The German theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein, developed the world's most famous equation, E = mc², helped to establish quantum theory, and published more than 300 scientific papers in his lifetime. He questioned the accepted classical worldview and tore it apart with his theories of relativity. It is for many reasons that his name has become synonymous with the word "genius." How to Think Like Einstein reveals just how he accomplished his achievements with a strong determination, visualized his goals to develop a clear strategy, and viewed each success as a stepping-stone for his next challenge, never believing his work was complete. Comprehensive yet accessible, this book will have you thinking like the great man in no time.
The German theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein, developed the world's most famous equation, E = mc², helped to establish quantum theory, and published more than 300 scientific papers in his lifetime. He questioned the accepted classical worldview and tore it apart with his theories of relativity. It is for many reasons that his name has become synonymous with the word "genius." How to Think Like Einstein reveals just how he accomplished his achievements with a strong determination, visualized his goals to develop a clear strategy, and viewed each success as a stepping-stone for his next challenge, never believing his work was complete. Comprehensive yet accessible, this book will have you thinking like the great man in no time.
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Overview
The German theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein, developed the world's most famous equation, E = mc², helped to establish quantum theory, and published more than 300 scientific papers in his lifetime. He questioned the accepted classical worldview and tore it apart with his theories of relativity. It is for many reasons that his name has become synonymous with the word "genius." How to Think Like Einstein reveals just how he accomplished his achievements with a strong determination, visualized his goals to develop a clear strategy, and viewed each success as a stepping-stone for his next challenge, never believing his work was complete. Comprehensive yet accessible, this book will have you thinking like the great man in no time.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781782432159 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michael O'Mara Books |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2015 |
| Series: | How To Think Like series |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
How to Think Like Einstein
By Daniel Smith
Michael O'Mara Books Limited
Copyright © 2014 Michael O'Mara Books LimitedAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78243-311-8
CHAPTER 1
Landmarks in a Remarkable Life
1879 Albert Einstein is born on 14 March in Ulm, Germany, to a Jewish family.
1880 The Einsteins move to Munich where Albert's father and uncle establish a gas and electrical supply business.
1881 A sister for Albert, Maria (known as Maja), is born.
1892 Albert opts not to attend his bar mitzvah.
1894 Einstein's parents and sisters move to Italy for his father's work. Albert moves in with relatives in Munich while he finishes his schooling, but joins his parents before he has graduated.
1895 After failing to secure a place at Zurich Polytechnic aged sixteen, Einstein goes to further his studies in Aarau, where he resides with the Winteler family. He writes his first (unpublished) scientific paper.
1896 Surrenders his German citizenship and wins a place at Zurich Polytechnic. There he meets his future wife, Mileva Maric.
1899 Applies for Swiss citizenship.
1900 Secures his teaching diploma from Zurich but fails to secure a job at the Polytechnic.
1901 Has a scientific paper published for the first time. It appears in Annalen der Physik. He receives his Swiss citizenship.
1902 Maric gives birth to Einstein's illegitimate daughter, Lieserl. Einstein begins work at the Bern Patent Office.
1903 Einstein and Maric marry. The Olympia Academy is formed in Bern by Einstein and two friends. All historical records of Lieserl end – it is probable that she is put up for adoption.
1904 Maric gives birth to a son, Hans Albert.
1905 The annus mirabilis, in which Einstein completes four papers that re-write the foundations of physics. He also formulates the equation E = mc2.
1906 Receives his doctorate from the University of Zurich.
1907 Turns his attentions to formulating the general theory of relativity, in the process discovering the principle of equivalence.
1908 Becomes an unsalaried Privatdozent at the University of Bern and begins lecturing.
1909 Appointed Extraordinary Professor for Theoretical Physics at the University of Zurich.
1910 Maric gives birth to a second son, Eduard.
1911 Takes up a professorship in Prague. He also attends the first Solvay Conference in Brussels.
1912 Begins an affair with his Berlin-based cousin, Elsa Löwenthal. He returns to Zurich to take up a professorship and begins working with Marcel Grossmann on the mathematics necessary for his general theory of relativity.
