The Genius of Einstein: The Science, His Brain, the Man

thank you it's a pleasure to be here good evening albert einstein once said that there were only two things that might be infinite the universe and human stupidity and he followed it by saying that he had no confidence that the universe was infinite now when we hear that you know we chuckle or at least we smile but what we don't do is nobody feels insulted by that no one takes offense at it and the reason of course is that when we hear those words right we see albert einstein right we see that warm hearted that good natured of vungular sage from an earlier era right we we see the the wild hair starry-eyed genius right whose iconic imagery from from riding a bicycle to sticking out his tongue to being lost in pensive thought all of this imagery is emblazoned in our collective cultural memory and einstein's story right at least the version that we tell when we re-tell right of the the the young boy who could barely talk until he was three four or five or the the young student who failed at school or the young brash graduate who gets shipped off to the patent office i mean this is stuff of myth making and then the storm of creative thought that flows forward that launches quantum mechanics the special theory of relativity the general theory of relativity completely rewriting our understanding of space and time and matter and energy i mean as a physicist i have studied these ideas intently i've taught them i've i've spent decades with colleagues trying to push these ideas forward and i have to tell you that they never lose their wonder i mean i am as amazed today regarding what einstein found as i was when i first encountered these ideas 30 40 years ago so how did he do it right is it personality is it perspiration is it some potent mix of brain physiology together with the particular scientific moment when he came on the scene is it all of it i mean what was happening in einstein's life when he was putting forward all of these amazing ideas and how have his discovery stood up to the test of time well these are some of the questions that we are going to be exploring here tonight in tonight's program a program that we at the world science festival are proud to co-present with the 92nd street why and we are honored that tonight's discussion will be led by the senior legal and investigative correspondent at nbc news the former anchor of abc news nightline two-time emmy award winner so please join me in bringing to the stage cynthia mcfadden great to see you i i feel that we should have full disclosure i come here as a journalist which someone once said was just the little kid on the street who wanted to be the first one to run down the street and say guess what i know well tonight i don't know very much i want to disclose that i had to drop out in college i had to drop out of the class poet physics for poets okay i couldn't handle it so i hope i'm going to learn a lot tonight i certainly have a lot of questions brian it's always great to be with you and welcome to all of you to the genius of einstein i want to start with a quote a quote from professor einstein here's what he said i want to know how god created the world i'm not interested in this or that phenomenon in the spectrum of this or that element i want to know his thoughts the rest are details so tonight we're going to explore the genius of einstein from three perspectives who he was as a human being what he scientifically gave to the world and also what neuroscience may tell us about the man's brain we brought together three people who have spent a great deal of time thinking about these things you've already met brian greene to talk about einstein the man i'd like to introduce author filmmaker and professor of science writing at mit he has produced more than a dozen science documentaries and written five books including newton and the counterfeiter and einstein in berlin please welcome thomas levinson great to have you also joining us is professor of neurology and ophthalmology at robert wood johnson medical school of rutgers university his research areas have ranged from abnormal eye movements to the very brain of albert einstein so please join me in welcoming dr frederick lapore doctor hi so let's get right into it let's start with the year 1905. it was known as einstein's anna's mirabilis his miracle year brian lead us off yeah now that was uh an amazing period of intellectual fervor it's hard to compare it it's hard to even imagine that kind of scientific outpouring happening so einstein wrote many papers in that year four of them were absolutely astounding one of them did launch quantum mechanics one of them established the existence of atoms and the two that i think have captured our imagination more than any other were his papers to do with the special theory of relativity we're going to get into that more deeply as we go but what was i mean to have this kind of a creative period what was going on in the rest of his lifetime at that time well einstein in 1905 was in some ways um really disadvantaged and in some ways i think he himself would have said he had this great opportunity he was disadvantaged because for a variety of reasons he completely you know failed to get the kind of university job or uh really entry into graduate school as it was then not quite the way we do it now after he finished his physics degree at uh switzerland's leading technical institution the the the polytechnic in zurich he just he alienated his professors he didn't bother paying attention to things he wasn't interested in all that you know the kind of student you would expect einstein to be so he didn't get any help from him when he graduated and he was in the wilderness he taught algebra to to uh high school students for a while that must have gone really well can you imagine being can you imagine einstein's you know saying i i couldn't figure out a quadratic equation under einstein's very embarrassing um so he's disadvantaged on the other hand he got this job in the patent office where he was looking at technical material all the time he was learning to visualize physical physical situations and he had um partly because he didn't really he wasn't really a great family man he spent really a lot of time even though he's married and had a young son he had great freedom to just think and i believe that that one of the things you see in einstein after he gets a patent office job and really starts settling into being a sort of grown-up um he really starts developing the characteristic you would have for the rest of his life which was this extraordinary ability to focus no matter what was going on around him would it be fair to say that his life was chaotic and that in his scientific life he was looking for more order i think it's certainly true and einstein himself wrote this in in what he called his autobiographical note many years later it's certainly true that einstein saw in science and escape from these are his words the merely personal there was this great territory out there i don't think his life was terribly chaotic in 1905 i think he was a solid you know young bourgeois swiss citizen going to his job every day small child taking hikes in the hills with his friends it was you know einstein the young man was not the bohemian eccentric genius we later you know as brian was saying we had this image of einstein einstein at 25 26 was a guy who went to his job and worked on his hobby in his spare time and his hobby turned out to be revolutionizing the world of physics hey he did love to play the violin and and fred one of the things that what that you've learned in looking at his brain is is you can you can understand some you can tell us what we can understand by looking at his brain let's go there he was a gifted musician and he he loved to play the violin love to play duets and um again dean faulk who's the person who did the anatomy and a couple of papers who i collaborated with he has a finding of a kind of a we'll show a picture of it later but uh it looks like a knob it looks like an omega sign an elaboration of his motor cortex on the right side and for somebody who's fingering with his left hand we now know mostly from neuroimaging that there are a lot of musicians who do have this kind of elaboration in their cortex that you see with people who are left-handed string so does the knob predate being a musician or does being a musician create the knob that's a great question we don't know we don't know you know come on you're a scientist you're supposed to know this stuff well you'd have to come up with a serial neuroimaging uh for pure research purposes you know start with a six-year-old and yeah it's a great no one's done that i mean that seems like a scientific experiment you can do no you need the funding you need the funding i i mean i hate to say he's gonna be outside afterwards yeah you know you say listen i want to pitch this idea do six-year-olds with cortical knobs become violin prodigies uh you may be able to do that or do prodigies but develop a knob and it may be a little bit of both i mean i think if anything's changed in in my lifetime in the conception of neuroscience is plasticity that you can enhance your wiring by learning experiences so the question is if you spend that ten thousand hours or