I had a similar revelation—not with Einstein, just with the brightest kid in my freshman physics class. I was in awe of him… until I went to a problem session with him and heard him think out loud. All he was doing was thinking.
It wasn’t that he was dumber than I had assumed. He really was that bright. It was just that there was no magic to the steps of how he solved a problem. For a fleeting moment, it seemed like what he did was perfectly normal. The rest of us, with our stumbling, were making it all too complicated. Of course, that didn’t mean that suddenly I could do physics the way he did; I just remember the clear sense that his mind was “normal.”
I had a similar revelation—not with Einstein, just with the brightest kid in my freshman physics class. I was in awe of him… until I went to a problem session with him and heard him think out loud. All he was doing was thinking.
It wasn’t that he was dumber than I had assumed. He really was that bright. It was just that there was no magic to the steps of how he solved a problem. For a fleeting moment, it seemed like what he did was perfectly normal. The rest of us, with our stumbling, were making it all too complicated. Of course, that didn’t mean that suddenly I could do physics the way he did; I just remember the clear sense that his mind was “normal.”