Okay, he’s probably up there in Heaven looking down at this very moment and laughing at the fact that one of earth’s biggest morons is writing an Internert post on a message board that questions his place among the Greats. No problem.
[and keep laughing, sir, and i hope you like that pic i have of you taped to my wall, next to Lincoln. ya look real good in it; ya know ya do! ]
The thing is, a few weeks ago, I heard this caller call into the radio show ‘Coast to Coast’ in which he basically went on a spiel about Einstein supposedly having had some input on a physics theory – the “string” theory – which (if I’m not mistaken) didn’t even come out until long after the man was dead!
When I first heard the guy, the caller, I thought that he was in error; that Einstein couldn’t have said all those things and have held such views because, like I said, he was long dead before physics had gotten that far. Then, a week or so later, a guy calls up the show and says (to the host) that which I had thought was true, i.e. that said caller – who came on like he was some kind of an expert – was full of crap and shouldn’t have any credibility at all on the subject.
Now here’s another thing; I heard this guy on another radio talk show call in and say that Einstein had predicted that human life would come to an end if for four generations (I think he said) there were no honeybees pollinating plants.
Hmm.
And so now I’m starting to wonder if maybe it’s becoming popular for some folks that are overly enamored with Einstein to misuse his greatness by trying to win their claims and arguments with this kind of ploy? (After all, who can argue with Einstein, right?)
So, has anyone else noticed this trend of dropping Einstein’s name here, there, and everywhere … ?
Well, I’m not sure what you’re arguing; however, my favorite Einstein factoid is that while his brain was the size of everyone elses, he had 10 times as many dendrites the average person.
Whether or not Einstein is overrated as a scientist and the issue of people trying to bolster their claims by invoking his name are two separate matters.
It’s very telling that Einstein figured out things circa 1910 with the assistance of only his brain that only the technological advances of the last few decades have been able to confirm. He was muy smart!
Also, you seem to find lots of radio programs where they talk about Einstein. What’s up with that?
Short answer: Of course Einstein built on the work of others; he was a scientist, that’s what they do. Nobody can really show that he stepped over then line into plagiarism, though.
Whether or not he is overrated is your own call. My vote is “No”. Hell, even Newton stood on the shoulders of giants, and Darwin had influences, too (not to mention that whole Alfred Wallace thing).
What’s probably being referred to here is Kaluza-Klein theory, which was an early attempt at what would now be called Grand Unification, and a pre-cursor to modern string theory. (The Wiki link looks to be pretty heavy going for the general reader!) The KK theory was published during Einstein’s lifetime, and I remember reading somewhere he was a fan of it (sorry, no cite). During the later part of his life he was very interested in unifying eletromagnetism and gravity, probaly more so than the vast majority of theoretical physicists at the time (again, no cite).
Einstein was probably the greatest physicist of the 20th century - and that is saying something! Even without Special and General Relativity, he could have been one of the greats of the century. (I read an article somewhere that posited this. Yet again, no cite. Bad Typo!)
But I am getting tired of seeing him everywhere and attached to everything. It comes up in the mental heath realm also - “was Einstein autistic”? :rolleyes: That would be no, IMNSHO.
I think Einstein was the last of the great scientists who could influence all of the fields of science in his day. The guy worked in astronomy, cosmology, particle physics, thermodynamics, etc., and contributed to all of these fields. After Einstein, science became specialized; which is why you have particle physicists and solid state physicists, who have nothing to do with eachother. So in that sense, Einstein’s career marked the end of an era. was he smart? Yes-VERY!
To deal with the bee thing first, this is obviously a (garbled) version of the story that’s been all over the web recently. All the versions seem to ultimately derive from this story in Der Spiegel. The quote allegedly from Einstein is given in it as “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man” (“Wenn die Biene von der Erde verschwindet dann hat der Mensch nur noch vier Jahre zu leben; keine Bienen mehr, keine Bestäubung mehr, keine Pflanzen mehr, keine Tiere mehr, keine Menschen mehr” in German). The 2005 article by Walter Haefeker that the news story mentions can be obtained from here. It indeed includes the quote and attributes it to Einstein, but gives no source. (The footnote at the end is there to point the reader to another paper on the general subject (a pdf), which doesn’t mention the quote.)
So did Einstein say it? Who knows. He was interviewed and quoted extensively over many decades and it’s impossible to check all such occasions. The point being made is striking, but, allowing for some hyperbole, isn’t that outrageous. Granted, it doesn’t quite sound like Einstein to me, but that’s just a gut feeling. He’s also one of those people striking quotations are frequently attributed to, whether he said them or not.
Which brings us to …
In so far as this is a “trend”, it’s one that’s been happening for nearly a century now.
An awful lot has been written over the years about public perceptions of him and how his image and name is used in popular culture. (The obvious overview is still Friedman and Donley’s Einstein as Myth and Muse, Cambridge, 1985, but it was far from the last word on the topic.) But most of this can be boiled down to a simple point: he became very famous for doing something everyone was told was very clever, but which few could understand. This made it inevitable that people would use him as an unquestionably wise authority and others try to co-opt that authority for their causes.
There were some other incredible physicists who never got the attention that fell on Einstein. Some of them have remarkable careers, posted amazing theories and even contradicted some Einsteinian thinkings.
I being very broad, but the point I am making is that Einsteen had that certain ‘something’ that elevated him into ‘pop culture’. Some folks resent the disproprtionate am’t of attention given to Al, when barely any attention was directed at other physicists.
A.E. : Remarkable and not over-rated, but possible resented since other amazing physicists/scientists were barely a blip on the radar screens of the masses.
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