whatever uh developing a skill with your left hand could you actually see tangible changes on the surface of the cortex don't know for sure all we know is he had the cortical knob on the right of his brain okay so now i take a deep breath and i say to you brian explain what special relativity is this is easy for you and hard for me yes so you know it's a funny thing because special relativity is one of the most simple ideas mathematically it only uses high school algebra but it is one of the deepest conceptual breaks so it's hard for all of us to to grasp these ideas so roughly speaking around the year 1905 a few years before there was a lot of discussion and confusion having to do with light and its speed and the question was could the speed of light depend upon the source that's emitting the light and could it depend upon the motion of the person receiving it right so if i was to take this this coffee cup and throw it toward you at say three miles an hour i won't actually that's just the thought of gdonkin experiment as einstein called it right so i throw it at you three miles an hour you'll receive it at that speed it's obvious that if you run toward me the cup is going to appear to approach you from your perspective more quickly and if you run away from it it'll approach you less quickly and that is basic intuition about how motion works but as it turned out with light it seemed that that was not the case if i fire a laser beam at you it'll approach you at 186 000 miles per second regardless of whether you're sitting still running toward me or going away now at the time many people were not ready to accept that kind of idea they were coming up with all sorts of contorted notions to try to sidestep that but einstein was the kind of thinker who would just come out see the facts very clearly and throw away the preconceived notions and say look that is what is the case the speed of light is constant and you just need to accept that the problem is if you think about it if the speed of light is constant that means it's behaving weirdly relative to experience and speed what is speed well it's how far something goes divided by how long it takes to get there so it's space over time so if speed behaves weirdly then space and time are behaving weirdly and einstein went for it and figured out how weirdly they behaved that's what he worked out in special relativity raise your hand if you could repeat that i don't know if i could repeat that so so it's the relationship between spaces yes exactly he finds that there's this kind of dance that space and time engage in where they go back and forth between each other in order to keep the speed of light constant and he makes that idea precise and mathematical so if you want to figure out and have a sense of how this notion of constant light speed affects time we'd love to use this little example here it's called a light clock this is really just like a wrist watch it goes tick tock tick tock it's a way of measuring elapsed time where we can see the internal mechanism of the clock you can use any clock that you like but they aren't as transparent as this one and for our purposes you can use this to pretty quickly get to einstein's conclusion which is time slows down when a clock is in motion now if you want i can show you that but i leave it up to you if you want to see it i say yes yes all right so one piece of you're not going to throw the cup at me no the cupcake well i may throw it at you okay not yet okay but um so so what we want to do is now take two of these light clocks and we want one of them to move relative to the other so the one on the right will set it into motion here's the thing look at the trajectory of that ball of light it's going on a double diagonal trajectory compared to the straight up and down trajectory of the clock on the left-hand side now if the speed of light is constant and yet for it to go tick-tock in the moving clock it has to go further because that double diagonal is longer look at time on the moving clock compared to the station if you could actually run that one again so you can just sort of see it in action watch the counter on the moving clock compared to the stationary and you'll see that time is elapsing more slowly simply because the speed of light is constant but the ball has to go further in the moving clock to accomplish tick tock tick tock longer trajectory same speed it will go tick-tock less quickly time slows down that little demonstration einstein made mathematical again it's high school algebra and that transforms our understanding of time before that everybody thought from newton that there's a universal clock out there that ticks off time second after second after second it drags us all forward in time at exactly the same rate regardless of what we do regardless of how we are moving but einstein shows that if i get up and start to walk my clock compared to yours if you look at it will tick off time more slowly more slowly time is not universal time is in the eye of the beholder and depends upon the beholder's motion that's crazy but true was this the beginning of quantum mechanics quantum mechanics is a different story that we could get into but that reaction is perfect in 1905 he did this yeah and he did the first paper wrote the first paper on quantum mechanics and they're completely separate lay it on us it's crazy well yeah quantum mechanics is a whole different story and just you know in two sentences it's a theory that applies to the micro world and starts with einstein's paper go through a lot of development but ultimately it gets to a place where we learn from the quantum law that you can't predict definite outcomes in any experiment you can only predict the probability of one outcome or another you can predict an electron will be here with 30 percent likelihood 20 percent likelihood here 50 over here that's a completely different perspective of reality compared again to the one that newton gave us newton says tell me how things are and i'll use my math to predict how they will be in the future and quantum theory says that's the wrong way of thinking about it all you can do is predict the likelihood of one outcome or another again a completely crazy set of ideas that are borne out by experiment and yes you follow the intellectual trail of quantum theory and smacks right back into einstein's 1905 paper which is the one for which he got the nobel prize tom so just a couple things to as grace notes to what brian said first of all the the the paper he's he's skipped over a little bit on the on the uh existence and dimensions of atoms and molecules is of the 1905 papers the most cited and the reason is it has the most direct uh practical applications it applies to such children's questions as why is the sky blue which actually einstein answered in another paper in 1910 but it's also used for doing things like working out the mathematics of mixing paint so this paper that often doesn't get discussed in in sort of you know because especially because relativity and quantum mechanics are so important uh was itself you know this this amazing result um but the other thing i just want to say is that um brian said that one of einstein's gifts as a genius was the ability to look at facts for what they are and follow them where they led even if they upset um preconceptions that einstein himself may have had and this was true actually even within the the quantum theory i mean it's famous that einstein uh really didn't like quantum mechanics in its in its fully developed form but he didn't stop doing quantum theory in 1905 he kept doing major contributions to the quantum theory for another two decades and he even did the first papers that really looked at the fact that in the micro world you would have an essential irreducible element of randomness he published this this stuff in first started publishing in 1916-17 and he wrote a letter to a a colleague i think it was max born a close friend and a great physicist nobel prize-winning physicist in his own right and said you know i wouldn't want to give up causality but there it is um and so when you think about einstein uh in his in his um just the kind of mind he was and the kind of uh sort of attributes that made him so powerful a thinker on the one hand it's his ability to follow to see facts for what they are consider their implications and follow them where they will and it's notable that this wasn't in some senses an infinite resource he was able to do it with the quantum theory for a very long time and he reached a point where not just because he was getting older and less flexible though that was part of it but because in some sense he was also prone to thinking about things that were congenial to him he had taste in physics he had things that he liked he had ideas he responded to more than others and there was a point at which physics moved away from the center of his affections but before it did that and even i mean even after he was still an incredibly formidable thinker but before he did that he was just astonishing i want to come back to the brain in just a second but first let's go to berlin 1914 almost a decade after these amazing papers come out uh the politics and the circumstances surrounding einstein's life at that time let's let's talk a little bit brian about how these