Will there ever be another Einstein? This is the undercurrent of conversation at Einstein memorial meetings throughout the year. A new Einstein will emerge, scientists say. But it may take a long time. After all, more than 200 years separated Einstein from his nearest rival, Isaac Newton.
Many physicists say the next Einstein hasn’t been born yet, or is a baby now. That’s because the quest for a unified theory that would account for all the forces of nature has pushed current mathematics to its limits. New math must be created before the problem can be solved.
But researchers say there are many other factors working against another Einstein emerging anytime soon.
For one thing, physics is a much different field today. In Einstein’s day, there were only a few thousand physicists worldwide, and the theoreticians who could intellectually rival Einstein probably would fit into a streetcar with seats to spare.
Education is different, too. One crucial aspect of Einstein’s training that is overlooked is the years of philosophy he read as a teenager-Kant, Schopenhauer and Spinoza, among others. It taught him how to think independently and abstractly about space and time, and it wasn’t long before he became a philosopher himself.
“The independence created by philosophical insight is-in my opinion-the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth,” Einstein wrote in 1944.
And he was an accomplished musician. The interplay between music and math is well known. Einstein would furiously play his violin as a way to think through a knotty physics problem.
Today, universities have produced millions of physicists. There aren’t many jobs in science for them, so they go to Wall Street and Silicon Valley to apply their analytical skills to more practical-and rewarding-efforts.
“Maybe there is an Einstein out there today,” said Columbia University physicist Brian Greene, “but it would be a lot harder for him to be heard.”
Especially considering what Einstein was proposing.
“The actual fabric of space and time curving? My God, what an idea!” Greene said at a recent gathering at the Aspen Institute. “It takes a certain type of person who will bang his head against the wall because you believe you’ll find the solution.”
Perhaps the best examples are the five scientific papers Einstein wrote in his “miracle year” of 1905. These “thought experiments” were pages of calculations signed and submitted to the prestigious journal Annalen der Physik by a virtual unknown. There were no footnotes or citations.
What might happen to such a submission today?
“We all get papers like those in the mail,” Greene said. “We put them in the junk file.”
When television first began to expand, very few of the people who had become famous as radio commentators were able to be equally effective on television. Some of the difficulties they experienced when they were trying to
21 themselves to the new medium were technical. When working
22_ radio, for example, they had become
23 to seeing on behalf of the listener.
This
24 of seeing for others means that the commentator has to be very good at talking.
25 all, he has to be able to
26 a continuous sequence of visual images which
27 meaning to the sounds which the listener hears. In the
28 of television, however, the commentator sees everything with the viewer. His role, therefore, is
29 different. He is there to make
30 that the viewer does not miss some point of interest, to help him
31 on particular things, and to
32 the images on the television screen.
33_ his radio colleague, he must know the
34 of silence and how to use it at those moments
35 the pictures speak for themselves.
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