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• Einstein’s genius traits included curiosity, having broad areas of interest (i.e. being a polymath), and a refusal to bow to convention.

• Einstein is known today as one of the 20th century’s most influential scientific thinkers, and was considered by many to be a genius in both mathematics and physics. He won the Nobel Prize for his work on the photoelectric effect, but he is best known today for his groundbreaking theory on relativity and his famous E=mc2 equation.

• Einstein coined his own term for the kind of playful, freeform connections he’d make between different topics and ideas: combinatorial play. By putting two unrelated ideas together to create something new, Einstein often solved problems, came up with creative new ideas or opened new avenues of thoughts to pursue.

• The game of “what if?” is another way to flex the curiosity muscle and bring freshness and novelty to conventional thinking. By running hypothetical situations and thought experiments in his mind, Einstein satisfied his thirst for learning and understanding, and accessed new insights that were beyond conventions at the time.

• Einstein was a polymath and had a broad range of interests, rather than one narrow focus. He played violin and piano, and had some of his best new ideas during play. This kind of broadmindedness and diversity of interest promotes intellectual agility and wide-ranging, flexible perspectives.

• Einstein was also non-conventional and worked independently, regardless of the established rules that surrounded him in early life. This allowed him to engage in truly independent ideas and contribute something entirely different to the field.

• We can see in Einstein’s case that non-linearity of thought, insatiable curiosity and a wide range of interests were not just helpful to his success, but essential. We can follow suit by freely engaging in interdisciplinary play and “what if?” games in the areas that grab our intense interest.

• Though conventions may occasionally be useful, the best territory to explore is that which is uncharted!

• To be more like Einstein, we can think of ways to break down artificial limits and categories in our own thinking, and blend concepts and ideas together freely—can you think of a way to combine two of your interests to produce a third, completely new idea?

#Bewusstseins #Einstein #Gedankenexperiments #Genius #Hadamard #Medici #NobelPrize #Pangaea #EinsteinAndCombinatorialPlay #RussellNewton #NewtonMG #PeterHollins #TheScienceofSelf #ThinkLikeaGenius

hello listeners buckle up for a new  episode of the science of self where

you learn to improve your life from  the inside out today is January 26 2023

today's episode comes from Peter  Holland's book think like a genius

and today we'll look at how Einstein used  non-linear thinking insatiable curiosity

and a wide range of interests  to further his thought processes

Albert Einstein is the world-renowned  German physicist and mathematician who

won the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his  work on the photoelectric effect.

Now considered one of the most  influential scientific theorists

in history, Einstein was known for being  a deeply inquisitive and curious person.

Reportedly Einstein didn’t  enjoy school as a child,

but early tutoring experiences sparked  his interest in the topic of light.

When Einstein excused himself from military  service as a young man and dropped out of

school (he preferred independent study),  his parents were worried about his future.

Nevertheless, he was admitted to  a prestigious Zurich university

because of his excellent performance on  the maths and physics entrance exams.

After graduating he worked as a patent clerk,  where he privately pursued some of his own ideas.

In 1905 he published four breakthrough  papers on the photoelectric effect,

Brownian motion and relativity.

Einstein married and had children,  but his marriage was not a happy one,

and he divorced and remarried in 1919.

At the time, Einstein was less known for  his theory of relativity than he is today,

and perhaps could not have predicted the  full direction his discoveries would take

physics in the future (for example, his work  foreshadowing the development of the atomic bomb).

not a one-trick pony

Surprisingly (or perhaps not), the  most notable scientist of the 20th

century was also known for taking time  out of his research to play the violin.

In so doing, Einstein was engaging in a  combination of the “hard” and the “soft” or,

more accurately, he was exercising skills  that required very different mindsets.

Reportedly, he was even very good at the  instrument, as he was with the piano.

But while sawing away on the  violin during his breaks,

Einstein actually arrived at some breakthroughs  in his research and philosophical questionings.

Allegedly one of these musical sessions was  the spark for his most famous equation: E=mc2.

Knowing what we do about how true genius  sees the world, this shouldn’t surprise us.

Einstein came up with the term combinatory  play to describe the intangible process in

which his favorite pastime led to ideas that  revolutionized the whole of scientific thought.

He explained his reasoning as best he

could in 1945 in a letter to French  mathematician Jacques S. Hadamard:

“My Dear Colleague:

In the following, I am trying to answer in  brief your questions as well as I am able.

I am not satisfied myself with those answers and I

am willing to answer more questions  if you believe this could be of any

advantage for the very interesting and  difficult work you have undertaken.

(A) The words or the language,  as they are written or spoken,

do not seem to play any role  in my mechanism of thought.

The psychical entities which seem to serve  as elements in thought are certain signs and

more or less clear images which can be  “voluntarily” reproduced and combined.

There is, of course, a certain connection between  those elements and relevant logical concepts.

It is also clear that the desire to arrive  finally at logically connected concepts is

the emotional basis of this rather vague  play with the above-mentioned elements.

