hello listeners buckle up for a new episode of the science of self where
you learn to improve your life from the inside out today is January 26 2023
today's episode comes from Peter Holland's book think like a genius
and today we'll look at how Einstein used non-linear thinking insatiable curiosity
and a wide range of interests to further his thought processes
Albert Einstein is the world-renowned German physicist and mathematician who
won the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his work on the photoelectric effect.
Now considered one of the most influential scientific theorists
in history, Einstein was known for being a deeply inquisitive and curious person.
Reportedly Einstein didn’t enjoy school as a child,
but early tutoring experiences sparked his interest in the topic of light.
When Einstein excused himself from military service as a young man and dropped out of
school (he preferred independent study), his parents were worried about his future.
Nevertheless, he was admitted to a prestigious Zurich university
because of his excellent performance on the maths and physics entrance exams.
After graduating he worked as a patent clerk, where he privately pursued some of his own ideas.
In 1905 he published four breakthrough papers on the photoelectric effect,
Brownian motion and relativity.
Einstein married and had children, but his marriage was not a happy one,
and he divorced and remarried in 1919.
At the time, Einstein was less known for his theory of relativity than he is today,
and perhaps could not have predicted the full direction his discoveries would take
physics in the future (for example, his work foreshadowing the development of the atomic bomb).
Einstein: not a one-trick pony
Surprisingly (or perhaps not), the most notable scientist of the 20th
century was also known for taking time out of his research to play the violin.
In so doing, Einstein was engaging in a combination of the “hard” and the “soft” or,
more accurately, he was exercising skills that required very different mindsets.
Reportedly, he was even very good at the instrument, as he was with the piano.
But while sawing away on the violin during his breaks,
Einstein actually arrived at some breakthroughs in his research and philosophical questionings.
Allegedly one of these musical sessions was the spark for his most famous equation: E=mc2.
Knowing what we do about how true genius sees the world, this shouldn’t surprise us.
Einstein came up with the term combinatory play to describe the intangible process in
which his favorite pastime led to ideas that revolutionized the whole of scientific thought.
He explained his reasoning as best he
could in 1945 in a letter to French mathematician Jacques S. Hadamard:
“My Dear Colleague:
In the following, I am trying to answer in brief your questions as well as I am able.
I am not satisfied myself with those answers and I
am willing to answer more questions if you believe this could be of any
advantage for the very interesting and difficult work you have undertaken.
(A) The words or the language, as they are written or spoken,
do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought.
The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and
more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined.
There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts.
It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is
the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements.
But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential
feature in productive thought—before there is any connection with logical
construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.
(B) The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type.
Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a
secondary stage, when the mentioned associative
play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.
(C) According to what has been said, the play with the mentioned elements is aimed
to be analogous to certain logical connections one is searching for.
(D) Visual and motor.
In a stage when words intervene at all, they are, in my case,
purely auditive, but they interfere only in a secondary stage, as already mentioned.
(E) It seems to me that what you call full consciousness is a limit
case which can never be fully accomplished.
This seems to be connected with the fact called the narrowness
of consciousness (Enge des Bewusstseins).”
Notice, firstly, that Einstein has no problem engaging in metacognition,
or thinking about his own thinking and asking questions about his own question-asking.
Einstein seemed to believe that indulging in his
creative tendencies was helpful for his logical and rational pursuits.
That might have been the case, and it also might have been the case that to engage in a distraction
was helpful for taking on different perspectives and viewing problems from different angles.
Perhaps it’s related to the so-called Medici effect,
in which the melding of different disciplines will inevitably lead to new discoveries,
and the whole always seems to be greater than the sum of the parts.
Indeed, combinatory play is not simply the notion
that play takes your mind to a different world to regroup.
It recognizes, as Einstein did, that taking pieces of knowledge and insight
from different disciplines and combining them in new contexts is how most creativity truly happens.
