How Einstein started

[zimmer04]

There was a point when almost nothing was known. I am wondering, how do you think people like Einstein started on the road they did to even begin to discover the things they did? Imagine that nothing were known about physics and the world we live in except what you can literally see. How do you take that first plunge into atoms and gravity etc.?

[Ophiolite]

You don't. Einstein built on significant work done by others who had built their work on others and so on. As Newton said, "If I have seen further it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants."

[EquisDeXD]

You don't. Einstein built on significant work done by others who had built their work on others and so on. As Newton said, "If I have seen further it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants."

 

Einstein's "later" work was inspired by others, but a lot of his first ideas come from when he was sitting in his patenting office imagining what relativistic effects the you'd see as the train past him in front of his office, essentially he spent all of his time thinking and reasoning and imagining, much like Newton and Galileo and many other great scientists.

Edited October 14, 2012 by EquisDeXD

[elfmotat]

Einstein's "later" work was inspired by others, but a lot of his first ideas come from when he was sitting in his patenting office imagining what relativistic effects the you'd see as the train past him in front of his office, essentially he spent all of his time thinking and reasoning and imagining, much like Newton and Galileo and many other great scientists.

 

If anything, I'd say the opposite. His early work (namely "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies") was inspired by the work of Lorentz and others. His ideas regarding relativistic gravity were much more original.

[EquisDeXD]

If anything, I'd say the opposite. His early work (namely "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies") was inspired by the work of Lorentz and others. His ideas regarding relativistic gravity were much more original.

 

I suppose that's possible, but didn't he work in a patent office before being exposed to Lorentz works? He would have only encountered Lawrentz either in college or peer review and debates. I think Einstein could have encountered Lawrentz' work and Maxwell's on magnetism prior to the patent office, Einstein was originally fascinated by magnetism, unless I am confusing a different Lawrentz for the one that created the relativistic Lawrentz transformation...

His works on relativity though were inspired from his days at the patent office, and his later works such as solving the Ultra-Violet Catastrophe were after relativity when other great scientists were working on formulating quantum physics.

Edited October 14, 2012 by EquisDeXD

[John Cuthber]

"his later works such as solving the Ultra-Violet Catastrophe"

 

That wasn't Einstein.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_catastrophe

The phrase was coined in 1911

The special theory was already published by then.

However his work on the photoelectric effect (which shows the quantisation of energy) was published 1905

He was ahead of the game on quantum physics before he published relativity.

 

To some extent his ideas were a product of their time: if he hadn't made the leap, someone else would have, and probably fairly soon.

[ewmon]

There was a point when almost nothing was known. I am wondering, how do you think people like Einstein started on the road they did to even begin to discover the things they did? Imagine that nothing were known about physics and the world we live in except what you can literally see. How do you take that first plunge into atoms and gravity etc.?

I'm imagining that a patent clerk's job is not so demanding for someone of Einstein's abilities, so he had more time to think about his scientific work. Also, not only did Einstein stand on the shoulders of giants in science, but quite possibly, being a patent office clerk, the nature of his work exposed him to new or novel concepts that helped him in his seminal work. His own "think tank" as it was.

 

I also think that humans are no more "intelligent" now than, say, 2,000 or even 10,000 years ago, but that our body of accumulated knowledge has grown considerably. Prehistoric humans have been portrayed as bumbling klutzes, but I think humans have always been very perceptive, clever, and industrious. We had to be in order to survive due to our physical susceptibilities and to overcome them.

 

Our body of accumulated knowledge itself has a positive effect on human advancement, specifically the storage and transmission of knowledge, but also the instruments to gather information and the development/recognition of formal logic that helps us to theorize the unknown and predict the future.

[Ronald Hyde]

I'm imagining that a patent clerk's job is not so demanding for someone of Einstein's abilities, so he had more time to think about his scientific work. Also, not only did Einstein stand on the shoulders of giants in science, but quite possibly, being a patent office clerk, the nature of his work exposed him to new or novel concepts that helped him in his seminal work. His own "think tank" as it was.

 

I also think that humans are no more "intelligent" now than, say, 2,000 or even 10,000 years ago, but that our body of accumulated knowledge has grown considerably. Prehistoric humans have been portrayed as bumbling klutzes, but I think humans have always been very perceptive, clever, and industrious. We had to be in order to survive due to our physical susceptibilities and to overcome them.

 

Our body of accumulated knowledge itself has a positive effect on human advancement, specifically the storage and transmission of knowledge, but also the instruments to gather information and the development/recognition of formal logic that helps us to theorize the unknown and predict the future.

 

This provides a very good overview of Einsteins work. Inventions don't work if they don't obey the laws of Nature, so his patent job was good practice for his mind. He was

also good at math, he used concepts like postulates and groups in his Relativity paper, which are advanced mathematically.

 

When people try to justify 'extraterrestrial intelligence' as being required to build the Pyramids, I think that's foolish. People were every bit as smart then as now, maybe

even smarter on average. The methods used to build the Pyramids were in the form of trade secrets, kept from their competitors and passed from generation to generation,

so we do not know what they are now, but if we did we would probably be amazed at their ingenuity and effectiveness.

