Einstein: Could he have been the father of QM?

[RandallB]

There is no such thing as luck in these matters.

I think you missed the point of my post here,
what Karlisbad calls "lucky"
you and I and most on this forum call genius.

[Edit] OK I see; you were adding to my comments, not responding to them.

Another good example of “seeing flaws” as you put it, is the biggest flaw of both QM and GR. It has been well known 20th century fact; the two are incompatibility with each other. Yet they both make their best progress by ignoring that flaw and each other as, Astrophysics uses GR and particle physics uses QM.
Neither can be truly correct and complete unless they can correct or replace the other. With over half a century of tremendous effort to fix one to combine them or even replace both them this solution will be the biggest of them all. Some even claim it is impossible to do, But I have no doubt when it does happen, come some even many will say; “shucks, I could have thought of that!”

 

[Careful]

I think you missed the point of my post here,
what Karlisbad calls "lucky"
you and I and most on this forum call genius.

No, actually I just wanted to add something to your post by saying that the progress made by these people just did not originate from wanting to see things differently, but from seeing flaws in existing programs as well as probing for a deeper level of understanding.

Careful

 

[Careful]

I'd say it takes a lot of courage and confidence in ones own mathematical ability to throw out contemporary thinking and replace it with something of your own conception. The math may seem simple now, but I don't think performing calculations has ever been considered particularly hard, it's always been about understanding the scope and meaning of the calculations, or even where to begin on them. A computer can do math, but it probably won't be creating general laws to describe the universe.

True, but at the same time you never throw out contempary thinking away like that. There is always something essentially correct in what is done (even today); it is just that we do not understand yet what is right and what not. I have heard many particle physicists say that they do not really understand what they are doing but they are pretty confident that their results are more or less correct. I entirely agree with this, but I am equally confident that some physical insights behind these calculations are entirely wrong ; the difficulty is to find out why it does not matter that they are so. That is understanding... A beautiful example of this is the radical destruction of the Newtonian insights by Einstein's relativity ; nevertheless a starting point for Einstein was the Laplace equation for Newtonian gravity.

Careful

 

[Karlisbad]

Of course a computer "can" perform calculations (yes if you have a program that worths 10000 $$ such us Mathematica or similar) but can't teach you Diff. Geommetry...if none had explained to Einstein DG we wouldn't have GR today.. we shouldn't forget that "hard math" is still an obstacle to get a theory.

 

[Careful]

Of course a computer "can" perform calculations (yes if you have a program that worths 10000 $$ such us Mathematica or similar) but can't teach you Diff. Geommetry...if none had explained to Einstein DG we wouldn't have GR today.. we shouldn't forget that "hard math" is still an obstacle to get a theory.

Now, with this I agree ... the path from having a good idea to a nice realization of it takes hard work. But the conception of a good idea requires very different skills, lots of time, much patience and persistence ... Once I bought the CD's of ``a beautiful mind'' by silvia nasar and in the part about how nash found the embedding theorem for Riemannian manifolds, the narrator cited the MIT professor Nash was talking to about his approaches to the problem. The text went something like this : ``the thing about nash was that he persisted where everyone would have given up for a long time, most mathematicians can work for a few months on a hard problem and then eventually give up if nothing comes out. But Nash kept on coming back and back, tried over and over again for about one year or so...´´ , the same applies to Wiles and the Fermat theorem and so on.

Careful

 

[alfredblase]

karlisbad, I think the point you are missing is that anything that you truly understand is absurdly simple..

when first confronted with calculus it's a complete mystery, then when you learn it it's extremely easy.

same with anything, for example I'm learning QFT at the moment. Every new page seems to be written in greek :S :P (it's an extremely condensed treatment) but once I get past a line I think how very easy it is to get from A to B if you know how..

the difficulty in studying/researching physics is not how advanced or developed the physics is, but finding the road to understanding/solution when you have few or no maps/signposts..