So as mentioned, somehow Einstein saw something in
playing the violin that helped him think about physics in an entirely new way.
The lesson here is to engage in your own pursuits and not feel constrained by having
to stay in similar or adjacent disciplines, thinking that only they will aid you.
There are always parallels between different disciplines, so find them.
More of the same probably will not help; a dash of something different just might.
The power of the possible
Einstein became well-known for another thinking technique,
and it is one that we use most days in everyday life.
“What if humans were capable of flying?"
“What if the world’s landmasses never broke up into separate continents and
instead remained as Pangaea to this day?”
These are hypothetical “what if” questions that tickle your mind
into thinking from other perspectives and challenge you to question your premises.
Imagining hypotheticals goes beyond simple thinking skills that require only memorization,
description of an observable event or situation, or even analysis of facts and concrete events.
Because hypotheticals pose questions about what isn’t, what hasn’t happened,
or what isn’t likely to ever happen, they stretch the imagination in new ways and
sharpen creative thinking and practical intelligence.
They allow a person to try on different perspectives as though they were lenses,
and suddenly see what was invisible to them before.
For instance, you’ve likely never considered the implications of human flight because
it’s impossible, so there is a world of thoughts that have remained unexplored.
How would traffic lights work, what kind of licensing process would be required,
would we still have cars and airplanes, and how would safety work?
Now, how would those rules and laws apply to normal traffic situations in the present day?
Think through the realities of how everything would fit together—it’s no small feat!
Einstein in particular was known to explore hypothetical situations taken to the extreme.
He called them Gedankenexperiments, which is German for “thought experiments."
A thought experiment, in a more general context,
is essentially playing out a “what if” scenario to its end.
It’s acting as if a theory or hypothesis were true,
diving deep into the ramifications and seeing what happens to your “what if” under intense scrutiny.
A thought experiment allows you to analyze interesting premises
you could never manifest in reality and make new leaps of logic and discovery
because you can consider conditions that current knowledge doesn’t yet reach.
Suppose the problem situation is needing to exit a room.
The conventional ways to do so are to walk out the door or jump out the window.
But what if the door is blocked by a raging
fire and the room is on the tenth floor of the building?
These conditions have now rendered your conventional solutions fatal.
You can only get out of the room either by finding a way
to kill that fire or by surviving a fall of several hundred feet.
Something in this scenario needs to drastically change its usage
or definition, or it will break entirely.
This is the essence of the thought experiment.
Suppose this happens.
What happens next?
And then?
Thought experiments were one of Einstein’s superpowers.
He could imagine a scenario, play it out mentally with shocking accuracy and detail,
and then extract the subtle conclusions that lay within.
One of Einstein’s most famous Gedankenexperiments begins with a simple premise: what would happen
if you chased and then eventually caught up to and rode a beam of light through space?
In theory, once you caught up to the beam of light,
it would appear to be frozen next to you because you are moving at the same speed.
Just like if you are walking at the same pace as a car driving next to you, there is no acceleration
(the relative velocities are the same), so the car would seem to be stuck to your side.
The only problem was that this was an impossible proposition at the turn of the century.
If you catch up to the light and the light appears to be frozen beside you,
then it is inherently impossible that it is light, because of the difference in speeds.
It ceases to be light at that moment.
This means one of the rules of physics was broken or disproved with this elementary thought.
Therefore, one of the assumptions that underlay physics at the time had to change,
and Einstein realized that the belief in time as a constant had to shift.
This discovery directly laid the path for the theory of relativity.
The closer you get to the speed of light,
the more time becomes different for you—relative to an outside observer.
This thought experiment allowed Einstein to challenge what were
thought to be set-in-stone rules set forth by Isaac Newton’s three laws of energy and matter.
This thought experiment was instrumental in realizing that people should question
old models and fundamental “rules” instead of trying to conform their theories to them.
The strength of non-conventionality
Let’s return now to the genius traits we mentioned in the previous chapter,
and see how Einstein measures against them.
