What made Albert Einstein so great?

 What made Einstein so great?

The best answer is nobody knows. However, there are conditions under which he learned. First, he had a home tutor who was mathematically and physics trained. This person probably insisted the young Albert think deeply about what he was learning and how to explain it thoroughly. This put Albert into a mode of internalizing everything he learned, and learning how to explain it. This is simply not taught in schools these days, but if you look at notables such as Richard Feynman, his father taught him to think similarly. Even Isaac Newton once said, “I think about a problem constantly until I can see clean through it.”

The lesson learned here is that one key to understanding is to contain the entirety of your subject all within the mind. You’ll note, all his life he was concerned with the very foundations of physics by way of understanding and explanation.

Next, we come to the man himself. He was obviously highly intelligent, and having learned to think internally and clearly, he could be challenged by penetrating to the very root of events - such as the consequences of the speed of light being the same in any reference system. It is not as though anyone can be so rigorously trained. Such training could ruin a lesser mind to totally rejecting all schooling.

Einstein was different. His mind had the horsepower to do it, and he loved doing it. Serious and deep concentration takes monumental amounts of mental energy. He persisted, even after having been rejected in the beginning. Happily, Max Planck helped him along the way. You’ll note his Nobel prize was not for relativity but for his photoelectric effect paper.

Let’s summarize these characteristics.

·        Complete focus upon a task.

·        Ability to concentrate for hours, days, and even months on a single problem.

·        A willingness to advance unusual consequences within the framework of his thought experiments.

·        A willingness to learn new, advanced topics such as non-Euclidean geometry to explain his ideas.

·        A doggedness and persistence in his pursuit of the problem at hand.

He did not brainstorm, as in the modern vernacular, He drilled deeper and deeper into the impenetrable unknown. He made sense of the unknowable unknowns of his day.