1913 Max Planck and Walther Nernst woo Einstein to Berlin with the promise of a professorship at the university and membership of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He takes up this position the following year.
1914 Einstein and Maric separate, and she leaves Berlin for Zurich with her two sons. Meanwhile, a politicized Einstein promotes his belief in pacifism as the First World War begins.
1915 Works with W. J. de Haas on investigations into the gyromagnetic effect. By November Einstein completes his general theory of relativity, which he outlines over four lectures at the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
1916 His paper entitled 'The Formal Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity' is published in the Annalen der Physik. By the end of the year he finishes On the Special and General Theory of Relativity, A Popular Account.
1917 Takes over management of Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. Also outlines his theory of the cosmological constant, which he will come to consider his 'biggest idiocy'.
1918 Rejects a return to teaching in Switzerland. The First World War comes to an end.
1919 Einstein divorces Maric in February and marries Elsa in June. In May, the astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington proves Einstein's theory of light deflection in the gravitational field of the sun (a key component of the general theory) using observations during a solar eclipse. Einstein's fame spreads around the world.
1920 Meets Niels Bohr, the celebrated quantum theorist, for the first time. Within Germany, Einstein finds himself a focus of increasing anti-Semitic sentiment.
1921 Spends two months touring the USA (his first visit to the country) with Chaim Weizmann, a Zionist who will become Israel's president. Einstein's motivation is to raise money for the prospective Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
1922 Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921, for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.
1924 Work with Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose results in the prediction of Bose–Einstein condensates, a state of matter not created under laboratory conditions until 1995.
1925 Formulation of the Bose–Einstein statistics, an important component of quantum mechanics. Einstein also joins the board of governors of the newly opened Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
1927 Debates quantum theory with Niels Bohr at the fifth Solvay Conference in Brussels.
1928 Spends much of the year housebound by illness. Helen Dukas starts work as his secretary and she will become his devoted protector until his death.
1929 Builds his beloved summerhouse at Caputh near Potsdam.
1930 Calls for global disarmament. He makes a second visit to the USA, staying at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena.
1931 Returns to Europe in March but goes back to the USA in December. He comes to the conclusion that his cosmological constant is incorrect.
1932 Travels to the USA in December unaware he will never return to Germany.
1933 Cuts his ties with Germany after Adolf Hitler comes to power. Following a brief return to Europe (when he stays in Belgium, Switzerland and the UK), he goes back to the USA to take up a post at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
1934 A collection of non-scientific works, The World As I See It, is published.
1935 Publication of the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen Paradox (the EPR Paper). Einstein and Elsa move to 112 Mercer Street in Princeton.
1936 Elsa dies on 20 December after a long illness.
1938 Publishes The Evolution of Physics in collaboration with Leopold Infeld.
1939 Signs a letter to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning of the threat of an atomic bomb shortly before the Second World War commences.
1940 Becomes an American citizen, while retaining his Swiss citizenship.
1942 The US government commences the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. Einstein is not directly involved, having been deemed a security risk.
1943 Undertakes work for the US Navy into highly explosive materials.
1944 A copy of Einstein's 1905 paper 'On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies' is auctioned for US$6 million.
1945 Responds to the end of the Second World War and the dropping of atom bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by saying: 'The war is won, but the peace is not.'
1946 Renews his calls for the creation of a supranational government and heads up the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, which seeks the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
1948 Mileva Maric dies on 4 August. Einstein is diagnosed with an aneurysm of the abdominal aorta and undergoes surgery.
1949 Autobiographical Notes, a review of his career written three years earlier, is published.
1950 Out of My Later Years, a collection of non-scientific essays and speeches, is published.
1951 Maja, Einstein's sister, dies on 25 June.
1952 Rejects the opportunity to succeed Chaim Weizmann as President of Israel.
1955 Agrees to sign what becomes known as the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, the founding document of the Pugwash movement, concerned with science and world affairs.
1955 Dies in hospital in Princeton on 18 April, aged 76.
CHAPTER 2Life is a Marathon, Not a Sprint
'I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.'
ALBERT EINSTEIN, 1930
For any parents intent on hothousing their young child in a bid to guarantee their future success, Einstein provides an object lesson that genius may take a while to find its way into the open. One of his school teachers, a certain Dr Joseph Degenhart, even secured himself a place in the footnotes of history by errantly concluding of his wayward pupil that he would 'never get anywhere in life'.
