When I read about Special Relativity in my textbook, it feels like one of those “obvious in hindsight” results… with or without the work of a certain patent clerk, somebody would have come up with it. Of course, it took a long time to turn Einstein’s paper into an explanation that makes it seem obvious. I don’t know enough about General Relativity to know exactly what the key insight it was that set up the rest of the theory and how much was just a matter of knowing the right kind of mathematics after starting from the correct principles/axioms/assumptions/whatever.
On the other hand, if you want to regard somebody as having mental superpowers, professional baseball players are as good a choice as anyone else. In order to hit a 90-mph fastball, a baseball player must begin his swing before the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand. What these people do is not just extremely difficult, it ought to be impossible.
(My own personal situation is weird; I feel as though I am capable of doing Great Things if I really worked at it—I managed to impress even some of my college professors—but I have great difficulty in motivating myself to do anything other than play video games or surf the Internet. I just don’t want things enough to work at earning or achieving them. My parents are workaholics and I grew up to be a lazy bum. Go figure.)
When I read about Special Relativity in my textbook, it feels like one of those “obvious in hindsight” results… with or without the work of a certain patent clerk, somebody would have come up with it. Of course, it took a long time to turn Einstein’s paper into an explanation that makes it seem obvious. I don’t know enough about General Relativity to know exactly what the key insight it was that set up the rest of the theory and how much was just a matter of knowing the right kind of mathematics after starting from the correct principles/axioms/assumptions/whatever.
On the other hand, if you want to regard somebody as having mental superpowers, professional baseball players are as good a choice as anyone else. In order to hit a 90-mph fastball, a baseball player must begin his swing before the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand. What these people do is not just extremely difficult, it ought to be impossible.
(My own personal situation is weird; I feel as though I am capable of doing Great Things if I really worked at it—I managed to impress even some of my college professors—but I have great difficulty in motivating myself to do anything other than play video games or surf the Internet. I just don’t want things enough to work at earning or achieving them. My parents are workaholics and I grew up to be a lazy bum. Go figure.)