circumstances affected his thinking and his productivity as a scientist well i think tom can probably speak more to the surrounding influences but berlin was the time when he is hot on the trail of the general theory of relativity he spent some time in prague moved back to zurich and then finally goes to berlin i think it was 1914 spring of 1914 he goes to berlin and he started to really think about general relativity back in zurich in 1912 and makes some headway toward the the general theory of relativity but it's in berlin that it really starts to all come together and by 1915 november 19 we're in the 100th anniversary of that momentous month he gives four lectures at the prussian academy of science where week after week after week he's getting closer and closer and closer and finally november 25th he writes down the field equations of the general theory of relativity so tom set the picture for us i mean he is being wooed to berlin despite the fact that he's jewish well this is 1914 i mean one of the things just as brian said at the beginning you know we have this image of einstein at the end of his life and we sort of pushed that back to the beginning we have this image of germany in the 20th century and you know the germany of uh the post-world war one period and then the hitler period is very very different from the the last days of imperial germany which is what you what you have before before the start of the war so yeah there was anti-semitism all over europe but it was you know genteel anti-semitism and for einstein it really wasn't much of a you know it just didn't it didn't really register on him yet um he was wooed to berlin in what was really a bargain i mean einstein saw it that way he was clearly one of the strongest if not the already the preeminent theoretical physicist in europe and berlin germany in general in berlin was the center of european science it was and certainly for physics i mean it was an amazing collection of people who were working in the prussian academy in the various institutes so berlin said we want you to add luster to our establishment and um we will bring you there with no teaching responsibilities a great salary your own institute you know support for things that you might like like an expedition to test your your evolving theory of gravity um once you come and he said fine even though among other things his wife really hated the idea uh it was you know look the idea of institutions wooing star academics is not exactly a foreign one i mean it does occasionally happen in this day and age so and that's really what happened and i think einstein had no thought of politics at that time i mean it's it's hard to recall how implausible world war one was up until you know days before the declarations of wars were working he certainly became political oh he became political because of the war not not beforehand it was and it was explicitly the reaction of his fellow german scientists to the outbreak of world war one that first triggered his political instincts there was a famous manifesto of 93 which 93 leading german intellectuals signed this document that said germany is not to blame for the war we're we are bringing the bringing civilization we aren't as bad as the english and french who are lying with mongols and slavs i mean uh it was it was really horrific and it was a it was again with hindsight it looks oh of course they would do that it's how german but to einstein it was a complete surprise that his cultured you know literate poetry quoting physics colleagues would join in this manifesto and and that they would express such nationalism when again science was his retreat from the merely personal science was something that was international or supranational he hated that and he became political almost from the you know first moments of the war so in this stew out comes the general theory of general relativity go yeah yeah no exactly you know and it really was the result in a sense of almost 10 full years of struggle to try to figure out the force of gravity that's what the general theory of relativity is all about and it's a it's a funny thing to think about because almost none of us today could even imagine spending 10 years on a single problem i mean you try to go back to get your grant renewed when you haven't got any progress on this problem that you set for yourself and it's not gonna go particularly well i mean you know if i'm just like i'm putting in a grant proposal and getting rejected you know and this is the kind of thing that at least today would happen so he had an amazing capacity to stay with a problem and this issue of how does gravity work that's really the issue that's driving him right is is one that he spends 10 years on and finally not only comes to a beautiful answer but it comes to a beautiful mathematical encapsulation of that answer so what is the answer well you know we all know that newton basically said that you have the sun you have the earth and there's this force of gravity that keeps the earth in orbit but einstein is well aware and newton was too that newton's never told anybody how that force is communicated so einstein looks at this situation as others could have done for 200 years nothing changed again he just looked at the same thing that everybody else looked at and so what do you have you got the sun you have the earth what's between them space so it's got to be that space somehow is the thing that communicates the force of gravity so this little picture gives a sense of what that is so here's 3d space and einstein's idea is that space is uncurved it's kind of flat if there's no matter or energy but if you bring in a body like the sun einstein tells us that the fabric of space in fact space-time curves and it's that curvature that keeps objects in orbit so look at the moon around the earth the earth is warping the environment and the moon is kept in orbit kind of because space is nudging it around keeping it rolling along this valley in this curved environment and if you if you pull back from this imagery you see that the earth is kept in orbit for exactly the same reason that is what einstein says is how gravity works and he didn't even have graphics think about it yeah i know how did he even ever how did he do his public lectures i don't know uh but um true and the and the wonderful thing is there is a mathematical version of this which again this is the part that's harder to communicate if you don't study mathematics but when we look at that equation i wish we had i don't think we have it but you know it's this beautiful little equation r mu nu minus a half g meanwhile because a pi g over c to the fourth team is beautiful little look come on there you go you can you give it back to us and when we look at it it's one of the most amazing compact formulae that describes gravity in terms of warps and curves the geometry of space and time so many people look at this moment in november of 1915 as the pinnacle moment in einstein's scientific career how can we know it's true how can we know it's true yeah it's a good question uh and for einstein we can answer it for more modern things it's harder but um for einstein he realizes that there are a number of ways that you could test this the first is in in november of 1915 before uh you can hold off on this for a second he realizes that there's a puzzle which i believe you just wrote a book about and the puzzle is having to do with the motion of the planet mercury so people have known for a long time that mercury's orbit wasn't closing on itself the way newtonian physics said that it should it was shifting by a little bit 43 arc seconds per century a little tiny shift and no one could figure out why some suggested maybe there was another planet called vulcan that was out there pulling on the motion of mercury and you have a beautiful book that's going to come out and tell people all about this but einstein says that doesn't make much sense to me let me recalculate mercury's motion using my new equations sits down does the calculation and by his own account when he looked at the result he had heart palpitations that lasted for hours because the math showed the same answer that the observers had so that was a real key moment for einstein in fact there's a quota maybe you know what it is but he says something like something snapped inside of me that was the moment when he knew that he had looked into reality in a way that nobody previously had but a real test is not too retro it's not to retrodict it's to predict something that no one has seen before and that's where this wonderful little document that i think you brought to our attention i never saw this before it's a beautiful can you bring that back up the that that note maybe not there it is so so i mean you want to describe this sure this is einstein went through this enormous struggle to get to general relativity um and uh i will defer to brian to tell me if this is true but basically uh as of 1913 he he got some help with the math that was uh his his mathematician friend told him was too deep and too hard for physicists um grossman talked about it yeah you're the riemann tensor he said physicists stay away from it exactly and that led einstein to look at it of course it was perfect and uh and they worked out this this amazing theory that