Albert Einstein entered the world on 14 March 1879, born in the German city of Ulm to Jewish parents, Hermann and Pauline. A sister, Maria (known as Maja), followed two years later. As a Jew in late nineteenth-century Germany, Einstein was instantly cast into the role of the outsider, a status that not only informed his psyche but had a profound influence on how others treated him throughout his life.
His family was typically bourgeois. His father, a talented mathematician, worked in the burgeoning electricity industry but suffered badly from a lack of business acumen. There was, truth be told, little in the family background to suggest Albert was destined for greatness. He was a late developer when it came to speaking – so much so that the family maid rather cruelly nicknamed him 'the dopey one'. In addition, he suffered from a condition called echolalia, which led him to repeat phrases several times. While there is little evidence to suggest that Einstein suffered from autism to any significant degree (and indeed, there is much to support the notion that he didn't), his echolalia has led some to speculate that he was to some extent afflicted.
Furthermore, he was a daydreamer, which could make him seem a little distant, and he had few friends of his own age as a young child. However, when he was five Einstein had his 'road to Damascus moment'. If it was a pivotal event for him personally, it would prove no less so for mankind. Einstein was poorly at the time and was recuperating in bed when his father presented him with a gift to distract him – a compass. The way that the needle rooted out north without any mechanical intervention rendered the boy astonished. Einstein himself described the moment as leaving him cold and shivery (good for science but probably not ideal for an already sick child). Here was an object that showed with brilliant clarity the physical effects of an invisible force. From that moment on, Einstein was obsessed by the unseen forces that influence our universe.
It has become part of folklore that Einstein was not very bright at school, no doubt partly the result of Dr Degenhart's ill-advised utterance. However, Albert was, by most accounts, a very able student, especially in the field of maths. In that subject he was working to an academic level several years beyond his age. By the time he was twelve, he was, in his own words, 'thrilled to see that it was possible to find out truths by reasoning alone, without the help of any outside experience'. But while, like his father, he certainly had a talent for mathematics, no one was proffering him as a science visionary. When he attempted to gain a place at university aged sixteen (two years earlier than normal), his test results showed he had some catching up to do in several of his other subjects, including botany, literature and politics.
In order to get a place at the Zurich Polytechnic, he attended school in the Swiss town of Aarau and came second in his class. Again, he had proven himself a capable student but had hardly set the world alight. (Although his name is of course far better known to us than that of the pupil who beat him into first place.) When he graduated from the Polytechnic in 1900, he was an undistinguished fourth in his class of five. He then made unsuccessful attempts to win an academic position at Zurich and an assortment of other institutions. In 1901, after much frustration, he was forced to take the relatively lowly position of Technical Expert (Class 3) at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern.
It is chastening, then, to think that only four years later Einstein would produce a series of papers that turned the world of science on its head. Even more remarkably, he did it all under his own steam and in his spare time. Einstein would later suggest that it was perhaps his lack of speed off the mark that helped him achieve his later triumphs. He would reflect: '... I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was already grown up.'
Yet even after he had shared his intellectual leaps forward with the rest of the world, it took several more years before he started to get the recognition he warranted. Extraordinarily, he only received his first junior professorship in 1909 – not only nine years after he had graduated, but fully four years after he had published his paper on the special theory of relativity and calculated that E = mc2. Nor would a Nobel Prize be his, officially, until 1922.
All of which surely goes to prove that even for an intellect as stellar as Einstein's, slow and steady wins the race.
CHAPTER 3Be Curious
'I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.'
ALBERT EINSTEIN, 1952
For all that we may wonder at the intellectual processes that propelled Einstein to greatness, he himself seemed to believe that there was nothing so important as his relentless desire to find answers to the really big questions. As he wrote in a letter in his later years: 'My scientific work is motivated by an irresistible longing to understand the secrets of nature and by no other feelings.' To Alexander Moszkowski, a friend who published an early biography of him in 1920, Albert explained that it was his inner conviction that the development of science was mainly driven by the need to satisfy the longing for pure knowledge.
