Literary Discussions

Einstein's initial publication of his papers on relativity did not have one single footnote which is to say that it was entirely original.  The long PBS series on the Civil War mentioned that Walt Whitman's poetry was something totally new which made no reference to antiquity or mythology and the newness of Whitman reminded me of the newness of Einstein.  As a teen, Einstein imagined himself riding on a beam of light and performed armchair thought experiments.  It is said that Tesla had the unusual ability to imagine a complex machine in his mind and set it running for days at a time (a sort of mental virtual simulation).   Euler (pronounced Oiler) was able to instantly compute in his head any number out to ten or twenty decimal places of accuracy.  It was Euler's one small equation which provided the foundation for decades of superstring research in physics. Such genius comes only several times a century and may be likened to the ability of an idiot-savant (as portrayed in "Rain Man") to count cards in a casino or instantly see how many toothpicks fell on the floor.  I do not say this to trivialize such a gift but to stress that it is a "gift" which is innate and inborn. Certainly one possessed of such a gift must have many other qualities and the desire to use the gift properly in order to achieve something of genius. But without such inborn gifts no amount of labor or ambition is likely to achieve something of genius. Each decade scientific experiments confirm the results of Einstein's "armchair experiments."