Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

http://www.quora.com/Genius-and-Geniuses/How-long-before-we-have-another-Einstein/answer/David-Minott/comment/5201426?srid=u4Qv&share=1THE NEXT EINSTEIN?

This enthusiastic fellow thinks (Einstein was somehow both rare and unique.)

We have many people as smart or smarter than Einstein today. There is never a shortage of geniuses.

To create a bach/mozart, aristotle/hume, maxwell/einstein requires three prior generations to attempt to solve a significant problem, so that the knowledge accumulated is sufficient for an individual to synthesize it. We have known this at least since Durant argued for it, and more recently and thoroughly by Murray.

You may not know that Einstein’s chief role in relativity was not so much of innovator as it was communicator since the ideas had already been disussed by others. Just as the lightbulb, calculus, and the television had multiple inventors. We pick a hero to single out. But great inventions are the product of many people over many years.

It apprars that I myself may have solved a century old problem in philisophy that is profoundly important for ethics, economics and politics. But I was only able to do so because of the accumulated effort of hundreds of people in the last century who did the vast majority of the work, while only failing to put the last few pieces together. Even my work was only possible because the internet dramatically teduced the time neede to conduct resrarch across multiple disciplines. And it still took me fifteen years.

To flip it around, intellectual historians have noted, not infrequently, that Einstein was a very naive individual, and that it is a credit to our civilization that such a soul could survive in it and still contribute a great achievement.

There is an organization dedicated to propagandizing Einstein’s mythos. His heroism is as much the result of their publicity efforts than his achievements.

And as Bridgman noted, and fought his whole life for: the reason we did not discover relativity earlier (its discovery was delayed) was an intellectual error that invaded physics from mathematics, and had been in mathematics since at least the invention of geometry – cured by proof of construction: the scope of measures.

A problem that remains with us today, and which is responsible for most pseudoscience – especially the pseudoscience remaining in our most respected sciences.