Here's the Foundation's page relaying Einstein's childhood and containing reactions to the billboard. This campaign actively champions the Einstein flunking myth, stating "he later credited his development of the theory of relativity to this slowness". Unsurprisingly, Einstein's particular genius was evident at any early age.“Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.” In primary school, he was at the top of his class and “far above the school requirements” in math.The distorted history of Einstein reflects the educational romanticism behind profligate educational spending and our PC/"everyone is special" culture. However, the implied message isn't lost on the gullible:
His parents bought him the [algebra and geometry] textbooks in advance so that he could master them over summer vacation.
Wonder which resource room our public schools would have tried to stick Albert Einsein into since he couldn't be pigeon-holed with typically developing kids. How many kids do we "lose" every year because educators can't see past their system?A recurring theme is consistent amongst the commenters: believing is achieving! This wishful thinking ignores even the existence of innate ability, an undeniable cause of Einstein's brilliance. Our society avoids acknowledging the distribution of any ability, especially that of intelligence. By misrepresenting the smartest man ever (though I prefer Newton and Gauss), educational romantics contend that all students are above average. They suggest underachievement isn't the result of cognitive deficiency, but the result of poor teaching methods and lack of motivation.
This needs to be in every school in the world! Kids need to believe!
Confidence is the main ingredient of success.
No matter the obviousness of innate intelligence, flat-curve parents and teachers will "discover" some environmental stimulus that impedes their child's progress. After all, popular conception of intelligence holds that within every struggling kid lives an Einstein.
18 comments:
Einstein, being Jewish and all, is probably spinning in his grave at the thought of a fundamentalist Christian outfit like the Foundation for a Better Life (run by Christian zillionaire Philip Anschultz) using his image in their ads.
Yes, I know, the Foundation must have paid for the rights to use Einstein's image, but that doesn't mean Al himself would have approved :)
Peter
To the best of my recollections of biographical literature, at age of 5 Albert Einstein said, watching magnetic compass: “There is something around this needle, that makes this needle to turn in one and the same direction”. This was a proto-idea of magnetic _field_, which nobody could have told him about. Later the ideas of _fields_, including gravitational ones, led him to formulate the General Relativity Theory.
Yours Florida resident.
A better example might have been Jimi Hendrix. The only class he failed one year in high school was music. He was fired in the middle of his first gig as a guitarist for showboating.
He was kicked out of high school - he claimed it was because he was seen holding hands with a white girl but his principal said that's bull, it was because of poor grades and attendance. His high school was unusually integrated for his time. He was booted out of the army for being a crappy soldier, but he told people it was a medical discharge.
Einstein was the most overrated scientist ever, I'm not sure he makes the top 100 list. He did very little after his relativity theory.
62665346 said...
"Einstein was the most overrated scientist ever, I'm not sure he makes the top 100 list. He did very little after his relativity theory."
This only shows how little you know about the subject. Instead of going on
about Hendrix (hardly a genius), you
could go to the very hard to find and
virtually unknown Wikipedia site
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
and find out about his many
contributions to physics.
Esteemed 62665346 !
I believe you are wrong about Einstein.
Bose-Einstein condensation (for which in 2001 C. Wieman and E. Cornell from JILA, Boulder ,CO, and W. Ketterle from MIT got Nobel prize, was actually predicted by Einstein; the basis for that prediction was Bose-Einstein statistics for particles with integer spin; hence the misleading name for condensation.
Einstein relationships between diffusion coefficient and mobility served to one of the first experimental measurements of Avogadro number, thus validating the (at that time not so firmly established yet) molecular structure of matter. These relationships still play first-rate role in the theory of semiconductor devices, including microchips of computers.
Einstein’s prediction of stimulated emission is the basis of all lasers (and masers).
Einstein got his Noble prize neither for Special Relativity Theory, nor for the General Relativity Theory (gravitation), but for introduction of the notion of new particle: photon, via his laws of photo-effect.
His contribution to the theory of light scattering is not so much publicized, but the fact that modern optical fibers do not attenuate light due to scattering, this fact is related to Einstein’s calculations.
I may agree about mathematicians – Newton and Gauss, but there was no other such a Physicist, as Einstein.
Your truly, Florida resident.
"How many kids do we "lose" every year because educators can't see past their system?"
I hope the irony of this isn't lost on anyone here. How many Einsteins do we "lose" every year because our education system focuses on self-esteem and trying to bring the worst students up to a minimum standard?
"you could go to the very hard to find and virtually unknown Wikipedia site"
Where do you think I got the info about Hendrix? It's virtually cribbed word for word from wiki, check his entry, I actually had it open as I wrote my comment.
I stand by my assessment of Einstein, too much credit is given to theorists for one, and after his big year he was surprisingly unproductive. He simply gets too much credit for what he actually accomplished.