had um uh matter and energy warping um space and time except it wasn't they was warping he knew that time warped under gravitation that point but he wasn't sure about space yet and but he knew even at that stage of the theory that if you saw gravitation as um as matter-deforming space-time then anything that travels through space-time including light itself would have to be would be deflected in the presence of a big uh big gravitational field a big dent in space-time and that's what he's drawing here and what this letter is about he's is in 1913 he's figured this out he's got a number it's the wrong number it turns out he's going to work it out later um but he's sending a note to the american solar astronomer george ellery hale who among other things built the biggest american telescope biggest telescopes in the world for about 30 years um but hale was himself not a deep space astronomer but a solar astronomer and um einstein wanted to know if there was any way at all that you could actually test this out in daylight and the answer was hail regretfully reported no but it turns out that you can take this idea further which einstein did later on and realized that during a solar eclipse when the moon obscures the sun you can see the distant stars and according to these ideas of general relativity the distant star light should travel on a curved trajectory on its way to the earth being moved deflected by the sun and that would therefore shift the star's apparent position in the sky so if during a solar eclipse you could take photographs of the background stars and compare their positions to where they appeared six months earlier when the sun was on the other side of the earth and having no influence on the trajectory of the starlight a tiny shift would be apparent if einstein's ideas are correct it's a little tiny angular difference but einstein could calculate what it would be so that's the proof well that's the proposal then you got to go out and do the measurement and the measurements were undertaken in 1919 two teams went out to uh brazil and off the west coast of africa and they took these photographs as best they could there are various technical problems with weather and so forth but ultimately by september of 1919 the data was analyzed and the folks doing the analysis were convinced that the data established einstein's theory and they they sent einstein a telegram and einstein sees that the result is positive and he's with the student at the time when the telegram comes ilsa schneider and she says to him what will you have said professor einstein if the results had not agreed with the general theory of relativity einstein famously says i would have been sorry for the dear lord because the theory is correct like how he thinks so he was arguably the most famous and is still arguably the most famous scientist one of the most famous men to have ever lived and it's not a very high bar we should say but uh yes it is no it's uh so i'm interested in how he saw himself at that point and and i'm interested in his brain i mean it's it's worth noting that einstein actually had his own brain had an e-e-g ekg done of his brain eeg done in his brain i i mean it's hard to translate the anatomy into the guy's personality but the guy was saintly he had uh in the sense that he was very self-effacing i mean again and again he had this incredible reputation but he was not a hard bargainer when he came to the united states to work at the institute for advanced study and you know i think at the end if you want to bring it back to the brain um one of the you know he was cremated and i think one of the reasons he was cremated was he was concerned that their people would want artifacts of a saint and he was right um at the time of his autopsy um forget about the brain his eyes were removed by his ophthalmologist and they've never been seen again and he he was this was his own ophthalmologist and uh he was dead on that i'm glad we don't have that picture yeah yeah i don't have a picture of that one sorry but um you know he was a a very modest kind of a guy who lived in a world of ideas and yet by the time he comes back to america many people talk about these next 30 years as the lost years and i'm fascinated by that a man with this enormous brain who has these thoughts that are unimaginable for most of us that that are even proved some of them some of them well maybe not yet he never made his peace with quantum mechanics he never made his peace with it but but what about those years when he finally he gets lord to princeton so tell us about that well he um he became you know from from his start in anti-war politics in germany during the the great war the so the great war um you know he went on to develop a much broader and i think uh more more generally humanistic uh set of politics and he was an acute observer of what was going on in germany uh you know he including threats to himself personally i mean he once said that he didn't know it was jewish until his german enemies taught him that's a paraphrase but it was pretty close to that um and so he was he was attentive to the rise of hitler at first like most sane thinking people um he thought hitler didn't have staying power he said you know hitler's risen to to power again a paraphrase on the stomachs on the empty stomachs the the german people and and you know when things get better he'll disappear but by the 3132 it was very clear to him that this was that hitler was a deep and immediate danger to germany and to jews in germany in particular and that it might not be tenable for him to stay and at that point he had already a deal with caltech to do a one semester year for three years of visiting professorship and she was coming to america every year and um i think you know by night by middle of 1932 it was he was thinking that he might not come back from his next visit to caltech and it was in that circumstance that uh flexner the the magnate who the the imp the intellectual impresario who set up the institute for advanced study um decided that he would try and bag the most famous name in science to put his brand new institute on the map and uh and he made einstein an offer and i think caltech expected to get him and were surprised when they did not especially to you know the institute for advanced study now is this extraordinary place with this great reputation all these people who've been there uh but then it was uh it was an empty field in in in princeton borrowing quarters on the on the campus of the university there it was nothing it was just starting um and it was i think einstein at that point that he'd been very worldly and very much involved in in in you know big city affairs i think he actually welcomed a chance to get away from the craziness of europe and go to a place that he had his doubts about but that was he called princeton land of puny demigods on stilts in a letter shortly afterwards but why princeton over uh i think i think he liked the peace and quiet i think he liked in some senses the isolation um i think he was beginning to really value both an ability to focus on what he was interested in and perhaps some remove from a physics community that was no longer interested in things that he valued and that he correctly saw as less and less interested in his view of the proper path for physics going forward so is it fair to say brian that he was less um productive during these years oh yeah hugely so i mean between 1933 and when he died in 55 he wrote a lot of papers but the ones that we really remember there's just a small handful of them the one that you referred to earlier his work that was aimed at trying to use the math of quantum mechanics to destroy quantum mechanics in some sense but ultimately it didn't turn out that way in fact he just revealed and emphasized one of the total strange features of quantum mechanics called quantum entanglement that's 1935. he wrote some other interesting paper in 1939 but throughout it all he was in search of one real prize which was the unified theory and this was a direct extension of everything that he had achieved as a young man so remember back in 1905 he's in the patent office he is an outsider to the establishment comes up with these new ideas of special relativity which turn everything on its head and then he gets brought in to the establishment but he's still a very independent thinker ten years later the general theory of relativity you know an amazing discovery but now he's like smack in the middle of of science in the traditional established sense and it's as if at that point he is trying to use all of the techniques and methods that served him so powerfully well as a young man and he just beats on that same approach over and over again but the methods were no longer suited to the next task the next task required other ideas and that's why he kind of doesn't make any progress really toward the unified theory so i want to go back to the idea of genius did he just was he a comet who who flared out after 201 1905 i mean was he was this because his brain i mean he he overdid it and now he's resting was it because what or i mean does the human brain only have a certain capacity and he used it up and then some what what well i i think scientists such as einstein and mathematicians in particular they do have a trajectory