How to Think Like a Genius 2 — Annus Mirabilus
How to Think Like a Genius 2 — Annus Mirabilus
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
June 8, 2017
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s talk about mental discipline, executive function, things like that.
Rick Rosner: When you look at some of the most famous geniuses have done, it’s often the result of thinking about tough problems for periods of many years. Either because they want to or I suspect in some cases because they forced themselves to keep coming back to a problem and reviewing it and breaking down their assumptions about it, and trying to find other angles on it.
Einstein first became fascinated with physics when he gave someone a compass. The kind that points North when he was 5 or 6 years old. The mysteriousness of some underlying force that was making the needle point in the same direction all of time fascinated him and triggered a habit of thinking about problems in physics for hours every day, I would assume, or the rest of his life.
He was 26 when he had his miracle year, Annus Mirabilus is a term for a year that he thought of a bunch of stuff including calculus and universal gravitation, but it should be applied to Einstein in 1905 because he published. Einstein never won the Nobel Prize for Relativity. it was not substantiated enough at the time and maybe there was political — scientific awards are as political as anything else. He published his theory of special relativity in 1905 and 5 other papers too including one on Brownian Motion, which proved the atomic nature of matter by proving the little juggles in liquids, and I think for that — that’s the among the reasons for him winning the Nobel Prize, and in the few years leading up to the papers and couple after he was working at the patent office looking at people’s patent applications, which gave him enough time on and off the job to think up these 4 papers that changed the world or most of which changed the world.
It was another ten years before he came up with General Relativity, which as a similar name to Special Relativity but is an entirely different theory, and deals with how gravitation and space and matter determine each other, and he had a bunch of years in those years between special and general relativity where he got discouraged. he had an overall picture of what he wanted the theory to do, but couldn’t find the math to do it, and he kept getting what he thought was close but that the math wasn’t adequate. He wasn’t the greatest math guy. His friends or some of them knew more specialized math than he did, and finally one of them pointed him in the right direction, which is a major — I don’t know the math of Special or General Relativity but there is a matrix that has 10 variables that let’s you set the conditions of space based on the equations.
He spends or starts thinking about physics when he is a little kid. He might have gotten the. From 10–26, he is thinking about physics, brings out his four famous papers, does general Relativity after another 10 years in the meantime. he is contributing to other scientific discussions, and then he is 36 at the time this paper is at the end of his or thought of as his major contribution to physics, and among things, and I don’t know how he did it, but the laser he invented it in paper. he had lots to say about quantum mechanics, which he disliked because of its probabilistic nature. He spent the last half of his life, which means well over half of his life, as a theoretician trying to come up with a unified field theory, which he failed to do, but his — every day big chunks of his day every day were spent thinking about physics and probably willing himself to think about physics at times of frustration because he probably had more times of frustration than breakthroughs, especially considering that from 1916 to his death in 1955 39/38 years.
he was working towards a theory that he never completed. So, you’ve got Darwin famous for taking more than 20 years to push out his theory of evolution, and only then because he received word that someone else had or was ready to publish a similar theory. Darwin goes on the Beagle. This five-year voyage where he sees all of these geological formations and different animals, which convince him that the world that we live in is the result of deep time, of at the very least hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary history.
he spends 20 years or more writing and refining the arguments and not publishing until his buddies say that there’s another paper by another guy. Who was the other guy?
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Endnotes
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 2012–2017. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the Founder In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal.
Originally published at medium.com on June 9, 2017.
