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General Relativity And The 'Lone Genius' Model Of Science

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One hundred years ago this Wednesday, Albert Einstein gave the last of a series of presentations to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, which marks the official completion of his General Theory of Relativity. This anniversary is generating a good deal of press and various celebratory events, such as the premiere of a new documentary special. If you prefer your physics explanations in the plainest language possible, there's even an "Up Goer Five" version (personally, I don't find these all that illuminating, but lots of people seem to love it).

Einstein is, of course, the most iconic scientist in history, and much of the attention to this week's centennial will center on the idea of his singular genius. Honestly, general relativity is esoteric enough that were it not for Einstein's personal fame, there probably wouldn't be all that much attention paid to this outside of the specialist science audience.

But, of course, while the notion of Einstein as a lone, unrecognized genius is a big part of his myth, he didn't create relativity entirely on his own, as this article in Nature News makes clear. The genesis of relativity is a single simple idea, but even in the early stages, when he developed Special Relativity while working as a patent clerk, he honed his ideas through frequent discussions with friends and colleagues. Most notable among these was probably Michele Besso, who Einstein later referred to as "the best sounding board in Europe."

And most of the work on General Relativity came not when Einstein was toiling in obscurity, but after he had begun to climb the academic ladder in Europe. In the ten years between the Special and General theories, he went through a series of faculty jobs of increasing prestige. He also laboriously learned a great deal of mathematics in order to reach the final form of the theory, largely with the assistance of his friend Marcel Grossmann. The path to General Relativity was neither simple nor solitary, and the Nature piece documents both the mis-steps along the way and the various people who helped out.

While Einstein wasn't working alone, though, the Nature piece also makes an indirect case for his status as a genius worth celebrating. Not because of the way he solved the problem, but through the choice of problem to solve. Einstein pursued a theory that would incorporate gravitation into relativity with dogged determination through those years, but he was one of a very few people working on it. There were a couple of other theories kicking around, particularly Gunnar Nordström's, but these didn't generate all that much attention. The mathematician David Hilbert nearly scooped Einstein with the final form of the field equations in November of 1915 (some say he did get there first), but Hilbert was a latecomer who only got interested in the problem of gravitation after hearing about it from Einstein, and his success was a matter of greater familiarity with the necessary math. One of the books I used when I taught a relativity class last year quoted Hilbert as saying that "every child in the streets of Göttingen knows more about four-dimensional geometry than Einstein," but that Einstein's physical insight got him to the theory before superior mathematicians.

So, was Einstein a lone genius in the manner of pop-culture myth? Yes and no. No, because he clearly didn't do his work alone, and probably wasn't capable of developing General Relativity on his own. At the same time, though, there's a decent argument to be made that had Einstein not had his particular flash of insight regarding the Equivalence Principle, and doggedly pursued the theory through the thickets of Riemannian geometry, we wouldn't be observing the centennial of General Relativity this week.

Which means that the "lone genius" model of science is pretty much in the same place as any other "great man of history" picture. His achievement is not really as singular as myth would have it, but at the same time, his personal qualities undoubtedly had an enormous effect on the eventual outcome.

The General Theory of Relativity is much bigger than Einstein, and it's good to celebrate all of its various successes. But it's also right and proper to honor Einstein himself, because without his insight and determination, it wouldn't be the theory that it is, and almost certainly wouldn't have been developed when it was.

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