How Albert Einstein learned Physics

[lpetrich]

How Einstein Learned Physics | Scott H Young

I recently finished Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein. The biography covers not just Einstein’s intellectual achievements, but also his anti-war activism, marital difficulties and celebrity. However, I wanted to share just the one part I found most interesting: how did Einstein learn?

While he was good at mathematics in school, he was not so good at it in college, and he was not very good at physics in college either. One of his professors, Hermann Minkowski, called him a "lazy dog", and he finished second to last overall.

1. Learning comes from solving hard problems, not attending classes

One thing that becomes apparent when looking at Einstein’s early schooling was both his distaste for rote memorization and attending classes. The physics professor that flunked him, did so, in no small part, because Einstein often skipped class. As he claims, “I played hooky a lot and studied the masters of theoretical physics with a holy zeal at home.”

2. You really know something when you can prove it yourself

How do you know when you really understand something? Einstein’s method was to try prove the proposition himself! This began at an early age, when Uncle Jakob, challenged him to prove Pythagoras’s Theorem:

“After much effort, I succeeded in ‘proving’ this theorem on the basis of the similarity of triangles,” Einstein recalled.

3. Intuition matters more than equations

Einstein was a better intuitive physicist than he was a mathematician. In fact, it was only when he struggled for years in developing general relativity, that he became more enamored with mathematical formalisms as a way of doing physics.

4. Thinking requires a quiet space and deep focus

Einstein was a master of deep work. He had an incredible ability to focus, his son reporting:

“Even the loudest baby-crying didn’t seem to disturb Father,” adding, “He could go on with his work completely impervious to noise.”

5. Understand ideas through thought experiments

Einstein’s most famous method for learning and discovering physics has to be the thought experiment.

6. Overturn common sense… with more common sense

Special and general relativity stand out as being some of the most mind-bending scientific discoveries of all time. With special relativity, Einstein discovered that there is no absolute time—that two people moving at different speeds can disagree about the passage of time—with neither being right or wrong. With general relativity, Einstein went further, showing that gravity bends space and time.

7. Insights come from friendly walks

While solitude and focus were essential components of how Einstein learned and did physics, it was often conversations with other people that provided his breakthroughs.

8. Be rebellious

Einstein was never much of a conformist. While his rebellious streak probably hurt his earlier academic career when he was struggling to find work in physics, it is also probably what enabled his greatest discoveries and accentuated his later celebrity.

9. All knowledge starts with curiosity

“Curiosity has its own reason for existing,” Einstein explains. “One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.”

That's a reason that I like Mathematica. I have proved lots of mathematical and mathematical-physical results with it, and I find it a good exercise for understanding.

Einstein was not very much into mathematics at first. That aforementioned professor, Hermann Minkowski, took special relativity and showed from it that space and time were very closely related, and that the distance between two space-time points can be found with a modification of Pythagoras's theorem. Einstein considered it "superfluous learnedness" (uberflüssige Gelehrsamkeit). But for general relativity, he needed a way to describe curved spacetime, and he ended up learning the formidable mathematics of differential geometry for doing so.