and they tend to have their greatest achievements earlier in life why um flexibility maybe or it's hard to absorb the newer ideas we like to think none of that's really true einstein einstein starts doing interesting publishing and he actually published his first papers in 1904 and they were once dismissed as completely inconsequential papers they're not they're they're building blocks for some of what he's going to do next and he keeps on doing really first class you know nobel prize or near nobel prize quality work until 1925 when he is 46. is that right something like that born in 1879 yes sir so he has um a 20-year run of producing you know bleeding edge stuff across again as brian said right in the outside you know his last papers were about statistics and statistics in a very deep and important way that really were i mean he he not he knocked right on the door of the you know modern quantum mechanical theory with that stuff in 1925 it's amazing stuff he made a prediction that was only actually developed in those papers that's where he predicts bose einstein condensate which is this new state of matter that happens when you get things very cold and you know so quantum scale objects stop behaving like quantum objects they become macroscopic objects and these are amazing weird difficult ideas they involve leaps from mathematics to you know imagination about you know actual physical intuition i mean it's extraordinary stuff 20 years after he did the stuff that we're we started out talking out about so it's not as if you know he flamed out after one great year he had a run that was better than almost any person can hold okay granted granted but does it still run out i mean i guess that's the question about genius i mean it it it doesn't does it peter out or or you know did he finally launch upon a problem that was insoluble which is the theory of everything i mean there's people you know whitton at the institute you know they're still trying to suss that out with you know enviro unverifiable results so he may have finally bitten off more than he could chew no shame in that but he did not you know to his dying day he was not able to come up with a unification of strong force weak force electromagnetism and gravity was not going to happen and he was sort of marginalized because of the quantum mechanics story he never could accept it he would get into fights with bohr and he'd say and he would say this is an incomplete description of reality he just never could deal with quantum mechanics and they marginalized him so i don't know if that's you know you're running out of neuronal steam or you're picking fights that you can't win on the other hand he becomes like this folk hero legend symbol right while he may not have been as productive and i think we all have to agree he wasn't as productive right as he was in his early life he became this iconic figure i love show the picture of the sandals i love this picture um he's where he got the picture there it's coming um there we go yeah yeah okay who can't love this guy those are actually now we know excellent research that he is actually wearing sandals that are a woman's size 11 as confirmed by the man who sold them to him david rothman in southwark county long island we had to get that in but this is actually a great kind of a tradition among physicists that what you look like on the weekend yeah right and there you go nice nice nice yeah good good take that down now thank you oh there's so much your shoes young lady right over there yeah hi tracy um there is so much folklore around einstein i mean i love the clipping from the new york times where he says he's incapable of doing his taxes because they're so complicated i mean i mean and he cultivates that too i mean you've studied this more than i but he's well aware of uh you go yeah there you go you know he's welcome and uh i think he enjoyed starting to starting the myth going forward yeah so he he he kind of enjoys being a celebrity right i mean he's no kim kardashian but he's enjoying being a celebrity well he didn't do signing tours but you know there's lots of kids in princeton probably still alive who he helped with their math problems he was this kind of avuncular as you say genial person i mean i i guess he did you know that's obviously charlie chaplin and he would take an occasional star turn but you know he never really left princeton from 33 for a prolonged period of time yeah that's the the premiere of city lights and uh there's this famous a probably apocryphal story where you know einstein and chaplin come in on the red carpet and there's this crowd cheering and einstein says to chaplain allegedly what does it all mean and chaplin says nothing which again is you know that that story itself is part of the cultivation of the myth the other worldly man um yeah he he did like being a celebrity but he also used it i mean he actually made practical use of it one time when he came to america he made reporters who wanted to interview him make a small donation to um to help with one of his causes i think it was displaced refugees um he obviously used his celebrity to do all kinds of attempts of political activism including writing to roosevelt that it was time for the u.s to start paying attention to uh the atomic bomb so i mean he would he he was willing to be famous if it helped him advance causes that he believed in including that one so do you think it's possible he was distracted from the science or not i don't think we're going to know for for sure he certainly was on on the larger arena in terms of you know being asked to be the uh prime minister of israel or the leader of israel at one point that which he turned down he did to his to his everlasting credit and he had a wisdom and ben gurion said asked ben gurion invited me president and then said to an adviser what do we do if he accepts right but you know um he he was a private intellectual um a lot of his work could be done by himself in in his office and he lived in a world of ideas i think the thing that's often underplayed is the years at the institute for advanced study one one of his boon companions there was curt goodell you know the uh the author of the the he framed the incompleteness theorem so you've got you've got einstein with relativity gerdell with incompleteness the only one you're missing is heisenberg with uncertainty if you're talking about three kind of cardinal cutting edge conceptions that characterize the 20th century so god knows what kind of conversations he would have and there's pictures of him and gerdell going towards mercer street for lunch and i imagine he got his intellectual rocks off with some of those conversations i i want to talk about it i want you to talk about his brain and what and what we know actually physically what what do we know from einstein so you need to tell the story about what actually happened for those in the audience too well you know cut me off because it's a long story but it begins the brain the story of the brain begins when he passes away on april 18 1955 he knew he was going to die uh he'd actually been living on borrowed time he had an aortic aneurysm abdominal aortic aneurysm and you didn't have much you could do for it in those days he'd actually had an operation several years earlier they would wrap cellophane around it with the idea that you'd scar down to keep it from rupturing but it didn't hold and it came back and he knew it and so april 18th 1955 he passes away utters a few words of indecipherable german we don't know what he said and the the body is taken down for the autopsy the routine postmortem determined the cause of death and had he left instructions no nothing nothing there is nothing in the will about the disposal of his body somehow it was known that he wanted to be cremated that that was known um april 19th which that thing you just showed was the next day in the new york times his family basically his son hans albert and his executor otto nathan read that the brain has been kept and they're going what nothing mentioned in in the will but that was like not on the script and they go to the pathologist thomas harvey a guy in his 40s who's the only chief pathologist at this little medical little hospital princeton hospital and harvey pitches the the pitch of his life and he says we're never going to get another chance like this let let me study the brain and hans albert goes for it and so does auto nathan so what do we know what do we know as a result of of preserving i mean i can show you some pictures let's do that okay let me tell you what we don't know we'll start okay okay it's not a bigger brain it's not a bigger brain okay that's it's not bigger it's not bigger it's 1230 grams not a big brain so if you're into the bigger is better doesn't work for central nervous system but the architecture is different and rather than me say well this squiggle goes there and that's let me show you okay all right so let me just okay let me just orient you real quick cut me off if this goes too long okay frontal lobe that's the back of your brain this is his right this is his right hemisphere the right there is a split the hemispheric split inner hemispheric split okay just the highlight the game highlights on this okay here's your front frontal lobes one two three four four frontal