First Blog

  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

The short answer is, “Who knows. Ask one.” However, there are markers I’ve noticed over many years having worked with and read about a few of them. a. Finding the “genius” solution is more than just picking up the right pebble on the beach. It is rejecting what doesn’t work. Researching a topic means sifting and winnowing idea after idea. The  genius can reject the bad ideas quickly  and move on. There is an anecdote about John von Neumann, who worked on the “Super,” H-bomb, and with the military. The report is that some engineers were working on a project for months, and one day handed it to von Neumann. He rifled through the pages for a few minutes, looked up and said it wouldn’t work. After months more of work, the engineers concluded, it doesn’t work. This is legend to the point that, “If Johnny says it will work or not, that is it.” BTW, Von Neumann was considered the best mathematician of the 20th century. Johnny had a great memory and one night at a party he got into an argum

It is almost foolish to speculate on why or how someone like Albert Einstein was a genius.   People like Einstein and Newton are essentially off the scale of human intelligence.   Yet, they live among us, make very human errors, and act in very human ways. So, we take them for humans, albeit just really smart specimens. As to Einstein, he told us his formula for discovery. That was through the thought experiment , wherein he would conceive of a physical situation such as what would happen as he looked in a mirror as both were accelerating toward the speed of light. This was, for Einstein, the beginning of relativity.   But what for you and I, had we been given this experiment? The implication is that Einstein dwelled on the problem endlessly until some ideas emerged.   Then, by sheer strength of will he managed those ideas into the beginnings of a theory.   Finally, it became a fait de complet. What is not mentioned is that Einstein also had an intense proclivity to indepen