise position of a particle, such as a moving electron, and its precise momentum (its velocity times its mass) at the same instant. The more precisely the position of the particle is measured, the less precisely it is possible to measure its momentum. And the formula that describes the trade-off involves (no surprise) Planck’s constant. (Location 6022)

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The very act of observing something—of allowing photons or electrons or any other particles or waves of energy to strike the object— affects the observation. But Heisenberg’s theory went beyond that. An electron does not have a definite position or path until we observe it. This is a feature of our universe, he said, not merely some defect in our observing or measuring abilities. (Location 6025)

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The uncertainty principle, so simple and yet so startling, was a stake in the heart of classical physics. It asserts that there is no objective reality—not even an objective position of a particle—outside of our observations. In addition, Heisenberg’s principle and other aspects of quantum mechanics undermine the notion that the universe obeys strict causal laws. (Location 6028)

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Among those who were dismayed was Wolfgang Pauli. Einstein’s new approaches “betrayed” his general theory of relativity, Pauli sharply told him, and relied on mathematical formalism that had no relation to physical realities. He accused Einstein of “having gone over to the pure mathematicians,” and he predicted that “within a year, if not before, you will have abandoned that whole distant parallelism, just as earlier you gave up the affine theory.” (Location 6231)

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to a world federalist organization, like a League of Nations with real teeth, that would have its own professional army to enforce its decisions. “It seems to me that in the present situation we must support a supranational organization of force rather than advocate the abolition of all forces,” he said. “Recent events have taught me a lesson in this respect.”55 (Location 7468)

He also spoke of the need for solitude. “The monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind,” he said, and he repeated a suggestion he had made when younger that scientists might be employed as lighthouse keepers so they could “devote themselves undisturbed” to thinking. (Location 7634)

It was a revealing remark. For Einstein, science was a solitary pursuit, and he seemed not to realize that for others it could be far more fruitful when pursued collaboratively. (Location 7637)

Einstein relished the simplicity of life in Watch Hill. He puttered around its lanes and even shopped for groceries with Mrs. Bucky. Most of all, he loved sailing his seventeen-foot wooden boat Tinef, which is Yiddish for a piece of junk. He usually went out on his own, aimlessly and often carelessly. “Frequently he would go all day long, just drifting around,” remembered a member of the local yacht club who went to retrieve him on more than one occasion. “He apparently was just out there meditating.” (Location 7829)

Not surprisingly, Einstein found solace in his work. He admitted to Hans Albert that focusing was difficult, but the attempt provided him the means to escape the painfully personal. “As long as I am able to work, I must not and will not complain, because work is the only thing that gives substance to life.” (Location 7947)

“At first his attempts to concentrate were pitiful,” Hoffmann recalled. “But he had known sorrow before and had learned that work was a precious antidote.” (Location 7951)

Might this spooky action at a distance—where something that happens to a particle in one place can be instantly reflected by one that is billions of miles away—violate the speed limit of light? No, the theory of relativity still seems safe. The two particles, though distant, remain part of the same physical entity. By observing one of them, we may affect its attributes, and that is correlated to what would be observed of the second particle. But no information is transmitted, no signal sent, and there is no traditional cause-and-effect relationship. One can show by thought experiments that quantum entanglement cannot be used to send information instantaneously. “In short,” says physicist Brian Greene, “special relativity survives by the skin of its teeth.”34 During the (Location 8250)

Bohr and his adherents scoffed at the idea that it made sense to talk about what might be beneath the veil of what we can observe. All we can know are the results of our experiments and observations, not some ultimate reality that lies beyond our perceptions. (Location 8273)

Born, who loved Einstein dearly, agreed with the Young Turks that Einstein had become as “conservative” as the physicists of a generation earlier who had balked at his relativity theory. “He could no longer take in certain new ideas in physics which contradicted his own firmly held philosophical convictions.”50 (Location 8319)

But Einstein preferred to think of himself not as a conservative but as (again) a rebel, a nonconformist, one with the curiosity and stubbornness to buck prevailing fads. “The necessity of conceiving of nature as an objective reality is said to be obsolete prejudice while the quantum theoreticians are vaunted,” he told Solovine in 1938. “Each period is dominated by a mood, with the result that most men fail to see the tyrant who rules over them.”51 (Location 8322)

Nonetheless, Einstein insisted that he still could not “accept the view that events in nature are analogous to a game of chance.” And so he pledged to continue his quest. Even if he failed, he felt that the effort would be meaningful. “It is open to every man to choose the direction of his striving,” he explained, “and every man may take comfort from the fine saying that the search for truth is more precious than its possession.” (Location 8420)

Tags: truth

Pacifists like himself had made a mistake in the 1920s by encouraging Germany’s neighbors not to rearm, he explained. “This merely served to encourage the arrogance of the Germans.” There were parallels now with Russia. “Similarly, your proposition would, if effective, surely lead to a serious weakening of the democracies,” he wrote those pushing the antimilitary petition. (Location 8923)

“It is a joy for me to have a son who has inherited the main traits of my personality: the ability to rise above mere existence by sacrificing one’s self through the years for an impersonal goal.” (Location 9571)

There was an aesthetic to Einstein’s thinking, a sense of beauty. And one component to beauty, he felt, was simplicity. He had echoed Newton’s dictum “Nature is pleased with simplicity” (Location 9777)