Crucially, he was also convinced that the answers were there, just waiting to be discovered. In 1938 he co-authored The Evolution of Physics: The Growth of Ideas From Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta. In it, he would note that 'without the belief in the inner harmony of our world, there could be no science'. His certainty that the great mysteries of our world and the cosmos had rational solutions came to him at a relatively young age. By the time he was around twelve he was certain that nature could be interpreted through the application of mathematical structures, most of which he considered to be 'relatively simple' (though those of us without his innate grasp of maths and physics reserve the right to take some issue with that). It was an idea he expanded upon at the Herbert Spencer lecture he gave in Oxford in 1933:
Our experience hitherto justifies us in believing that nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas. I am convinced that we can discover by means of purely mathematical constructions the concepts and the laws connecting them with each other, which furnish the key to the understanding of natural phenomena.
Einstein was thus able to combine a sense of wonder at the world with a belief that he could come to understand what lay behind those wonders. The sickly infant who had marvelled at the seemingly mystical powers of the compass soon found his interests expanding to take in the mysteries of heat and electricity (no wonder, given that the family business was electricity generation). He grew up, too, in a period when science was just starting to come to terms with the physical reality of atoms and molecules (essentially, the unseen building blocks of the universe), while the emerging field of kinetic theory (the motion of particles within matter) was another major area of interest for him in his youth.
He had his heroes too, citing Galileo and Newton to Moszkowski as the two greatest creative geniuses that science had thrown up. Of these, it was arguably Newton who he most looked up to, an irony given that much of Einstein's work would throw into chaos many of the Newtonian 'realities' that the scientific world had accepted for over two centuries. Writing a foreword in 1931 to a reissue of Newton's 1704 work Opticks, Einstein said of him: 'In one person he combined the experimenter, the theorist, the mechanic, and, not the least, the artist of exposition.' He might have been describing himself, although there are those who would suggest that Einstein's skills as an experimenter lagged some way behind those of his eminent predecessor.
He was, though, quite as great a theorist and this was in part due to his conviction that a theory should be boiled down to its simplest state. As he would note in the 1940s, a theory is increasingly impressive the simpler its premises and the greater variety of things that it encompasses. It was his belief that, when one has removed the complex mathematics that may be required to express it, a good theory should be uncomplicated enough to describe that even a child may understand it. The revelation of fundamental truths through an attachment to simplicity had great currency in the age of modernism. Ponder the words of the epoch's greatest artist, Pablo Picasso, who held that it had taken him four years to learn to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to paint like a child.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from How to Think Like Einstein by Daniel Smith. Copyright © 2014 Michael O'Mara Books Limited. Excerpted by permission of Michael O'Mara Books Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction vii
Landmarks in a Remarkable Life xi
Life is a Marathon, Not a Sprint 1
Be Curious 6
Follow Your Intuition 12
See the World Differently 16
Thought Experiments 21
Seek Out Like Minds 24
The Olympia Academy 30
Do Your Homework! 33
Challenge Authority 38
… But Don't Make Unnecessary Enemies 42
The (Relative) Struggle for a Professorship 45
Make Hay While the Sun Shines 49
The 1905 Papers 53
How to Read Like Einstein 59
The Literature of Science 64
Immerse Yourself 70
Don't Neglect Those Closest to You 74
A Flawed Husband 79
Einstein and God 91
Einstein, Judaism and Zionism 100
Take Time to Unwind 106
The Violin Virtuoso 110
How to Eat Like Einstein 113
Think Big 116
The General Theory of Relativity 120
Back Yourself 126
The Nobel Prize 131
Swim Against the Tide 134
Einstein's Battle with Quantum Mechanics 137
Think Even Bigger 142
Be a Political Animal 147
Be a Citizen of the World 152
Einstein and Pacifism 156
Einstein and Fascism 163
Einstein and Socialism 168
Consider the Moral Implications of Your Work 173
Einstein and the Bomb 176
Make Celebrity Work for You 183
Get the 'Mad Professor' Look 188
Don't Fight Time 193
Make Your Peace with the Cosmos 197
Five Things They Said About Einstein 201
Selected Bibliography 203