How the Great Become Great - A Few Excerpts

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein

During "the last decades of the (19th) century" there was a crisis looming in "the world of Newtonian physics". Newton's Laws, the very "foundations of classical science" were being "undermined by a score of experimental physicists tunnelling along their own separate routes from a dozen different directions".

Well not exactly. His "Italian was minimal" so that was out. And The Swiss School in Milan, where his sister and cousin went? They "only took children up to the age of thirteen". Basically his formal education "halted mid-stream", and Einstein spent his time "enjoy(ing) the people and the air of freedom", and especially his solo "cultural" tour of Padua, Pisa, Siena, and Perugia, "the main art centres of Italy".

While Einstein clearly did some thinking during this time about the problems of `'electricity, magnetism, and ether", after his years getting 'ramrodded' in the Luitpold Gymnasium, you can be sure the "prickly" 16 year old -- now "half-cocksure" of himself, "his head full of" - in his father's terms - "philosophical nonsense", "determined to renounce his (German) nationality and drifting further from parental control every day" -- wasn't about to sign himself on for another trip to the "barracks", German or otherwise. That was gonna take a little more help from his spwins. This time starring with next round of "his father's business fail(ures)".

With the financial pressure jacked up again, his father after him to "apply himself to the 'sensible trade' of electrical engineering", and his mother "pulling stings" to get her son a shot at the "one possible way out" -- sitting the entrance exam for the only Polytechnic in sight that "demanded no Gymnasium diploma" -- Einstein "was despatched over the Alps" to sit the ETH exam.

Although he had at best only a "vague idea" of what he might want to be in the fall of 1895, the" 'sensible trade' of electronic engineering" (read "technician") was not part of it. So Einstein simply failed the exam, the "general-knowledge questions" anyhow. Not that it mattered. Despite himself, Einstein's "obvious scientific and mathematical abilities" so "impressed the principal of the ETH" that, with the "support of an old (family) friend" living in the area, they managed to get "the boy (into) the (nearby) cantonal school at Araru, where a year's study might enable him to pass the ETH entrance exam".

At Araru the third and final round of spwins occurred. Instead of another year of studying with the "obedience of the corpse", Einstein experienced "one of the happiest periods of his life". At the "small country school" for "the first time in his education", Einstein "found a school that perfectly suited his temperament". The principal, Professor Winteler, was "a liberal-minded man and highly respected teacher who treated his pupils as adults and approached education with a free thinking manner". And beyond that, Einstein lodged with the Wintelers throughout his time at Araru, developing a "close and lasting relationship" with 'Papa' and 'Mutti' who soon "became a second family to him".

As a result when next round of ETH entrance exams came up in the summer of 1896, the 17 year old was not only sitting right on door step of the only 3rd level institution that would consider him without a diploma, he was also ready and eager to sit the exams.

That gives us a quick glimpse of - to borrow Bill Russell's words again - the "whole string of unlikely events" which was essential to the development of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, ie, that string of seemingly irrelevant, often tiny, coincidences which turned out to have massive consequences in relation to accelerating the development of Einstein's ideas and capacity to think creatively about (and finally resolve) the contradiction between Maxwell's "world of electromagnetism (where) light was propagated at a constant speed which could not be surpassed" and the world of "Newtonian mechanics" where it was "possible to increase the speed of an object indefinitely by adding more energy to it". In short , the chance combination of circumstances which created the opportunity for Einstein to gain access to the 'right kind of problems' for him to accelerate the development of his capacity to think creatively about the Maxwell-Newton conflict and eventually develop his Special Theory of Relativity, what we are calling the spwins of change.

________
* I'm introducing the term 'spwins' - chancewinds/forces in societal, institutional, interpersonal & personal worlds of the person which result in accelerated spin/developmental change in a person's key characteristics - as a conceptual parallel to the developmental process of a snowflake as it spins across the winter sky with its own internal chemical developmental processes ever being influenced by the continual changes occurring in the skies around it. To my knowledge at present there is no such term for describing this key developmental process in human beings.

On to hitchcock