62665346 said...
"I stand by my assessment of Einstein, too much credit is given to theorists for one, and after his big year he was surprisingly unproductive. "
When, do you thik did he produced theory of Stimulated emision ?
General Relativity Teory ?
Einstein-Rosen-Podolskiy effect ?
all well after the famous 1905.
Your F.r.
You put too much emphasis on nature, and not enough on nurture. Yes, political correctness puts too much emphasis on nurture. But that doesn't mean that all is nature.
It is true that Einstein didn't perform poorly at school. But it is also true that he was the only one of his year to graduate without being able to find a job. There's a good article on this and the rest of his career in the journal The New Atlantis. You'll find it online by Googling.
Something similar was true of Churchill, who is sometimes described as having performed poorly in school. The truth is that he was at the top of his class in history and English, the topics that fascinated him, and awful at almost everything else. He simply refused to study Latin, for example. His father sent him to Sandhurst (the military academy) because he was convinced that Winston was basically stupid.
Long story short: yes, you can't grow a flower if the plant isn't inherently capable of bearing flowers. But of course you can't grow a flower either without putting the plant in the light.
@ Anonymous:
Have I ever contradicted any of those statements?
No sane person is a genetic determinist or thinks work ethic isn't important. In fact, in my second post where I lay out the basic HBD argument (see "Featured Posts"), I put the nature/nurture split at 70/30.
Of course though, every intellectual (or physical) field and occupation requires a minimum level of innate ability, e.g. only the most naturally brilliant can win a Nobel Prize and only naturally huge men can play offensive lineman in the NFL.
Have you ever contradicted any of my statements? I don't know. They reflect my take on what I thought you to be saying.
You adamantly deny the idea that Einstein was some sort of dunce in school, and by extension you debunk the idea that smart people can be dunces in school. I think that this is twice wrong.
Einstein did not do poorly. But neither did he excel in highschool or as an undergrad (or even in his first, failed, attempt to get a PhD). He was, at best, average. And he always continued to have trouble with mathematics. His genius was his vision. He used other people to help him with the maths (see the Atlantis article I referenced in my earlier post). Nothing wrong with that, but it also shows there's some truth to the idea that Einstein was not, well an Einstein.
It frequently happens that smart people are not recognized in school, including by themselves. Elsewhere on your blog either you or a commenter acknowledges as much (I'm not going to waste time looking it up, but I'm sure I read it on this site), rightly attributing it to PC cuddling of the dumb. It has to do with democracy's love of the mediocre. Social democracy stifles and destroys potential Einsteins, or those one STDV below him (if you'll forgive me the pun).
Finally, the idea that Einstein's particular genius was evident at an early age because he had mastered calculus before the age of fifteen is, I'm sorry to say, laughable. I attended a university preparatory high school in Europe, and that's just the normal age calculus is taught to pupils expected to go on to university. Period.
"I hope the irony of this isn't lost on anyone here. How many Einsteins do we "lose" every year because our education system focuses on self-esteem and trying to bring the worst students up to a minimum standard?"
How many lettuce pickers do we lose to welfare and crime? We would attract no immigrants if the welfare folks were working the fields instead of sitting in classrooms being taught poetry till they drop out and sell drugs.
To an extent, I think that you might have the causality reversed. If we didn't allow cheap labor to flood the country, it would be a lot easier for the welfare class to get a decent job regardless of education.
However, there is definitely an entrenched entitlement mentality among the native-born of certain groups, which is encouraged by the cult of victimology. For many of these people, there is more dignity in living on the government dole than in a hard day's work picking lettuce.
There's a good article on this and the rest of his career in the journal The New Atlantis. You'll find it online by Googling.
Right, because it would have required far too much effort for you to post a link.
Einstein's Annus Mirabilis.
Was that so hard?
Regardless, the article you're naively recommending is grossly misrepresentative. You should be embarrassed to be pointing to it as being in any way authoritative.
From that ineptly researched article:
He was slow as a child
He was late in learning to speak. In no other way was he "slow."
he received low marks in grammar school
Not quite: "From 1885 when he was six years old he attended 'Petersschule,' a catholic elementary school in Munich. Due to a report card from school Albert's mother wrote to her sister: "Yesterday Albert received his grades, he was again number one, and his report card was brilliant.'"
he failed on his first attempt to get into a polytechnic institute
Cheapshot: He wrote that entrance exam at several years underage, compared to the rest of the applicants. The polytechnic administration was nevertheless impressed enough with his performance to ask him back, after he had brushed up on his Latin, etc. (Wikipedia: "he took an entrance examination, which he failed, although he got exceptional marks in mathematics and physics.")
when he finally did get in, he cut classes so frequently that he only passed his exams by borrowing a friend's notes.