gyri the great great great majority we don't have of us have three he had four that is a serious anomaly how do we know that because there are standard atlases of brain anatomy ono and connolly and again i am stealing from my colleague dean faulk who's the real anatomist in this and she poured over this brain but in any event that is not standard issue that frontal lobe okay so one more makes a big difference okay got it yeah i mean that's the you know if i say anything more than that you're going to say well you're a phrenologist and i'm not all i can tell you is the brain is different and the guy was a genius um that's all i can tell you that's not going to get you an a on the final okay no i know i'd love to see okay all right there's your cortical knob the violin part see that looks can you go back one yep ah give me a little more back one okay yeah see that thing cortical knob that's on the right hemisphere so that's presumably what's the knob well well call it an omega sign call it a kink they just the literature calls it a knob you see it's that little i'll show you better but that little u-turn there yeah that's not standard issue and there's stuff we don't even know this is uh this is a diagonal uh sulcus here there's no name i talked to dean faulk emailed her this morning there's no name for that thing it's not described in regular anatomy anatomy textbooks so he's got a lot of variant anatomy next slide okay this is if you cut the brain in half okay all right so that's the frontal lobe that's your occipital lobe that's your corpus callosum that's the fiber pathway that connects up your right hemisphere with your left hemisphere we didn't do it we recovered this photograph these photographs have been lost for half a century we recovered these photographs and now we start to analyze them and dr men weigh men out in east china normal sees the photo goes wow look at that corpus callosum sets up a computer program he's got a larger than normal corpus callosum large not age lot for age-matched guys but for even young people he's got greater internal wiring anatomically with his corpus callosum which opens up a whole other can of worms where you're not really talking about the stuff on your surface on your cortex you're talking about the internal wiring and he obviously this is a sign of greater white matter internal wiring or if you want to use the sexy new terms connectome he has a a different connectome that's the major finding on that so his brain really was different than everybody else's no doubt about it they don't publish this stuff in brain unless you can prove that it's anatomically very different so does but does the brain change over time with use i mean did he have an extraordinary brain and then i mean obviously the brain by itself right the answer is yes it does change but you don't see it like this you don't i mean so this wasn't just because he worked really really hard i mean we don't know first place i got no cohort of genius brains we're never going to get newton we're never going to get galileo we're not going to get touring so we don't have comparisons we have some smart people but we don't have einstein quality brains to compare to that's a problem with this but if your question is does your brain change with experience yeah that's how eric kandel got his nobel prize only he wasn't working with human brains he was working with sea slugs and he showed that every time you shocked these things that they would rewire their nervous system now the question is if you multiply that by 85 billion neurons which you and i all have could you actually change the surface of the brain i doubt it but i don't know you know you'd have to have you know serial neural imaging looking at cortical anatomy and you know dean and i we basically this is unfundable stuff it's really cool but i don't know if there's someone out there who could actually trace neuroimaging to show you the core you know development of your of your gyri and sulci your cortical anatomy it's not out there yet if someone's doing it jb asked about the number of convolutions i don't even know what that is but thank you jb in the context of what are the physical manifestations of intelligence in the human brain the size he asked about and the number what the number of convolutions is that the squiggly thing yeah right exactly we call them gyrai and sulci but you know it's it's not so much that it's a quantitative thing that you know i can show you that he's got different variant arrangement of these guys yeah okay this is his left hemisphere and again um different stuff this is uh this is your motor motor strip that's your sensory strip that's where that would represent your face we know that because from cortical stimulation things uh experiments penfield since the 50s that uh that is a very large elaborate motor and somatosensory cortex around the face and mouth but you can't translate that into special relativity or quantum theory um he's got this is close this is broca's area speech area remember it's your left hemisphere very very additional you can't really measure that with a number but he's got very involved cortical development there you don't normally see that so that's a variant here one of the things we got into in looking at the old literature was the reason we were able to come out with this i mean people have had these photographs but no one had dozens of these photographs and the thing with the brain is you got to have it from different angles or you're going to miss a lot of nuances of the anatomy and to show you what i mean they the the original articles in the 90s about they said that this was a continuous groove sulcus and it's not that is actually an interruption that's an anatomical difference that's a hidden gyrus now if you take that photograph from another angle which other investigators they only had five photographs to work with you don't see it it's like a slot canyon if you're off on the side you can't see what's the bottom of that canyon until you get over it and when you get that right shot you see where did that come from that's a whole different gyrus hidden in that sulcus no one knew about it because those photographs had been stashed in in thomas harvey's cellar for a half century so there's a lot of little things like that that tells you the brain is different i just can't point to you and say well this is why he was a good violent well maybe a violin player maybe i could tell you that but i can't tell you why he could do guntonica experiments i can't tell you why he could learn tensor calculus to figure out the theory of general relativity right why he becomes why this brain leads to him becoming the physicist of the ages i mean you can't just we don't know i mean if you put that brain in front of me uh you couldn't or brains like that you couldn't tell that the guy was you'd say well that's an interesting brain part of the thing is this is kind of a lost art you know cortical anatomy is this is a this study was a very interesting dirt detour off the main road of neuroscience but it really is a detour thomas harvey the guy who did the original study and chopped the brain into 240 sections and you'll see pictures of that he didn't bet on this he took the photograph because he was an obsessive good pathologist but this is where he thought the money was in terms of making a finding you you basically cut the brain at 240 uh sections and then you make slides from that and you look at the microscopic anatomy that's what harvey thought if i can look at the microscopic anatomy i can figure out what makes albert einstein and tick 30 years went by before the first paper came out in 1985 marion diamond and she said well maybe there's a few more glial cells and neurons and they're still brooding that about but 30 years and he sent this brain around to the great neuroscientist pathologist such as they were in america no one could find anything positive diamond does it in 85 10 years later there's one more paper on histology so everyone harvey included was focusing it's got to be microscopic and we just happened to get these photographs and said well let's just for the hell of it look at the surface of the brain and in point of fact it was dramatically different big surprise well i learned something i don't know about the rest wow okay so it's not size we got that yeah but the physical structure is very different than a regular brain absolutely okay thank you okay that but i mean that's fascinating and chopping it up really wasn't the key to it it was looking at this the whole surface of it not the keynote i mean if you're saying if you say well lapor come on well you know where do we go next can we look at the wiring can we look at the connect dome and now you're going to have to resection those cubes they're embedded in plastic look at them under the microscope and measure the myelin length and the of the neuronal fibers maybe maybe you're going to get something out of it i mean the cortical anatomy i think we've run the table on that i just you know it's a very interesting idea though that the brain itself doesn't make the genius maybe it's a necessary and sufficient condition but then he has to do something i mean right right i mean yeah i mean it could be a necessary condition but not no not sufficient yeah i mean