einstein
einstein
einstein
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studying the DNA from Einstein’s brain. Unfortunately, it turned out that the way Harvey had embalmed the brain made it impossible to extract<br />
usable DNA. And so her questions were never answered. 7<br />
In 1998, after forty-three years as the wandering guardian of Einstein’s brain, Thomas Harvey, by then 86, decided it was time to pass on the<br />
responsibility. So he called the person who currently held his old job as pathologist at Princeton Hospital and went by to drop it off. 8<br />
Of the dozens of people to whom Harvey doled out pieces of Einstein’s brain over the years, only three published significant scientific studies.<br />
The first was by a Berkeley team led by Marian Diamond. 9 It reported that one area of Einstein’s brain, part of the parietal cortex, had a higher ratio<br />
of what are known as glial cells to neurons. This could, the authors said, indicate that the neurons used and needed more energy.<br />
One problem with this study was that his 76-year-old brain was compared to eleven others from men who had died at an average age of 64.<br />
There were no other geniuses in the sample to help determine if the findings fit a pattern. There was also a more fundamental problem: with no<br />
ability to trace the development of the brain over a lifetime, it was unclear which physical attributes might be the cause of greater intelligence and<br />
which might instead be the effect of years spent using and exercising certain parts of the brain.<br />
A second paper, published in 1996, suggested that Einstein’s cerebral cortex was thinner than in five other sample brains, and the density of his<br />
neurons was greater. Once again, the sample was small and evidence of any pattern was sketchy.<br />
The most cited paper was done in 1999 by Professor Sandra Witelson and a team at McMaster University in Ontario. Harvey had sent her a fax,<br />
unprompted, offering samples for study. He was in his eighties, but he personally drove up to Canada by himself, transporting a hunk that amounted<br />
to about one-fifth of Einstein’s brain, including the parietal lobe.<br />
When compared to brains of thirty-five other men, Einstein’s had a much shorter groove in one area of his inferior parietal lobe, which is thought<br />
to be key to mathematical and spatial thinking. His brain was also 15 percent wider in this region. The paper speculated that these traits may have<br />
produced richer and more integrated brain circuits in this region. 10<br />
But any true understanding of Einstein’s imagination and intuition will not come from poking around at his patterns of glia and grooves. The<br />
relevant question was how his mind worked, not his brain.<br />
The explanation that Einstein himself most often gave for his mental accomplishments was his curiosity. As he put it near the end of his life, “I<br />
have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.” 11<br />
That trait is perhaps the best place to begin when sifting through the elements of his genius. There he is, as a young boy sick in bed, trying to<br />
figure out why the compass needle points north. Most of us can recall seeing such needles swing into place, but few of us pursue with passion the<br />
question of how a magnetic field might work, how fast it might propagate, how it could possibly interact with matter.<br />
What would it be like to race alongside a light beam? If we are moving through curved space the way a beetle moves across a curved leaf, how<br />
would we notice it? What does it mean to say that two events are simultaneous? Curiosity, in Einstein’s case, came not just from a desire to<br />
question the mysterious. More important, it came from a childlike sense of marvel that propelled him to question the familiar, those concepts that,<br />
as he once said, “the ordinary adult never bothers his head about.” 12<br />
He could look at well-known facts and pluck out insights that had escaped the notice of others. Ever since Newton, for example, scientists had<br />
known that inertial mass was equivalent to gravitational mass. But Einstein saw that this meant that there was an equivalence between gravity and<br />
acceleration that would unlock an explanation of the universe. 13<br />
A tenet of Einstein’s faith was that nature was not cluttered with extraneous attributes. Thus, there must be a purpose to curiosity. For Einstein, it<br />
existed because it created minds that question, which produced an appreciation for the universe that he equated with religious feelings. “Curiosity<br />
has its own reason for existing,” he once explained. “One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the<br />
marvelous structure of reality.” 14<br />
From his earliest days, Einstein’s curiosity and imagination were expressed mainly through visual thinking—mental pictures and thought<br />
experiments—rather than verbally. This included the ability to visualize the physical reality that was painted by the brush strokes of mathematics.<br />
“Behind a formula he immediately saw the physical content, while for us it only remained an abstract formula,” said one of his first students. 15<br />
Planck came up with the concept of the quanta, which he viewed as mainly a mathematical contrivance, but it took Einstein to understand their<br />
physical reality. Lorentz came up with mathematical transformations that described bodies in motion, but it took Einstein to create a new theory of<br />
relativity based on them.<br />
One day during the 1930s, Einstein invited Saint-John Perse to Princeton to find out how the poet worked. “How does the idea of a poem<br />
come?” Einstein asked. The poet spoke of the role played by intuition and imagination. “It’s the same for a man of science,” Einstein responded<br />
with delight. “It is a sudden illumination, almost a rapture. Later, to be sure, intelligence analyzes and experiments confirm or invalidate the intuition.<br />
But initially there is a great forward leap of the imagination.” 16<br />
There was an aesthetic to Einstein’s thinking, a sense of beauty. And one component to beauty, he felt, was simplicity. He had echoed Newton’s<br />
dictum “Nature is pleased with simplicity” in the creed he declared at Oxford the year he left Europe for America: “Nature is the realization of the<br />
simplest conceivable mathematical ideas.” 17<br />
Despite Occam’s razor and other philosophical maxims along these lines, there is no self-evident reason this has to be true. Just as it is possible<br />
that God might actually play dice, so too it is possible that he might delight in Byzantine complexities. But Einstein didn’t think so. “In building a<br />
theory, his approach had something in common with that of an artist,” said Nathan Rosen, his assistant in the 1930s. “He would aim for simplicity<br />
and beauty, and beauty for him was, after all, essentially simplicity.” 18<br />
He became like a gardener weeding a flower bed. “I believe what allowed Einstein to achieve so much was primarily a moral quality,” said<br />
physicist Lee Smolin. “He simply cared far more than most of his colleagues that the laws of physics have to explain everything in nature coherently<br />
and consistently.” 19<br />
Einstein’s instinct for unification was ingrained in his personality and reflected in his politics. Just as he sought a unified theory in science that<br />
could govern the cosmos, so he sought one in politics that could govern the planet, one that would overcome the anarchy of unfettered nationalism<br />
through a world federalism based on universal principles.<br />
Perhaps the most important aspect of his personality was his willingness to be a nonconformist. It was an attitude that he celebrated in a<br />
foreword he wrote near the end of his life to a new edition of Galileo. “The theme that I recognize in Galileo’s work,” he said, “is the passionate fight<br />
against any kind of dogma based on authority.” 20<br />
Planck and Poincaré and Lorentz all came close to some of the breakthroughs Einstein made in 1905. But they were a little too confined by<br />
dogma based on authority. Einstein alone among them was rebellious enough to throw out conventional thinking that had defined science for<br />
centuries.<br />
This joyous nonconformity made him recoil from the sight of Prussian soldiers marching in lockstep. It was a personal outlook that became a