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Einstein - Why is he Great? Einstein as we know is regarded as one of the most genius men of this century. In fact, I have read as somebody saying that, "Einstein is the greatest Jew since Jesus". But if you ask me, my personal opinion is that Einstein is the undisputed greatest ever genius as well as greatest ever human being whom mankind has ever seen. In this article we'll have a look at those facts which make him great as a scientist. Einstein - the greatest
scientist He made his contributions in the development of the two greatest theories of the 20th century physics i.e. Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. While the theory of relativity was almost completely developed by him, he laid the foundations of the Quantum Mechanics along with the works of Planck. (for a detailed view on how Einstein was more responsible for the birth of quantum mechanics than Max Planck, check out the following article Max Planck: the reluctant revolutionary by Helge Kragh) His theory about the photo-electric effect (for which he also got a Nobel Prize), gave a new life to Planck's Quanta. Einstein's greatest strength was his high reasoning and imaginative power. His thought experiments were well beyond the capabilities of an ordinary human being's imagination. He discovered almost the entire theory of relativity based on his famous thought experiments and not on real world experiments. Even the mathematics of the General Relativity was formulated by him (of course, with the help of well known mathematician Grossman) only after he had laid down the entire theory of general relativity in its logical form. He wasn't even aware of the fact that the mathematical tools (i.e. Differential Geometry, Riemennian Calculus, Tensors) required to frame the field equations of general relativity were already existing! It was only after Grossman explained to him about these mathematical branches (which were till then thought to be of no practical use), that he became aware about it. Physicists always use mathematics to frame equations based on experimental data and then interpret the meaning of those equations. Einstein was the only one who went the other way round. He first framed the complete theory in his mind and then built the equations for it. Thus, there was absolutely no need to interpret the meaning of general relativity. It had already been done. In fact, the theory itself did innumerous number of new predictions like the gravitational redshift, bending of light by gravity, black holes, worm holes, big bang, etc of which some like worm holes have not yet been verified as we lack the necessary experimental setup, while all those verified predictions have unanimously voted in favor of general relativity. But, this is not the case with Quantum Mechanics. After Einstein turned towards relativity, the physicists investigating the world of the small i.e. the sub-atomic world just started piling up mathematical equations (Schrodinger's wave equation, Heisenberg's Matrix Mechanics and so on) which became more and more complicated as it built up. Finally we had today's quantum mechanics, where we have quite a large number of mathematical equation which have been working fine when supplied with necessary data, but the meaning of which still nobody is aware of and which still continues to be a debatable topic (like we have the conventional Copenhagen interpretation, the Many World Theory, the Transactional Interpretation etc). The reason, the approach towards the construction of quantum mechanics was exactly opposite of that adapted by Einstein. Finally what is left for a quantum physicist is a large scope for grand imaginations. Perhaps, only a reincarnated Einstein will be able to solve the mystery and show the path of enlightenment to today's confused quantum physicist who is desperately wants to UNDERSTAND quantum mechanics. Einstein was never comfortable with quantum mechanics. He did not agree with the probabilistic nature of its equations, which he summed up as "God never plays dice". He firmly believed that humans were intelligent enough to completely understand the functioning of this universe. "The most incomprehensible thing about the Nature is that it is comprehensible". His famous EPR paper along with two other renown physicists was an effort to show that quantum mechanics was incomplete. Later, Bell showed that if Einstein's hidden variable theory as mentioned in EPR paper was correct then quantum communications would take place at almost infinite speed violating locality. Some say that this violates Special Theory of relativity. But I haven't found anything in the entire relativity (special or general) which prohibits faster than light communications. (I would be grateful if someone could show me any such thing if at all it exists). Yet, Einstein was also a human being and was prone to errors. When his equations predicted an expanding universe (Hubble hadn't yet discovered expansion of the universe), he nullified the expansion by introducing a constant called the Cosmological Constant to avoid his equations from predicting an expanding universe as at that time it was strongly believed that the universe is static. Later, when the expansion of the universe was discovered by Hubble, Einstein regretted for having introduced the unnecessary Cosmological Constant in his equations by terming it as the biggest blunder in his life. He was humble enough to accept his mistakes. He was the first physicist to dream about a Grand Unified Theory (GUT). He spent the entire last days of his life in search of a GUT. Of course, he didn't succeed in that for the simple reason that he was already very much ahead of his times in terms of reasoning power and imagination. I can say with a 100% confidence that, if Einstein was around today, with the large amount of experimental data and the sophisticated apparatus available today, he would have discovered the Grand Unified Theory in less than a year's time! -by
Gurudev |
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