Why do i like einstein

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By clicking the "I accept" button, you consent to the use of these cookies. This article is published in collaboration with Project Syndicate. Albert Einstein announced his greatest achievement, the general theory of relativity, in Berlin a century ago, on November 25, For many years, hardly any physicist could understand it.

But, since the s, following decades of controversy, most cosmologists have regarded general relativity as the best available explanation, if not the complete description, of the observed structure of the universe, including black holes.

When he gave lectures about general relativity at Oxford University in , the academic audience packed the hall, only to ebb away, baffled by his mathematics and his German, leaving only a small core of experts. We revere him not only as a scientific genius but also as a moral and even spiritual sage.

Abraham Pais, Einstein's friend and biographer, called him "the divine man of the 20th century. I doubt it. In Genius , his biography of physicist Richard Feynman, James Gleick pondered why physics hadn't produced more giants like Einstein.

The paradoxical answer, Gleick suggested, is that there are so many brilliant physicists alive today that it has become harder for any individual to stand apart from the pack.

In other words, our perception of Einstein as a towering figure is, well, relative. Gleick's explanation makes sense. In fact, physicist Edward Witten has been described as the most mathematically gifted physicist since Newton. However, I would add a corollary: Einstein seems bigger than modern physicists because--to paraphrase Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard --physics got small.

For the first half of the last century, physics yielded not only deep insights into nature--which resonated with the disorienting work of creative visionaries like Picasso, Joyce and Freud--but also history-jolting technologies like the atomic bomb, nuclear power, radar, lasers, transistors and all the gadgets that make up the computer and communications industries.

Physics mattered. Over the past few decades, many physicists have gotten bogged down pursuing a goal that obsessed Einstein in his latter years: a theory that fuses quantum physics and general relativity, which are as incompatible, conceptually and mathematically, as plaid and polka dots.

Seekers of this "theory of everything" have wandered into fantasy realms of higher dimensions with little or no empirical connection to our reality. Over the past few decades, biology has displaced physics as the scientific enterprise with the most intellectual, practical and economic clout.

Of all modern biologists, Francis Crick who originally trained as a physicist probably came closest to Einstein in terms of scientific achievement. As if by magic; as if a friend were whispering into my ear an extraordinary hidden truth, suddenly raising the veil of reality. The adult Einstein continued to enjoy disconnecting himself from the demands of the land. His wife, Elsa, enjoyed the effect of the sea on her beloved genius, too.

This lackadaisical approach did sometimes get him in trouble. Einstein occasionally ended up wandering the beach, befuddled, and got picked up by police, as happened in the summer of in Long Island. Einstein is not alone in appreciating the importance of doing nothing as a way to generate creative ideas. We thought that space was a flat, Euclidean entity, unaffected by the distribution of matter and energy within it. Einstein, a mere patent clerk when he first began suggesting differently , showed us that light must be thought of as a particle when it is emitted or absorbed, that matter is composed of atoms, that space is malleable, undulating with the distribution of the stuff within it, that how long or massive an object is or the time order of closely occurring events is not a fact of the world, but merely a fact of our point of view.

He showed that these perspectival truths were well-behaved when they were placed in a four-dimensional conceptual framework. Seeing may be believing, but what we should believe about the universe, Einstein demonstrated, requires seeing it from a reference frame beyond that of the human senses. Einstein joked to his dear friend Max Born that he had a version of the Midas touch: everything he said turned to newsprint.

He was no shrinking violet, yet he detested the shallowness and meaningless absurdity that came with his universal adoration. But he realised that it could be handy. He was given a cultural megaphone and he decided that its best use was to amplify the concerns of those whose voices were least heard. Whether it was his own Jewish brethren suffering the insults of antisemitism, African-Americans suffering systematic racism, the poor kept down by structural barriers to advancement, or political dissidents in the Soviet Union who were being repressed, Einstein was unabashedly vocal in trying to change the institutions that led to inequality and injustice.

His standing provided him with a unique place to speak for those who were silenced and he made great use of it in the name of universal human dignity. Einstein never lacked confidence. Strengthened by his convictions, he was impervious to the power of those with superior social or professional standing, and resolute in his willingness to state his beliefs publicly.