From: Christian Szegedy (szegedy@or.uni-bonn.de)
Date: Wed Jun 26 2002 - 02:31:53 MDT
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> I do, actually. Sometimes great scientific achievements are made by
> people who are no smarter than many other contemporary geniuses but
> who happen to be in the right place at the right time. Both Newton
> and Einstein managed to do it *consistently*, however. If Einstein
> had been an ordinary genius, he would have invented Special Relativity
> on the basis of Michaelson-Morley, but not gone on to invent General
> Relativity on the basis of essentially *no* evidence. Almost as
> astonishing as Einstein's invention of General Relativity is his
> (absolutely correct) advance confidence in it: on being asked what he
> would have done if the eclipse observations conflicted with General
> Relativity, Einstein is said to have replied: "Then I would have
> pitied the Good Lord. The theory is correct."
I think it is not so astonishing: the special relativity raised a more
important question than it solved: why can it
work together with the gravity. I think this is only natural that one
tries hard to tackle this question, and he had
the most motivation to do is, because his theory was at the stake. That
was the reason also that he tried so hard
to prove that quantum-mechanics was not correct.
You wrote:
> It seems to me that in some way, Einstein learned to think like the
universe well enough to anticipate, in advance of knowing, > what kind
of physical laws the universe would invent.
It seems that he did not menage "thinking like the universe", otherwise
he would have discovered the quantum-mechanics
instead of insisting that it was not correct.
I believe that Einstein was a great genius, and that he was at the right
place at the right time (the special relativity is
so simple that it would have been surely discovered by someone else.),
but I don't think the consistantly trying to tackle
the most insteresting problem was an inherent attribute of him. I think
there is more coincidence, than you trying to
suggest.
Best regards, Christian
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