[Janus]

I suppose that's possible, but didn't he work in a patent office before being exposed to Lorentz works? He would have only encountered Lawrentz either in college or peer review and debates. I think Einstein could have encountered Lawrentz' work and Maxwell's on magnetism prior to the patent office, Einstein was originally fascinated by magnetism, unless I am confusing a different Lawrentz for the one that created the relativistic Lawrentz transformation...

His works on relativity though were inspired from his days at the patent office, and his later works such as solving the Ultra-Violet Catastrophe were after relativity when other great scientists were working on formulating quantum physics.

 

Einstein already had a teaching diploma from Zurich Polytechnic and was working towards his Phd while at the patent office. The only reason he took the job was because he couldn't find a teaching position.

[EquisDeXD]

Einstein already had a teaching diploma from Zurich Polytechnic and was working towards his Phd while at the patent office. The only reason he took the job was because he couldn't find a teaching position.

 

It must have been that the same Lorentz who both wrote the papers on magnetism and time dilation relative to other frames of reference, Einstein graduated with a degree in physics in 1900 and got the patent job in 1902 but Lawrentz work on relativity wasn't known until 1905. This is getting confusing because I know lawrentz was working on problems with relativistic light from multiple frames of reference, but Einstein was the person who created the theory of general relativity in 1915, but the Lawrentz works on relativity couldn't have been physically understood until after the notion that time and space were one thing was already created.

"his later works such as solving the Ultra-Violet Catastrophe"

 

That wasn't Einstein.

http://en.wikipedia....let_catastrophe

The phrase was coined in 1911

The special theory was already published by then.

However his work on the photoelectric effect (which shows the quantisation of energy) was published 1905

He was ahead of the game on quantum physics before he published relativity.

 

To some extent his ideas were a product of their time: if he hadn't made the leap, someone else would have, and probably fairly soon.

 

But the ultra-violet catastrophe was a problem black body radiation, and Maxwell postulated that it's because energy was quantized, even though Einstein had already said that in 1905? Doesn't that mean that he did in fact solve it? How doesn't it? I know Einstein had something to do with it, he used the findings of some part if it for his theories.

Edited October 14, 2012 by EquisDeXD

[MigL]

I believe Einstein already had his PhD in 1905 when he published his three papers ( Special Relativity, Photoelectric effect and Brownian motion ) all while working at the Swiss patent office because he couldn't get a teaching position.

 

The Lorentz- Ftzgerald transforms were an early attempt to explain relativistic effects along with the null result of the Michelson-Morly experiment. Most people, however, believe that Poincaire would have been first with a version of SR if Einstein hadn't delivered. GR however was totally unforeseen by anyone else and may still not be available today if not for Einstein.

 

The UV catastrophy was a problem with black body radiation that was solved by Max Planck in 1900, before Einstein even finished his schooling. He did later expand on Planck's ideas with a collaborator who I can't seem to remember right now.

[Pugdaddy]

I am reading a book about Einstein right now written by Walter Isaacson. I am about to 1912. Einstein was a bit of a rebel. He was not considered a very competent teacher. Lorentz and Einstein were friends and often communicated by letters.

In July 1912 Einstein moved back to Zurich from Prague. He contacted his college buddy Marcel Grossman, a brilliant mathematician who did his dissertation on non-euclidean geometry, published 7 papers on it and was chairman of the Math department. Einstein was not the greatest mathematician and never took it too seriously or studied it to any great extent, but now he was starting to acquire an appreciation that Mathematics could be a tool for discovery and not just a description.

Before he had much preferred his intuition guide him to the physical principles and leave the math to others like his Zurich colleague Minkowski did in Special Relativity.

That is where Grossmann came in. Grossmann recommended a paper Bernhard Riemann did for his thesis on curved surface in multi dimensions. Riemann thesis adviser was Carl Gauss who was a pioneer in the field in the mid 19th century. Einstein wanted to develop math that described two complementary processes. How a gravitation field told matter how to move and how matter told the gravitational field how to curve space. This led him to another insight of genius that gravity could be defined as the curvature of space time. He spent the next three year working on this with Grossmann.

When he was working as a patent clerk, there was an flood of patents submitted to synchronize clocks as the rail system was expanding but there many cities connected by a single rail causing nightmare collisions. a Standard time was needed. This is where the seed was planted that motion was through time and space. Things in the same inertial reference frame had all their motion through time. When someone moves relative to another, some of their motion is now through space. This he realized meant that for each observer, time passed at different rates. I know WOW.

 

Some time insight is more collective notion that an individual one. This I find fascinating. For example the alchemists thought the world was made up 4 things. Earth, air water and fire. The fact that is no where near the truth is not the point though. This was a significant leap in that it introduced the concept that the world could be described in terms of a combination of fundamental things. Since them we have learned much about fundamental things, but it is still the same concept.