Yes, he cut classes--and was even written up for doing that--simply because the profs (e.g., Weber) weren't covering the cutting-edge subjects which were of interest to him. Those same subjects, by the way, ended up being directly relevant to the papers he wrote in 1905, including his development of special relativity.
Regarding some of the comments here:
Einstein did not do poorly. But neither did he excel in highschool or as an undergrad (or even in his first, failed, attempt to get a PhD). He was, at best, average.
From Esterton's Einstein's Wife: Mileva Marić:
"In the 1898 intermediate [polytechnic] diploma examination Einstein came top of their group of six students."
From which it's obvious that Einstein "did not excel" as an undergrad, eh? Being, you know, "at best, average."
"In the final diploma exam Einstein obtained an overall mark for four subjects and a dissertation of 4.91 (gradings from [low] 1 to [high] 6) ... approximating to 78%."
I don't recall where exactly Einstein finished in that graduating class, but he was definitely and literally above average, not merely "at best, average."
He used other people to help him with the maths (see the Atlantis article I referenced [but couldn't be bothered to pull my finger out and post a friggin' link to] in my earlier post). Nothing wrong with that, but it also shows there's some truth to the idea that Einstein was not, well an Einstein.
When Einstein was working on general relativity (1917), in the "race" to that theory he was running against arguably the top mathematician in the world, David Hilbert.
Albert won. (Hilbert tried to cheat by submitting his own paper to a journal ... with a big, blank area at the bottom, for him to write his solution in when he had finally figured it out, at a later date.)
Einstein's "difficulties" in math, by his own admission, stemmed mostly from him working his way deep into a series of equations with such concentration that he would "forget how he got there." Also, from making "dumb [i.e., careless] mistakes," which his postdocs would catch. He'd still get the right answers, but there would be mistakes along the way.
So, you see, it was not the concepts that tripped him up. Nor was his learning of math on his own up to a world-class Hilbert-ian level, having been taught so little of it in physics (back in that day) as an undergrad, any mean feat.
And by the way, by your criteria, "Hawking isn't a Hawking" and "Witten isn't a Witten," either. 'Cause all such researchers have postdocs doing the gruntwork for them. Duh.
Finally, the idea that Einstein's particular genius was evident at an early age because he had mastered calculus before the age of fifteen is, I'm sorry to say, laughable. I attended a university preparatory high school in Europe, and that's just the normal age calculus is taught to pupils expected to go on to university. Period.
Right, and deriving the equations of special relativity is part of the standard second/sophomore-year physics curriculum in North America today. Easy-schmeazy!
But what about a hundred or more years ago? What was the "normal age" for taking calculus then? It does matter, you know.
But it is also true that [Einstein] was the only one of his year to graduate without being able to find a job.
Yes, but that was simply because he hadn't shown the proper respect to his "Herr Doktor Professors" (e.g., Weber, who told Einstein that his "one great fault" was that he did "not let [him]self be told anything") as an undergrad. So, unlike the other students who had properly kowtowed and attended class regularly, his teachers wouldn't help him find work. It had nothing to do with the caliber of his undergraduate work per se. Rather, it was indeed related to his "bad attitude"--the same disrespect for authority that gave him the psychological grounding to go against the accepted wisdom of the old-guard authorities in physics. Without that courage he would have been a mere unaccomplished critic and follower--comparable, perhaps, to at least two of the commenters here--not a revolutionary leader.
From John B. Severance's Einstein:
"In his four years as a student [Einstein] had managed to make enemies of many of his teachers. Professor Minkowski thought he was a 'lazy dog' [for skipping classes], and Professor Weber thought he was arrogant. His only friend on the staff was a professor of history, who could not help much with an appointment in physics. As a recently naturalized Swiss citizen, Albert would not have the same chance for a job as applicants who were born Swiss."
Richard Feynman was the same way, in terms of arrogance and "disrespect." Ah, but he was overrated (and Jewish) too, though, wasn't he? Does he even make the "Top 100"?
"Rather, it was indeed related to his "bad attitude"--the same disrespect for authority that gave him the psychological grounding to go against the accepted wisdom of the old-guard authorities in physics."
Great point. Only a guy with massive balls would challenge Newton like Einstein did. Unsurprisingly, one of the other great visionaries of the early 20th century (Schrodinger) was equally iconoclastic. And IMO (and Feynman's), quantum mechanics is even stranger than relativity.
I believe Princeton even rejected having Schrodinger work there because he insisted on having his wife and his mistress live with him.
Another thing is that Einstein's brain was found to have an unusually large ratio of glial cells to neurons.
These help to form myelin which affects the brains processing speed. So essentially he had greater bandwidth than most people.
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22333/
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