Current Events > The more I learn about physics, the more bonkers Einstein's intelligence becomes

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I always thought that "Einstein" being synonymous with "a smart person" was just a sort of long standing meme. Like sure, there have been lots of smart people, some were even better at maths, others better at other types of academia, etc.

What's hard to grasp is how wlld Einstein's ideas still are today, and how utterly ridiculous they would have seemed at the time. I'm just trying to imagine what it would have been like in i dunno, 1905 when he was coming up with relativity. How absolutely nuts he would have seemed to his colleagues. "gravity isn't a force in the conventional sense but actually the bending of spacetime. Oh yeah, space and time are the same thing. You push on one and the other distorts." And then the madlad comes up with a really elegant formula that shows how this works and then it...works. Better than Newton's model of gravity.

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Its actually surprising to me that we didnt figure this out sooner.

And personally, I think Newton is smarter than Einstein.

Newton literally invented calculus in 1665

This photo of a 1927 conference always blows my mind:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/3/32570ca8.jpg

Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, Dirac, Heisenberg, Planck, Curie . . .

The number of revolutionary thinkers, all in one place at one time.

NittanyLions23 posted...

Its actually surprising to me that we didnt figure this out sooner.

And personally, I think Newton is smarter than Einstein.

Newton literally invented calculus in 1665

Eh, elements of calculus had been around since before Christ's time.

Heck, another European also invented modern calculus independent of Newton around the same time period.

To think, we should be much farther ahead but the dark ages literally held science and progression back.

NittanyLions23 posted...

Its actually surprising to me that we didnt figure this out sooner.

And personally, I think Newton is smarter than Einstein.

Newton literally invented calculus in 1665

The sheer amount of stuff newton figured out is mind boggling, sure. I always thought newton was the smartest man ever. I just underestimated einstein.

Slightly off-topic, but this is why I don't like researchers who are always so adamant about something not being possible.

It's not possible just because noone smart enough to figure it out has shown up yet.

We went from first ideas of flying to landing on the Moon in less than a 100 years, why is the idea of a technology that will be able to bend the space/time so out of question? Just because we havent figured it out yet.

Its time travel but he fucked up

tri-sapphire posted...

Heck, another European also invented modern calculus independent of Newton around the same time period.

And his version was easier to use and resembles the way we use it today more. Although that's less because he was smarter, and more because he collaborated with other mathemetiticans to make it better while Newton largely kept it to himself.

That said, both Newton and Einstein were extremely smart. They were in different times working on very different problems so I don't see much point in trying to say who was smarter, it's an apples and oranges comparison.

What most people get wrong is that they assume because they're geniuses in their field, that means they're super smart about everything. But outside of physics and related areas, Einstein wasn't particularly smart. In his everyday life he was just a regular dude and there were no doubt plenty of things he was dumb about.

Like, I remember there was a Melanie Griffith romantic comedy where she and her husband Tim Robbins are in the 1950s living near Albert Einstein, and because he's Einstein of course he has some deep wisdom about love to share that helps them understand true love or whatever. When in real life he was married several times and none of the marriages went well, apparently, so Einstein probably would have been a terrible person to go to for advice about love.

Pretty sure he was helped by aliens. How did we go from riding horses to landing on the moon in 60 years?

Aliens.

tri-sapphire posted...

Eh, elements of calculus had been around since before Christ's time.

how many years is 1665 after Christ?

Ill give you a minute to think about that.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/d/dfe1f0d4.jpg

But what did he know about big cats?

Humanity's ability to conceptualize the mechanics of the universe far ahead of their ability to measure it is always something that has completely floored me when I give it much thought.

Gravity, relativity, atoms, germ theory, DNA, etc. All of these things pretty accurately theorized before there was any ability to confirm or deny their existence. It's amazing. Humans are amazing.

Then there are people like Tesla, who invented new thing after new thing until he died, a lot of which still have their uses today.

Definitely makes you feel inadequate sometimes, nowhere close to seeing the world in the way these people were able to.

LeoRavus posted...

Pretty sure he was helped by aliens. How did we go from riding horses to landing on the moon in 60 years?

Aliens.

Maybe it was the horses who were just sick of our bullshit and wanted us off their backs?

Wouldn't Da Vinci theoretically have a claim as smarter?

Tesla, Turing, Cantor

His book is awesome, I gotta read it again.

Newton invented half of math and physics as we know it on his own.

Einstein was incredibly intelligent, don't get me wrong, but special relativity ultimately falls out of applying a couple assumptions to mathematical tools that had been around for centuries.

I think I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson tell a story about how Albert Einstein got inspired about science as a child when he picked up a compass for the first time and he was so curious about WHY it always pointed north.

This paints such a vivid image in my mind of a child, holding a compass, and the hamster running on the wheel inside of his head is just going crazy thinking about the universe.

I knew something about Einstein when I was in elementary school but playing Red Alert when it came out was was really got me interested in him.. (the game was also my first introduction to alternate history)

NittanyLions23 posted...

I think I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson tell a story about how Albert Einstein got inspired about science as a child when he picked up a compass for the first time and he was so curious about WHY it always pointed north.

Literally FUCKIN MAGNETS, HOW DO THEY WORK? lol

What amazes me is the breadth, more so than the depth.

Newton is most famous for gravity, yet also contributed to optics and fluid dynamics (Newtonian fluids). Einstein is most famous for relativity theory, but won his Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect and started out in diffusion theory (Einstein relation)

Wait until you go over his studies on light and how we technically don't know if light goes a set speed one way then another when it's reflected.

teep_ posted...

What amazes me is the breadth, more so than the depth.

Newton is most famous for gravity, yet also contributed to optics and fluid dynamics (Newtonian fluids). Einstein is most famous for relativity theory, but won his Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect and started out in diffusion theory (Einstein relation)

That's why I reckon Leonardo Da Vinci has a claim as the smartest

He didn't have the science knowledge of those 2, but he was around long before them and certainly was well ahead of his time with his inventions, despite only a fraction of his ideas being actually feasible at the time

And then you add in that he also was an artistic genius, arguably the greatest painter of all time, a titan in the arts world, which is a pretty different area to science

But... does God play dice with the universe?