right all the other things that were going on in his life i mean the things that made him look at the establishment and be willing to challenge it i mean the traditional graduate student goes up the ranks and wants to please their advisor wants to please other faculty because they know they're going to give the recommendations for the next stage of their career and einstein just didn't care about that and i'm sure you can trace that psychological mindset to earlier place in his life people have done that but i think that experience and that frame of mind was as potentially important as the extra thingamabob that when found inside of his brain that's what i call it too yeah i just want to bear down on this point a little bit though i mean there's the father of quantum mechanics who find who turns his back on it right um to those who have said the last 30 years of his life not as product not that they were unproductive but not as productive i mean where where do you come out in this this conversation how great was his contribution in your opinion after his arrival in princeton uh i guess the answer is similar to tom's that in in the grand scheme of things it just doesn't matter what he did by 1915 was so extraordinary that you you there's nothing that could possibly tarnish his standing in the in the in the scientific world now it is the case that he had a singular goal and a singular focus and in fact he thought repeatedly that he had found the unified he published many papers on the unified theory paper after paper after paper ultimately he'd say ah that's not quite right but i have the new idea and he'd publish that one and this cycle went on for for decades and it ultimately was not influential but he said in other words when we do our work today day to day there's almost nothing that we do that doesn't come to us from einstein every calculation that we do relies upon ideas in relativity either the specialty or the general theory and every calculation that we do in quantum mechanics ultimately goes back to the very ideas that were in the photoelectric effect so there's there's there's his influence is so spectacular and deep so tom was he happy with himself did he feel he'd done a good job how did he feel was he frustrated or did you know i asked him i'll streep once if she if she when she was having a bad day if she thought well i am the greatest actress of my generation she said do i look crazy to you so how did how did einstein feel about his accomplishment was he i don't think i mean i i don't think most of us most days take stock of our lives and say okay i've i'm i am you know i'm i'm my life is a success my life is has value or not um einstein you know einstein did calculations on the last day of his life right he kept working and i think that's you know he he he did say once that he knew that most of his colleagues thought he'd gone crazy there was something he put it slightly differently slightly less less harshly but he said but it's okay i've you know i've earned the right to be as you know stubborn and as focused on what i'm interested in and so to that extent yeah he knew he he was albert einstein he had done his he'd done good stuff and if he thought something was important it was okay to pursue it but you know going to the gym did you see it as a failure not being able to find a unifying theory of everything yeah i mean yes he he yes and no he in the 50s a few times said you know it's getting clear that i am not going to solve this problem but he also said i'm not going to stop working on it this is the problem i'm interested in you know to the general question of you know what can we say from a singular you know one data point einstein about the nature of genius one thing is there is you know people are not geniuses out of context einstein for decades had a series of problems for which his experience his approach his aesthetics just his you know what seemed to him beautiful matched the problems that were in front of them and when you had the quantum mechanical revolution um two things happened one is that was no longer the cases didn't meet his his aesthetic interest and also to a certain extent his approach you know leave aside his taste his approach was no longer really suited for that you know the ways he thought of it and this is you know i want to sort of toss to brian but you know his gedonkan experiments his ability to construct very simple visual pictures that would allow him to absorb abstract down to the the critical problem all that that's from what i understand from talking to people like brian is really difficult as in impossible to do in the counter-intuitive world of quantum mechanics so the genius that einstein was was a great genius for that transitional period in the early 20th century and not so much after do you know that's true i mean and i think that if you trace the roots of that you can find it starting to occur in the last couple months as he's trying to get the general theory of relativity so he had this uncanny ability from sort of 1905 up to call it you know 1912 1913 where he would come up with these thought experiments and think them through and have these visualizations but that in 1912 13 leads him down the wrong trajectory so he spends two years roughly 1912 to 1914 on an approach to the general theory that ultimately fails and at that point he takes a step back and says let me just let the math take me to the promised land let me just use romanian geometry tensor calculus and i'm going to follow it where it takes me and it leads him to the answer and i think from that he kind of changed his approach where now mathematics was going to be what would lead him forward and a very particular kind of mathematics a mathematics that's much better suited to the classical world that's not suited to the quantum world and i think that is why he goes like this after sort of 1915 1919 following that same kind of mathematical trajectory that had been so effective but it no longer was the right approach so even regardless of the fold inside his brain he had a style he had a belief in the way forward but it turned out not to be the right one or not yet who knows we don't have the answers yet maybe a generation or two for now we'll look back at einstein say he was actually following the right trajectory but he just didn't get there that could still happen so we have some great questions from the audience so let's try to get through a few of these in our remaining moments um why do you think einstein never came across string theory during his quest for a theory of everything i just wasn't smart enough you know next which is missing a few folds they believe right which um which of his discoveries did einstein like or enjoy the most great question what was this which of his his discoveries his theories did he personally enjoy or celebrate himself the most right after november 1915 he wrote a letter to um i think was arthur arnold summerfeld great physicist said study these equations well they are the greatest accomplishment of my life as against that he also said i've spent much much more time through my uh through my life thinking about the problem of the quantum than anything else yes so you know maybe he's like a parent all his children are beautiful all right this is another great question do you believe that going through and learning to overcome adversity is key to accomplishing the feats that einstein and other geniuses did and in in his life their lives is there a neuroscience to support this well it's hard to reduce it to the neuroscience but you know when you get back to general relativity you know i think i think einstein was a great intuitive physicist i mean you know with the gentile godokan experiments you know i'm in a box and it's accelerating and is that gravity or is that acceleration but it's at some point he would take the bit between his teeth and say i gotta i gotta learn the math and he didn't like math he he he felt to purely um concentrate on math would take him places he didn't want to go but in order to justify those physical intuitions godokan experiments then he would learn rhymanian then he would learn tensor calculus um so that that that's kind of like if you're a research guy you you got to get a whole new set of skills you got to build up your expert knowledge system and you basically leave one thing and you have a whole new skill that you have to adopt and that gets harder i know it gets harder for me when you get older to learn a new skill set but he could do it he could do it at a certain point maybe he couldn't do it but he had a great run what do you compare him to isaac newton you know after newton you know when he left cambridge when the plague was coming through and he goes off in the countryside and does uh calculus or principia what did he do afterwards he ran a mint he wrote things about alchemy he had theological interests but you know it's just hard to to to have peak performance for every clicking off those decades so no shame in that and the hair um the hair this is a little off great hair too by the way maybe maybe we're finding a theory of everything okay um this is a little off topic but i think brian this is a question you might well enjoy uh what will be the next significant breakthrough in physics well i think the big breakthrough