I hope you guys all appreciate the umlaut in “Schrodinger”, because I had to hex edit my blog database to put it there (Hex Workshop, by the way, it the best hex editor ever).
I read an interested article in Discover (or similar popular science magazine) yesterday about Einstein. Einstein has pretty much be written about to death in these magazines, but this article had an interesting epistemological slant.
In 1905, Einstein’s annus mirabilis, the german made four fundamental contributions to physics. Most people don’t contribute so much in their entire life to the store of human knowledge. The article discussed the possibility that Einstein might have decided on a different career choice, such as becoming a violinist, and not made these contributions. How much of a loss would this have been for modern science? The argument is that it would not have been so great a loss. In these discoveries, Einstein is judged to have only been a couple years ahead of the rest of the pack. Henri Poincare, in particular was already making advances towards E = mc^2 and special relativity.
Now this is the most significant bit: Einstein had one brilliant stroke of genius that was completely out of the blue. His theory of general relativity came from nowhere. At the time of it’s formulation by Einstein, there was almost no experimental evidence indicating that that should be the way the universe works. Expert agree that without Einstein, general relativity might not have seen the light of day for sometime. I have read else where that general relativity is sometimes considered to be a piece of 21st century physics which mistakenly fell into the 20th century.
So those career choices are important.
