“IIRC, Einstein wasn’t the first to try to develop a curvature theory of gravity. Riemann himself apparently tried. And, IIRC, Einstein was one of Riemann’s students. Einstein brought to the table the whole thing about having to deal with spacetime rather than space.”
Riemann died in 1866, Einstein was born in 1879. Riemann was a mathematician: he developed the math of differential geometry, among a great deal of other things, so a lot of stuff is named after him. Einstein applied Riemann’s geometry to the physical universe. So far as I know, none of the early non-Euclidean geometry people thought that their geometries might be applicable in reality. The first theorems of hyperbolic geometry were produced in an attempt to create a contradiction and so prove Euclid’s fifth postulate.
“I disagree strongly with the suggestion Einstein was a proponent of MWI. In fact, the overemphasis on deduction (defined here as induction from few au priors) caused him to waste the remaining 2⁄3 of his life attempting to disprove quantum phenomena, no?”
I have to find an actual physicist to discuss this with, but there appears to be nothing wrong with Einstein’s quest for a unified theory; he simply didn’t have the prerequisite information of QM at the time (Feynman, Dyson, etc. didn’t develop renormalization until the 1940s). MWI wasn’t proposed until several years after Einstein’s death.
“A willingness to reconsider his assumptions, an openness to new explanations, and an abiding belief that hypotheses should always be tested against the data—and discarded if they were found wanting.”
Plenty of scientists have these, and many of them make significant discoveries in their fields. But what was it about Einstein that let him discover, not one, but two of the fundamental theories of physics?
“IIRC, Einstein wasn’t the first to try to develop a curvature theory of gravity. Riemann himself apparently tried. And, IIRC, Einstein was one of Riemann’s students. Einstein brought to the table the whole thing about having to deal with spacetime rather than space.”
Riemann died in 1866, Einstein was born in 1879. Riemann was a mathematician: he developed the math of differential geometry, among a great deal of other things, so a lot of stuff is named after him. Einstein applied Riemann’s geometry to the physical universe. So far as I know, none of the early non-Euclidean geometry people thought that their geometries might be applicable in reality. The first theorems of hyperbolic geometry were produced in an attempt to create a contradiction and so prove Euclid’s fifth postulate.
“I disagree strongly with the suggestion Einstein was a proponent of MWI. In fact, the overemphasis on deduction (defined here as induction from few au priors) caused him to waste the remaining 2⁄3 of his life attempting to disprove quantum phenomena, no?”
I have to find an actual physicist to discuss this with, but there appears to be nothing wrong with Einstein’s quest for a unified theory; he simply didn’t have the prerequisite information of QM at the time (Feynman, Dyson, etc. didn’t develop renormalization until the 1940s). MWI wasn’t proposed until several years after Einstein’s death.
“A willingness to reconsider his assumptions, an openness to new explanations, and an abiding belief that hypotheses should always be tested against the data—and discarded if they were found wanting.”
Plenty of scientists have these, and many of them make significant discoveries in their fields. But what was it about Einstein that let him discover, not one, but two of the fundamental theories of physics?