is still finding einstein's dream of this unified theory but a little bit more specifically einstein gave us a new picture of space and time special relativity we learned that they can sort of meld together that motion through space affects the passage of time in general relatively we learn that matter warps and curves space and time in the surface of gravity but there hasn't really been the next step in that progression which is to address the question what actually are space and time are they fundamental constructs or could it be the case that space and time are themselves made of something finer right i mean you look at any piece of matter it's made of ingredients molecules atoms sub-atomic particles could it be the case that space and time also are subject to that kind of structure that there are atoms of space atoms of time what would those be what would describe them how do we describe a realm in which familiar time has not yet emerged because those constituents haven't arranged themselves in a manner that yields space and time as we experience it so i think really getting to the bottom of what space and time are is the next big step i think that's pretty good i was going to say that so i do think um listening to you listening to all three of you i mean in a way there's also there's a there's a sort of science a purity of science but there's also a philosophy that goes along with some of this einstein referenced god a good deal let's talk for a moment before we conclude about einstein's vision of of religion and the greater and the in the greater whole and how and how his ideas connected to that okay um einstein was an extremely clever man as well as being a deeply smart man and he used god talk in a variety of metaphoric ways he himself said that his god was spinoza's god the abstract ordering of the universe he was not a person of traditional faith uh you know you know in one of the in any of the revealed religions judaism as his tradition uh he didn't you know the the the um the traditional view of god as some supernatural being acting in sp acting in time that was nonsense to him and he could be very harsh in private describing this nonsense um you know he went to to palestine in as as then in the early 20s saw traditional orthodox jews praying at the the wailing wall and was contemptuous of them i mean his private writing about it is just you know it's it's really these people are are crazy they're lost in time this kind of thing um at the same time he really did feel a very strong sense that the fact that the universe was ordered and it that order was accessible to human reason was a deeply beautiful deeply mysterious fact of life right and he was perfectly willing to talk about that in terms that were congenial uh to broader discussions about religion uh so he used god in lots of different settings he's the word god in the concept of some super ordering power uh in all kinds of ways he could again be satirical he didn't believe in a design no he did not believe in the god of abraham isaac and jacob or of jesus or any you know he that god was not part of einstein's lexicon except to declare that it didn't exist when a friend of his seriously no friend and to you i mean listen let's be honest a lot of the a lot of his best-known quotes have to do though with you know god well yeah but god in that metaphoric sense or god in that sense to make his philosophical ideas i think palatable to wide audiences he was a spiritual person he believed in things that were larger than himself but the thing that he believed in that was larger than himself was nature and the accessibility of nature's organization to human uh intellect and and you know that was extremely powerful for him it moved him he saw himself as as you know seeking to be at one with nature and occasionally having these spiritual or transcended experiences when he felt that he wrote that in one of his travel diaries contemplating the ocean this kind of thing but you know attempting to shoehorn him into some picture of the scientist who really secretly believes in a traditional sense no that's not einstein so let's conclude by asking the question we're going to do a little moment at the end about the 100th anniversary of general relativity but before we conclude genius was he i guess we can all agree about that yes but why why do you feel brian let's start with you well i think the obvious answer that we would all give but maybe i'll be proven wrong in 30 seconds is that it was this remarkable union of all the things that we're talking about right so clearly there's something different about his brain presumably that had some role because the brain is where presumably all this stuff happened but it was this wonderful confluence of his own personal history of the kinds of open problems that were available for progress at that time right so it was the right moment for thinking about space and time and light maxwell had given us the equations of electricity and magnetism in the 1880s right so this is when einstein is born and starting to think about things so he's there at the right moment he's got the right physical structure and he's got the right attitude he's got this perspective that i don't care what anybody thinks i'm just gonna go forward and understand the world so you put all those three together and at least for part of the time you see what emerges right well he certainly was an incredibly hard worker he had the infinite capacity to take pains i agree though that um he was a little bit of a lone wolf and that may have helped him in the sense that when you're in that patent office making your living looking at at inventions you can't get to the university library because the hours were such that he basically was a lot of his thinking was his own thinking and he was not in at that point in the academic establishment and if you look at those original manuscripts in 1905 they're all handwritten out and there's not a lot of references think of an academic submitting any kind of paper with no references or few references just doesn't happen that you the referees would eat you alive but einstein just the strength of his ideas and his independent thinking untrembled upon by external influences you know maybe that did give him the focus to to come up with these that anis mirabilis in in 1905. but one thing i would say genius it's not you know everyone it's not homogeneous i mean there are all sorts of geniuses i mean you know there's a guy on the basketball court has got ball smarts you got social geniuses we call them politicians you know okay so i mean he was you know a physical genius he was in physics a physics genius i'm not going to tell you what i see on those photographs really explains that um he wasn't a great mathematician but he learned enough math to do to take his strong suit which is physics and and couch it in in mathematical terms and make it demonstrable to the public to the scientific public tom wind it up for us well i think i mean i agree with what's been said uh by both brian and fred um if the word genius has any meaning at all einstein has to be on that list um he was a genius uh in his you know the measure of it is his accomplishments but i guess from where i said the point i keep coming back to is that the particulars of history matter you know if einstein had been born in germany before 1900 before 1800 he would have been before the napoleonic you know emancipation he would as a you know a jewish kid raised by a jewish family from the villages of you know south germany would never have come close to the education he needed to make the first step in any scientific career so you know i missed by 100 years if einstein had been born 30 years later he would have been a very bright good scientist but he would have missed some of the window of opportunity that he he you know went through so so eagerly um and he might have gotten caught up you know the particulars of history uh matter enormously to the ability of people with the capacity for genius to actually exercise it you know genius is not an in is not simply an internal characteristic of brain and smarts and talent and all that it's those combined with circumstance and the circumstances are social we have geniuses because we have societies that are congenial to them at that time fascinating well all of you i've learned so much and thank you all really so much i want to thank all of you for being such a great audience and it is the 100th anniversary of relativity so what's the science world science the science festival will have that as a theme this year so if you enjoy this conversation look for a variety of programs that will explore general relativity this may so keep your eye out for thanks thanks very was much

Channel: World Science Festival

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Keywords: Albert Einstein, The Genius of Einstein, The Science His Brain the Man, Brian Greene, Thomas Levenson, Fredrick Lepore, Cynthia McFadden, greatest scientific geniuses, 92Y, history of Einstein, bending light, annus mirabilis, Einsteins brain, General relativity, Genius of Einstein, New York City, NYC, world science festival, full program, World, Science, Festival, 2015

Id: DPPnrDdNoUU

Length: 82min 42sec (4962 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 12 2015