dunbarx wrote:Sri.
....... he had to ask mathematicians Tulio Levi-Cevita and Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro how to implement his ideas in a formal manner.........
Craig
Sure, and he sought the assistance of his classmate Marcel Grossman, too, to be tutored on some math. In the context of the grandeur of his discovery, this is like asking a friend who knows how to drive to take you to a place no one knew existed and only you knew how to get to. All great men stand tall and see far because they stand on the shoulders of giants, but few depended on others for their greatness as little as Einstein. To quote C.P. Snow (sorry for the long quote)
"Einstein, twenty-six years old, only three years away from crude privation, still a patent examiner, published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905 five papers on entirely different subjects. Three of them were among the greatest in the history of physics. One, very simple, gave the quantum explanation of the photoelectric effect—it was this work for which, sixteen years later, he was awarded the Nobel prize. Another dealt with the phenomenon of Brownian motion, the apparently erratic movement of tiny particles suspended in a liquid: Einstein showed that these movements satisfied a clear statistical law. This was like a conjuring trick, easy when explained: before it, decent scientists could still doubt the concrete existence of atoms and molecules: this paper was as near to a direct proof of their concreteness as a theoretician could give. The third paper was the special theory of relativity, which quietly amalgamated space, time, and matter into one fundamental unity. This last paper contains no references and quotes to authority. All of them are written in a style unlike any other theoretical physicist's. They contain very little mathematics. There is a good deal of verbal commentary. The conclusions, the bizarre conclusions, emerge as though with the greatest of ease: the reasoning is unbreakable. It looks as though he had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided, without listening to the opinions of others. To a surprisingly large extent, that is precisely what he had done."
if Einstein never lived, we might well have had the Special Theory (Poincare was a possible candidate) but we might never have had the General Theory. This statement may be apocryphal
No, it is not. C.P. Snow is the culprit, again.
John von Neumann was probably smarter, though.
Einstein himself said "Imagination is more important than knowledge".
As an aside, personally, I think smartness is overrated; (and goodness, underrated.)
Regards,
Sri.
