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How the Great Become Great - A Few Excerpts
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"..
In particular there was the problem of "the luminiferous ether" - that "ghostly medium" which was essential to a Newtonian explanation of light, magnetism, and electricity - the ether through which "Maxwell's electro-magnetic waves (were assumed) to be transmitted like shakings in an invisible jelly", the ether which noone could find, the ether which - as Michelson and Morley showed in their "almost legendary" experiment of 1887 - simply did not exist.
And it wasn't just the "awkward results" of Michelson & Morley that "permeated the scientific climate of the 1890s". By the time Einstein had entered his teens in the early 1890s, Newton's Laws were getting littered with footnotes. Recent "technological advance(s)" had opened the door for a whole "new group of disturbing discoveries" - discoveries which simply could not be explained by "Newtonian mechanics". There was that little problem with "Mercury's orbit", that "obstinate planet" which simply refused to "conform (to) Newtonian calculations". There was Wien in Berlin, and Lorentz in Leiden, Thomson at the Cavendish, Becquerel in Paris, and these were only the worst offenders - finding inexplicable "discrepancies in the phenomena of heat and radiation"; atoms "containing electrically-charged particles"; "bits of electricity (which) not only had an existence of their own but a mass and an electric charge" to boot; a "metal (which) was giving off streams of radiation and matter".
Surely Einstein was not the only 'precocious' student of his generation who started pondering all the "worm(s) in the apple" of Newtonian physics, pondering the "revolutionary implications of Maxwell's electro-magnetic theory" . Just think back to the discovery of evolution, or the takeoff of the computer revolution. The problem was in the air. Remember Peter Deutsch, Lee Felsenstein, Ed Fredkin, Bill Gosper, Richard Greenblatt, John Harris, Tom Knight, Alan Kotok, Efren Lipkin, Stewart Nelson, Ed Roberts, David Silber, Dan Sokol, Randy Wigginton, Ken Williams, Stephen Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Paul Allen, and Bill Gates? How 'bout Patrick Matthew, Robert Chambers, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Charles Darwin? Exactly. If it hadn't been Allen and Gates, or Wallace and Darwin, it would have been someone else. Einstein came "on the scene... at the moment physics was about to be revolutionised". If it hadn't been him it would have been someone else, maybe a bit earlier, maybe a bit later. It was all down to that "whole string of unlikely events", those spwins of change which happened to put Einstein - rather than one of his contemporaries - in the right place at the right time to go from his interest in "one of the most hotly disputed scientific subjects (of the mid 1890s), the relationship between electricity, magnetism and the ether" to his revolutionary paper of 1905. That right place was ETH, the "famed Zurich polytechnic", the "MIT of Switzerland".
It was Einstein's 4 years at ETH that provided him with his first crucial sustained opportunity to accelerate his own development in relation to eventually solving the problem of relativity. It was here that he got the first perfect and sustained match between his key characteristics - both intellectually and interpersonally - and the resources/opportunities on offer in the ETH university environment. A match which hugely accelerated his development in two crucial ways. First, intellectually, it locked him on to the problem of 'the electrodynamics of moving bodies', the problem which would eventually led to his 1905 paper on "the Special Theory of Relativity". This is not to say that Einstein saw it that way in his years at ETH. Clearly he did not. He was still miles from working out the problems raised by earlier explanations of "first-order aether drift effects", by the "observations on stellar aberration", and by "Fizeau's measurements on the speed of light in moving water"; not to mention his "rediscovery of all essential elements of statistical mechanics" and his "derivation of the Lorentz transformations".
What is crucial is that by the time he left ETH in 1900, Einstein had formulated his own ideas relevant to the electrodynamics of moving bodies, and come up with his own experiments to test them - ideas and experiments which, inadequate though they inevitably were, would push his thinking further and further along the path he'd now found for himself, i.e. the path to relativity. In short, as a result of his 4 years at ETH, Einstein was 'locked on' to the problem of the electrodynamics of moving bodies, locked on to the problem that would eventually be solved by his special theory of relativity. . .
(several pages spelling out precisely how ETH was the ideal place for accelerating the development of Einstein's key characteristics relevant to developing his theory of 1905)
. . . As for the spwins* that got him into ETH in first place, Albert Einstein in the mid 1890s wasn't exactly the "greatest mind of the 20th century". Nor was he a 'shoo in' for university, ETH or elsewhere. In fact he was just another "precocious",15 year old with a fascination for physics and maths and a "revulsion for regimentation", who was stuck in the Luitpold Gymnasium getting "the rudiments of Latin and Greek, of history and geography" and maths "drummed into" him, and not exactly looking forward to the further tightening of the screws he'd be facing a couple years down the road when he moved on to his stint of compulsory service in the German military. Whatever about his "mocking" eyes and 'propensity to sarcasm', the budding "genius" wasn't exactly doing anything about remedying the situation.
No doubt with good reason. Because at 15 Einstein was also a quite "unsociable" and "introspective" boy; a boy with strong emotional bonds to his "close-knit family"; a close-knit family living in the comfort and security of a "lavish two-story villa complete with roof-top sun terrace and ...landscaped gardens"; a close-knit family that ran very "smoothly" under the tight reins of the "powerful woman at its centre"; under the "discipline" of Albert's mother, a discipline that had organized his life for years.
The first of that "whole string of unlikely events", those spwins of change, which eventually opened the door to ETH came in the summer of 1894, when "the family business failed" and Albert's father accepted an offer to set up a new factory in Pavia, outside Milan. As a result the villa in Munich was sold, and the entire family moved south to Italy, leaving the fifteen-year-old Einstein behind to finish his education in Munich. Watching his family disappear and his home turned "into a construction site", then moving on his own into the "lodging" of some "distant relative", sent Einstein into a "deep depression". The thought of another "eternity" in the Luitpold "barracks", not to mention compulsory "national service" right afterwards no doubt booted him back into action. Knowing full well he was gonna be in deep shit if he showed up in Italy, cap in hand, with no official cover, Einstein managed to get himself a med cert from the local family doctor, stating that "because of a nervous breakdown he should join his parents in Italy'. No matter, his "propensity for sarcasm" apparently got to the Luitpold authorities first. They 'sent him packing" in the spring of 1895.
So thanks to his father's business failure, combined with the offer from an Italian associate, and hence the family move to Italy, Einstein was now started on his way -- not to another year and a half of "learning gabble by rote", not to bootstepping round the much more serious "barracks" of "the Imperial Prussian Army", not even to whatever trouble his "caustic" reactions to such circumstances would have brought him -- but rather Einstein was on his way to the ETH, to the "MIT of Switzerland".
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