What’s rarely appreciated is that Einstein also lucked out, besides being 1 in 10^? genius. A lot of things went right for him early on. On the other hand, a lot of things went wrong for him later on, and so he was left out of the mainstream scientific progress, save for his incisive QM critique.
In what sense was Einstein left out of the mainstream, because of what life events, besides his (correct, assuming MWI) criticisms of QM? I don’t think I’ve heard this story of Einstein before. Szilard approached him to ghost-send his letter to Roosevelt, that’s all I know of Einstein’s later years.
As far as I know, it was mostly because in his last decades he focused his research mostly on obtaining a classical field theory that unified gravity and electromagnetism, hoping that out of it the discrete aspects of quantum theory would emerge organically. Most of the forefront theoretical physicists viewed this (correctly, in retrospect) as a dead end and focused on the new discoveries on nuclear structure and elementary particles, on understanding the structure of quantum field theory, etc.
Einstein’s philosophical criticism of quantum theory was not the reason for his relative marginalization, except insofar as it may have influenced his research choices.
In what sense was Einstein left out of the mainstream
Not out of the mainstream in general, only out of the useful scientific research.
his (correct, assuming MWI) criticisms of QM
His criticism of QM was useful regardless of MWI. Among other things, he pointed out several issues with objective collapse and hidden variables (with his famous EPR paradox). Even when he was wrong (in his almost as famous debates with Bohr), he did not make any obvious errors, it took Bohr some time to figure why a certain thought experiment did not contradict QM in its shut-up-and-calculate non-interpretation.
Now, what I was referring to is that he was fortunate to get the education the he had, to have a fellow scientist as a fiancee and (apparently) as a sounding board for his ideas during his work on SR, he was fortunate to have had the mathematician Marcel Grossmann as a friend who helped him with the critical piece of differential geometry later on, etc.
Early on he also had a good sense to apply his genius to constructing models based on known but not yet explained experimental data: photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, Michelson-Morley experiment, Maxwell equations, gravity acting like acceleration, and a few others.
This changed some time in 1920s/1930s, when he decided that unifying classical gravity and classical EM is a good idea on general principles (like Occam’s razor and aesthetic considerations), probably because of his understandable dissatisfaction with QM. To be fair, he had quite a bit of success with models not based on experiment, such as predicting Bose-Einstein condensate. He also remained confused about some of the less clear the aspects of GR, like gauge invariance, gravitational waves and stress-energy tensor. And that’s what meant by “went wrong”.
Nearly there: you can’t predict backward from success to raw (non domain specific) ability, for just the same reason you can’t predict forward from high IQ to success in arbitrary field.
They’re not the same, but they do correlate (which is why it’s not pointless to define g in the first place); now, due to regression to the mean, someone better at theoretical physics than 99.999999% of the population (and no, I don’t think that’s too many 9s) is likely not also better at general intelligence than 99.999999% of the population—but I very strongly doubt that the correct number of 9s is less than half that many. (Anyway, I’m not sure it’d make sense to define g precisely enough to tell whether someone’s 1 in 10^6 or 1 in 10^9.)
What’s rarely appreciated is that Einstein also lucked out, besides being 1 in 10^? genius. A lot of things went right for him early on. On the other hand, a lot of things went wrong for him later on, and so he was left out of the mainstream scientific progress, save for his incisive QM critique.
In what sense was Einstein left out of the mainstream, because of what life events, besides his (correct, assuming MWI) criticisms of QM? I don’t think I’ve heard this story of Einstein before. Szilard approached him to ghost-send his letter to Roosevelt, that’s all I know of Einstein’s later years.
As far as I know, it was mostly because in his last decades he focused his research mostly on obtaining a classical field theory that unified gravity and electromagnetism, hoping that out of it the discrete aspects of quantum theory would emerge organically. Most of the forefront theoretical physicists viewed this (correctly, in retrospect) as a dead end and focused on the new discoveries on nuclear structure and elementary particles, on understanding the structure of quantum field theory, etc.
Einstein’s philosophical criticism of quantum theory was not the reason for his relative marginalization, except insofar as it may have influenced his research choices.
Not out of the mainstream in general, only out of the useful scientific research.
His criticism of QM was useful regardless of MWI. Among other things, he pointed out several issues with objective collapse and hidden variables (with his famous EPR paradox). Even when he was wrong (in his almost as famous debates with Bohr), he did not make any obvious errors, it took Bohr some time to figure why a certain thought experiment did not contradict QM in its shut-up-and-calculate non-interpretation.
Now, what I was referring to is that he was fortunate to get the education the he had, to have a fellow scientist as a fiancee and (apparently) as a sounding board for his ideas during his work on SR, he was fortunate to have had the mathematician Marcel Grossmann as a friend who helped him with the critical piece of differential geometry later on, etc.
Early on he also had a good sense to apply his genius to constructing models based on known but not yet explained experimental data: photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, Michelson-Morley experiment, Maxwell equations, gravity acting like acceleration, and a few others.
This changed some time in 1920s/1930s, when he decided that unifying classical gravity and classical EM is a good idea on general principles (like Occam’s razor and aesthetic considerations), probably because of his understandable dissatisfaction with QM. To be fair, he had quite a bit of success with models not based on experiment, such as predicting Bose-Einstein condensate. He also remained confused about some of the less clear the aspects of GR, like gauge invariance, gravitational waves and stress-energy tensor. And that’s what meant by “went wrong”.
Nearly there: you can’t predict backward from success to raw (non domain specific) ability, for just the same reason you can’t predict forward from high IQ to success in arbitrary field.
But you can predict forward from high IQ to success in an arbitrary field, at least to some degree. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_outcomes.
They’re not the same, but they do correlate (which is why it’s not pointless to define g in the first place); now, due to regression to the mean, someone better at theoretical physics than 99.999999% of the population (and no, I don’t think that’s too many 9s) is likely not also better at general intelligence than 99.999999% of the population—but I very strongly doubt that the correct number of 9s is less than half that many. (Anyway, I’m not sure it’d make sense to define g precisely enough to tell whether someone’s 1 in 10^6 or 1 in 10^9.)