
Einstein: Superman or Super Stubborn? - acangiano
http://math-blog.com/2010/09/03/einstein-superman-or-super-stubborn/
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T_S_
For the tl;dr-impaired:

"Einstein, like many inventors and discovers, spent many years stubbornly
pursuing his great discoveries — about seven years for special relativity and
the other discoveries published in 1905 and seven years for General
Relativity. His accomplishments did not come easily or quickly or without
error."

Well, at least when he was finished, he didn't have to code it up in LaTeX and
run a bunch of experiments using code written at 2AM after the lab sysadmin
disabled his login for downloading too much data. Instead he went for walks.

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sever
A great article, and a great illustration of the fact that you can't always
judge the correctness of an action based on outcome, but only based on the
information you had available at the time.

If QM turns out to be right, it doesn't mean Einstein was wrong to work
against it. If string theory turns out to be right, doesn't mean the
theoretical physics community was correct to invest all its time into it.

------
known
"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious." --Albert Einstein

~~~
wwortiz
If you ask me that is a pretty special talent.

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baguasquirrel
Boohoo, he was on the losing side Schrodinger and de Broglie. I'd give a
kidney to be named on the losing side of a problem of this level, with guys
like these.

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devmonk
Maybe so, but he still rules because of relativity and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power>

~~~
eru
What does Einstein have to do with Nuclear Power?

Just to stop one answer: The mass-energy equivalence works as well for
lighting a fire or for water-turbines as for nuclear energy. And yes, Einstein
did some initial work on quantum mechanics.

~~~
ithkuil
"Einstein's greatest role in the invention of the atomic bomb was signing a
letter to President Franklin Roosevelt urging that the bomb be built."

<http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/einstein.shtml>

where he cites the work made by Fermi el al.

The first artificial nuclear reactor was built in 1942
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1>)

Einstein's relativity theory and the equivalence of mass and energy is
commonly cited has having laid the ground for the exploitation of the energy
from nuclear decay, but I have the feeling that research in the nuclear energy
field would have continued and yield some interesting results even without
knowing that E=MC^2 beforehand.

~~~
devmonk
Anyone could do almost anything without others' influence if given enough
time, but that doesn't mean we can't appreciate those that move things along
faster and those that bring the science to the forefront.

Einstein did a tremendous amount for related fields of research and the world
in-general, not only through his work, but by becoming a superstar and
elevating the role of science in our lives. If he could go from patent clerk
to a world-renown scientist, then surely others could as well.

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korch
_Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems._

—Paul Erdös

It may take another century, but I believe with absolute certainty that
Einstein will be vindicated for thinking Quantum Mechanics was _incomplete_ ,
rejecting the non-visualizable, non-intuitive, entirely algorithmic hoisting
up of the mathematical machinery which Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac, de
Broglie et. al. built into quantum mechanics.

Einstein was on the far-most opposite end of the spectrum than all of them.
Einstein was looking towards intuition to _explain_ the physics and the
experimental reality, while they were looking for _mathematical models_ which
seemed to fit the experimental data, while providing no understanding of what
it all meant. Once Heisenberg & Schrödinger made a big break into QM, it's
like all of physics jumped on it and forged ahead, damn whether anyone
_understands_ what is really happening.

Even Schrödinger himself, in his own first paper presenting his wave mechanics
formulation, said there is no hope of visualizing nor understanding what Psi
really represents. It's all just _empty_ mathematical symbols, that when
manipulated according to a particular set of rules, within a particular
context, will give somewhat accurate predictions about some physical
experiment. It really doesn't help at all the the entire QM apparatus is just
plain ugly, inelegant and incapable of justifying itself. I'm not condemning
it, nor any of the enormous geniuses who tossed their own contribution onto
our _great, immeasurable & eternal bonfire of accumulated human knowledge
which we call science_.

But if you read through a few grad-level books about QM, it's blindingly
obvious that nobody really knows what's really going on. This is more of a
consequence of our current gaps in mathematics, more than a failure of any
individuals. Believe me, once someone discovers how to solve The Eigenvalue
Problem in quadratic time, all of QM, as it is currently formulated, is going
to go away and be replaced by a much simpler model. It'll be just as
simplifying as centuries ago when we replaced Ptolemy's epicycles with
Kepler's elliptic orbits. I bet even the probability concepts embedded in QM
will be entirely thrown out(they were never anything but trouble anyways), and
replaced by something even more fantastic & currently unimaginable.

~~~
eru
Eigenvalues (and eigenvectors etc) can already be calculated numerically in
polynomial time. Why would quadratic time make such a difference?

~~~
korch
_We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming._

— Wernher von Braun

Because having a worst case algorithm of n^2 is tractable, while solving for
n^1000000 or bigger is not so much. The numbers are as shockingly big as in
thermodynamics. And for real problems, it's not just one matrix, but
thousands, all interlocked. And for some reason, the most common cases involve
extremely sparse matrices. Numerical methods can only scratch the surface. _On
the bright side, we can't even imagine the true difficultly level._ Sure
computers can model the easy text book examples, but when it comes to modeling
the real world, our current best mathematical capabilities don't even get off
the paper.