But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this  combinatory play seems to be the essential

feature in productive thought—before  there is any connection with logical

construction in words or other kinds of  signs which can be communicated to others.

(B) The above-mentioned elements are, in my  case, of visual and some of muscular type.

Conventional words or other signs have  to be sought for laboriously only in a

secondary stage, when the mentioned associative

play is sufficiently established  and can be reproduced at will.

(C) According to what has been said, the  play with the mentioned elements is aimed

to be analogous to certain logical  connections one is searching for.

(D) Visual and motor.

In a stage when words intervene  at all, they are, in my case,

purely auditive, but they interfere only  in a secondary stage, as already mentioned.

(E) It seems to me that what you  call full consciousness is a limit

case which can never be fully accomplished.

This seems to be connected with  the fact called the narrowness

of consciousness (Enge des Bewusstseins).”

Notice, firstly, that Einstein has  no problem engaging in metacognition,

or thinking about his own thinking and asking  questions about his own question-asking.

Einstein seemed to believe that indulging in his

creative tendencies was helpful for  his logical and rational pursuits.

That might have been the case, and it also might  have been the case that to engage in a distraction

was helpful for taking on different perspectives  and viewing problems from different angles.

Perhaps it’s related to the  so-called Medici effect,

in which the melding of different disciplines  will inevitably lead to new discoveries,

and the whole always seems to be  greater than the sum of the parts.

Indeed, combinatory play is not simply the notion

that play takes your mind to  a different world to regroup.

It recognizes, as Einstein did, that  taking pieces of knowledge and insight

from different disciplines and combining them in  new contexts is how most creativity truly happens.

So as mentioned, somehow Einstein saw something in

playing the violin that helped him think  about physics in an entirely new way.

The lesson here is to engage in your own  pursuits and not feel constrained by having

to stay in similar or adjacent disciplines,  thinking that only they will aid you.

There are always parallels between  different disciplines, so find them.

More of the same probably will not help;  a dash of something different just might.

The power of the possible

Einstein became well-known for  another thinking technique,

and it is one that we use  most days in everyday life.

“What if humans were capable of flying?"

“What if the world’s landmasses never  broke up into separate continents and

instead remained as Pangaea to this day?”

These are hypothetical “what if”  questions that tickle your mind

into thinking from other perspectives and  challenge you to question your premises.

Imagining hypotheticals goes beyond simple  thinking skills that require only memorization,

description of an observable event or situation,  or even analysis of facts and concrete events.

Because hypotheticals pose questions  about what isn’t, what hasn’t happened,

or what isn’t likely to ever happen, they  stretch the imagination in new ways and

sharpen creative thinking  and practical intelligence.

They allow a person to try on different  perspectives as though they were lenses,

and suddenly see what was  invisible to them before.

For instance, you’ve likely never considered  the implications of human flight because

it’s impossible, so there is a world of  thoughts that have remained unexplored.

How would traffic lights work, what kind  of licensing process would be required,

would we still have cars and  airplanes, and how would safety work?

Now, how would those rules and laws apply to  normal traffic situations in the present day?

Think through the realities of how everything  would fit together—it’s no small feat!

Einstein in particular was known to explore  hypothetical situations taken to the extreme.

He called them Gedankenexperiments, which  is German for “thought experiments."

A thought experiment, in a more general context,

is essentially playing out a  “what if” scenario to its end.

It’s acting as if a theory  or hypothesis were true,

diving deep into the ramifications and seeing what  happens to your “what if” under intense scrutiny.

A thought experiment allows you  to analyze interesting premises

you could never manifest in reality and  make new leaps of logic and discovery

because you can consider conditions that  current knowledge doesn’t yet reach.

Suppose the problem situation  is needing to exit a room.

The conventional ways to do so are to  walk out the door or jump out the window.

But what if the door is blocked by a raging

fire and the room is on the  tenth floor of the building?

These conditions have now rendered  your conventional solutions fatal.

You can only get out of the  room either by finding a way

to kill that fire or by surviving  a fall of several hundred feet.

Something in this scenario needs  to drastically change its usage

or definition, or it will break entirely.

This is the essence of the thought experiment.

Suppose this happens.

What happens next?

And then?

And then?

Thought experiments were one  of Einstein’s superpowers.

He could imagine a scenario, play it out  mentally with shocking accuracy and detail,

and then extract the subtle  conclusions that lay within.

One of Einstein’s most famous Gedankenexperiments  begins with a simple premise: what would happen

if you chased and then eventually caught up  to and rode a beam of light through space?

In theory, once you caught  up to the beam of light,

it would appear to be frozen next to you  because you are moving at the same speed.

Just like if you are walking at the same pace as a  car driving next to you, there is no acceleration

(the relative velocities are the same), so  the car would seem to be stuck to your side.

The only problem was that this was an impossible  proposition at the turn of the century.

