Item — HN Reader

I haven't met anyone that has read Einstein's papers and things of him as something but a super genius.

Obviously his work is based on the result of others, you could make that claim for 100% of scientists and mathematicians.

Not only was relativity a mind blowing thing that he clearly saw through, there's the massive leap to general relativity, then there's the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, the mass energy equivalence, Bose-Einstein condensate, the cosmological constant and even his work on quantum entanglement. Any of which would make a physicist very famous. For one single person to come up with so many ideas, is almost unbelievable.

7 comments

I think both are true. Timing plays a role but it requires the local (in a temporal sense) genius of the day to put together the pieces.

Plenty of other physicists were contemporaries of Einstein and did not see what he saw.

I suspect also that had Einstein instead lived in this modern age where, at least to this layman physics progress appears to be floundering, he too would have been struggling to stitch all the pieces together into some semblance of a whole.

I sometimes wonder what it would look like if a time traveller became stranded in the past and needed to advance physics by several decades in order to build a device to return home.

Einstein ticks quite a few of the boxes.

Perhaps he was an avatar of one of the universe simulator's programmers, giving us a nudge to move the scenario along.

Like using a cheat code to buff one of your units in a video game.

And even when Einstein didn't know the answer, in things like the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky it shows he was also really good at coming up with the right question.

Special Relativity wasn't really all that special - Einstein put all the existing pieces together. Lorentz actually put it together but just didn't believe that's how the universe actually operated.

Einstein's genius was the General Theory of Relativity. That was truly original and revolutionary thought, the likes of which we only see every few hundred years.

And let's not forget that he released four monumental papers THE SAME YEAR( called Annus Mirabilis, miraculous year)! Brownian motion, Special Relativity, Photoelectric Effect and Mass-Energy Equivalence.

Astonishing!

Thanks to the timing, I strongly suspect that half of those four — in aggregate, not necessarily two of the four complete items — were from his wife, who was also brilliant.

A lot of these discoveries were also published in the same year (1905):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_mirabilis_papers

(General relativity was 1915.)

Relativity as a concept is at least as old as Galileo.