As we saw above, many of Einstein’s great Eureka moments came from his being a polymath,
or “cross-pollinating” ideas from one area to another (in this case music and physics).
It’s probably quite obvious that another of Einstein’s strengths was intellectual curiosity,
lust for learning and insatiable desire to keep asking questions.
We can see so much of the lighthearted, uninhibited child aspect of genius in
Einstein, who literally labeled a technique he used as “play.”
Einstein never set out to win any prizes, or earn accolades as the best physicist of his generation.
That was never his goal.
Rather, he simply wanted to understand.
His passion for seeing into the deeper nature of things led him
to areas of knowledge that were previously uncharted.
We can see how this attitude put him at odds with his more conventional,
pedagogical early school life, and we can imagine that the young Einstein would not have been much
inspired by boring lessons about things that were already well known and established.
We cannot imagine Einstein’s great achievements happening without his
enormous sense of curiosity spurring him on.
He was not motivated by pride or fame, either, since he was known to regularly alienate and
offend other scientists and peers and was reportedly quite difficult to work with.
Einstein was nothing if not a curious soul,
and it’s this attitude of inquiry that seems to have informed his entire life.
We can see in Einstein’s case that curiosity so often comes with non-conventionality.
He was a “draft dodger” and concocted a medical excuse so as not to complete military service,
and was not averse to skipping classes or generally failing to follow school rules.
He seemed to have little regard for pre-established hierarchies and
preferred to trust his own estimations of what was important and worth doing.
And, this trait, too, is at the center of his success.
Can you imagine any scientist being credited with completely
paradigm-shifting work in the field without breaking the rules of the day?
We know and love Einstein today as a fiercely smart,
independent thinker who greatly advanced the human scientific endeavor.
But we need to remember that Einstein was just a man, who at one time saw his own vision only
dimly, and worked on his pursuits with no guarantee of where they would lead.
The one thing that can motivate a person through such a path?
Endless curiosity.
We can imagine that Einstein would have been fulfilled even if he had
never won any awards and died completely unknown.
Takeaways
•Einstein’s genius traits included curiosity,
having broad areas of interest (i.e. being a polymath), and a refusal to bow to convention.
•Einstein is known today as one of the 20th century’s most influential scientific thinkers,
and was considered by many to be a genius in both mathematics and physics.
He won the Nobel Prize for his work on the photoelectric effect, but he is best known
today for his groundbreaking theory on relativity and his famous E=mc2 equation.
•Einstein coined his own term for the kind of playful, freeform connections
he’d make between different topics and ideas: combinatorial play.
By putting two unrelated ideas together to create something new, Einstein often solved problems,
came up with creative new ideas or opened new avenues of thoughts to pursue.
•The game of “what if?” is another way to flex the
curiosity muscle and bring freshness and novelty to conventional thinking.
By running hypothetical situations and thought experiments in his mind,
Einstein satisfied his thirst for learning and understanding,
and accessed new insights that were beyond conventions at the time.
•Einstein was a polymath and had a broad range of interests, rather than one narrow focus.
He played violin and piano, and had some of his best new ideas during play.
This kind of broadmindedness and diversity of
interest promotes intellectual agility and wide-ranging, flexible perspectives.
•Einstein was also non-conventional and worked independently,
regardless of the established rules that surrounded him in early life.
This allowed him to engage in truly independent
ideas and contribute something entirely different to the field.
•We can see in Einstein’s case that non-linearity of thought, insatiable
curiosity and a wide range of interests were not just helpful to his success, but essential.
We can follow suit by freely engaging in interdisciplinary play and “what
if?” games in the areas that grab our intense interest.
•Though conventions may occasionally be useful,
the best territory to explore is that which is uncharted!
•To be more like Einstein, we can think of ways to break down artificial limits and
categories in our own thinking, and blend concepts and ideas together freely—can
you think of a way to combine two of your interests to produce a third, completely new idea?
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