If you catch up to the light and the  light appears to be frozen beside you,

then it is inherently impossible that it is  light, because of the difference in speeds.

It ceases to be light at that moment.

This means one of the rules of physics was  broken or disproved with this elementary thought.

Therefore, one of the assumptions that  underlay physics at the time had to change,

and Einstein realized that the belief  in time as a constant had to shift.

This discovery directly laid the  path for the theory of relativity.

The closer you get to the speed of light,

the more time becomes different for  you—relative to an outside observer.

This thought experiment allowed  Einstein to challenge what were

thought to be set-in-stone rules set forth by  Isaac Newton’s three laws of energy and matter.

This thought experiment was instrumental  in realizing that people should question

old models and fundamental “rules” instead  of trying to conform their theories to them.

The strength of non-conventionality

Let’s return now to the genius traits  we mentioned in the previous chapter,

and see how Einstein measures against them.

As we saw above, many of Einstein’s great  Eureka moments came from his being a polymath,

or “cross-pollinating” ideas from one area  to another (in this case music and physics).

It’s probably quite obvious that another of  Einstein’s strengths was intellectual curiosity,

lust for learning and insatiable  desire to keep asking questions.

We can see so much of the lighthearted,  uninhibited child aspect of genius in

Einstein, who literally labeled  a technique he used as “play.”

Einstein never set out to win any prizes, or earn  accolades as the best physicist of his generation.

That was never his goal.

Rather, he simply wanted to understand.

His passion for seeing into the  deeper nature of things led him

to areas of knowledge that  were previously uncharted.

We can see how this attitude put him  at odds with his more conventional,

pedagogical early school life, and we can imagine  that the young Einstein would not have been much

inspired by boring lessons about things that  were already well known and established.

We cannot imagine Einstein’s great  achievements happening without his

enormous sense of curiosity spurring him on.

He was not motivated by pride or fame, either,  since he was known to regularly alienate and

offend other scientists and peers and was  reportedly quite difficult to work with.

Einstein was nothing if not a curious soul,

and it’s this attitude of inquiry that  seems to have informed his entire life.

We can see in Einstein’s case that curiosity  so often comes with non-conventionality.

He was a “draft dodger” and concocted a medical  excuse so as not to complete military service,

and was not averse to skipping classes or  generally failing to follow school rules.

He seemed to have little regard  for pre-established hierarchies and

preferred to trust his own estimations  of what was important and worth doing.

And, this trait, too, is at  the center of his success.

Can you imagine any scientist  being credited with completely

paradigm-shifting work in the field  without breaking the rules of the day?

We know and love Einstein  today as a fiercely smart,

independent thinker who greatly  advanced the human scientific endeavor.

But we need to remember that Einstein was just  a man, who at one time saw his own vision only

dimly, and worked on his pursuits with  no guarantee of where they would lead.

The one thing that can motivate  a person through such a path?

Endless curiosity.

We can imagine that Einstein would  have been fulfilled even if he had

never won any awards and died completely unknown.

Takeaways

•Einstein’s genius traits included curiosity,

having broad areas of interest (i.e. being a  polymath), and a refusal to bow to convention.

•Einstein is known today as one of the 20th  century’s most influential scientific thinkers,

and was considered by many to be a  genius in both mathematics and physics.

He won the Nobel Prize for his work on the  photoelectric effect, but he is best known

today for his groundbreaking theory on  relativity and his famous E=mc2 equation.

•Einstein coined his own term for the  kind of playful, freeform connections

he’d make between different topics  and ideas: combinatorial play.

By putting two unrelated ideas together to create  something new, Einstein often solved problems,

came up with creative new ideas or  opened new avenues of thoughts to pursue.

•The game of “what if?” is another way to flex the

curiosity muscle and bring freshness  and novelty to conventional thinking.

By running hypothetical situations  and thought experiments in his mind,

Einstein satisfied his thirst  for learning and understanding,

and accessed new insights that were  beyond conventions at the time.

•Einstein was a polymath and had a broad range  of interests, rather than one narrow focus.

He played violin and piano, and had  some of his best new ideas during play.

This kind of broadmindedness and diversity of

interest promotes intellectual agility  and wide-ranging, flexible perspectives.

•Einstein was also non-conventional  and worked independently,

regardless of the established rules  that surrounded him in early life.

This allowed him to engage in truly independent

ideas and contribute something  entirely different to the field.

•We can see in Einstein’s case that  non-linearity of thought, insatiable

curiosity and a wide range of interests were  not just helpful to his success, but essential.

We can follow suit by freely engaging  in interdisciplinary play and “what

if?” games in the areas that  grab our intense interest.

•Though conventions may occasionally be useful,

the best territory to explore  is that which is uncharted!

•To be more like Einstein, we can think of  ways to break down artificial limits and

categories in our own thinking, and blend  concepts and ideas together freely—can

you think of a way to combine two of your  interests to produce a third, completely new idea?

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podcast it's very much appreciated thank  you have a great weekend see you next week