July 10th, 2003, 11:23 pm
Quote Like Einstein, the other great mathematician who was also a great physicist in the 20th century, he worked on central problems in physics and came up with new mathematics to solve them. I beg to differ. I would say that Einstein (by all accounts that I'm aware of) was not a mathematician at all. He was a physicist, through and through. In fact, from the little that I know, my understanding is that his mathematics was actually quite poor, and that he required constant assistance from his more mathematically oriented friends. I think M Besso was one of them. I've also read a number of times that one of the reasons why it took him more than 15 years to develop the (correct) theory of (classical) gravity, was that it was very difficult for him to come to grips with tensor analysis which he needed to describe curvature, geodesics in curved spaces, etc. I also recall that I was quite surprised when I realised that he published a number of versions of "the theory of gravity" prior to the 1921 (??) paper, all of which were wrong. The reasons varied from his extraordinary ability to come up with "physical reasons" to justify his wrong ideas, to his lack of mathematical ability. This is all chronicled in great detail in A Pais' "Subtle is the Lord" (which I must admit, I haven't read from cover to cover). It's also scattered around some of his more technical, and less hagiographic biographies. Incidentally, only yesterday, I saw a paperback version of "Einstein in Love", by Dennis Overbye. Looks like a detailed account of his relationship with his first wife, Mileva Maric. A rather shadowy part of his life. No, Albert, was not a saint when he was younger (or even as a middle aged man). You can buy it used on amazon for about $1.00. But ---- he discovered General Relativity, one of the two deepest theories of modern physics. And while the other theory, Quantum Mechanics, was motivated by very strong experimental signals, and required the collaborative effort of a very large number of very smart people, Einstein produced General Relativity single handedly, motivated only by deep insight and intuition.