I think the following article ought to be read by everyone. Twice. The nature of genius is very metaphysical and inscrutable. This article illustrates the genius in all of us. All of us are in the right place at the right time. Its all relative.
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Musings show Einstein's genius at work

By Gary Stix

Gary Stix

is an editor at Scientific American

A century ago almost to the day, a 26-year-old Swiss government functionary wrote to tell a friend about some "inconsequential babble," a series of science papers he had just finished writing. The patent clerk, a German Jewish expatriate who worked on physics problems in his spare time and at the office while others weren't looking, had accomplished little more in his aspiring physics career than having a doctoral thesis turned down.

The papers Albert Einstein cranked out during the course of 1905 would show a proof that atoms really exist; that light is both particle and wave; that time and space are not absolutes and that mass and energy are equivalent. (Remember the most famous equation of all time: E = mc2?) Einstein's musings would provoke the most radical upheaval in physics since Isaac Newton's annus mirabilis in the mid-1600s, which laid the groundwork for the law of gravitation, the calculus and the theory of colors.

The secrets of Einstein's gifts consisted of a near-religious zeal to uncover immutable laws of nature; an incurable rebellious streak; an education steeped in the works of 19th-century philosophers; perhaps a few funny anomalies in brain structure; and, not least, historical circumstance - in other words, pure luck.

The United Nations has declared 2005 the International Year of Physics, serving also as a commemoration of Einstein's miraculous year. The centennial is more than just a toast to the man with bad hair. It serves also as an occasion to contemplate the very nature of genius.

Today, any physicist is but a click removed from more data than an Einstein could have ever imagined, or desired. ("Where is the knowledge we have lost in information," T.S. Eliot once lamented.) In the ensuing century, no achievement in the physical sciences can compare to what Einstein produced either in 1905 or during the following decade or so of his life.

How could one individual achieve such seemingly superhuman feats? As one NASA scientist put it: "Was Einstein a space alien?" The question of whether Einstein was a mutant of sorts has fascinated neuroscientists for decades. The Princeton professor donated his brain to science (even posthumously). One area of the organ involved with visual and spatial cognition and mathematical reasoning was wider than normal - another had more densely packed brain cells. Perhaps this accounted for Einstein's vivid imaginings, running along beside a light beam, and other thought experiments that helped him formulate his theories.

With those inferior parietal lobes and that Sylvian fissure, why didn't Einstein end up as a pre-Bauhaus modernist architect rather than the person who radically changed our view of the physical world, besting Roosevelt, Gandhi and Hitler to become Man of the Century in the estimation of Time magazine?

Historians and psychologists have devoted reams to answering the question of what endowed Einstein with his particular gift. Recent additions to the paper mountain of Einstein scholarship have even turned up a few new ideas. One relatively recent work suggests that the Technical Expert, Third Class, at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern, Switzerland, was literally in the right time and space - that is, at his desk at the patent office, the top desk drawer of which Einstein called his department of theoretical physics.

Harvard science historian and MacArthur fellow Peter Galison suggested in his 2003 book Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps that Einstein never fit the depiction of the detached philosopher-scientist lost in theoretical ruminations. Rather, he had an intimate acquaintance with the practical problems of the world he inhabited. Patent applications that involved clocks and methods of sending electrical signals to synchronize clocks - an obsession for both railroads and the military at the fin de siècle - were likely, not only to have crossed Einstein's desk, but to have influenced the way he thought about physics.

In 1880, the clock tower in Geneva had three faces, one for middle Geneva time (say, 10:13) another for Paris time (9:5 and another for Bern time (10:1.

Countless ideas circulated for clock synchronization schemes. While milling through patent applications, it was Einstein's realization - a key tenet of the special theory of relativity - that time was not regulated by some über-clock that prevails anywhere from Allentown to Alpha Centauri. Neither time nor space are absolute. Clocks on a speeding train beat infinitesimally more slowly than clocks at the station.

Einstein was not the only one thinking along these lines. The great French mathematician Jules Henri Poincaré delivered a lecture in 1904 in which he even used the word relativity, a year before Einstein, while discussing how time depends on the frame of reference of the observer. But Poincaré, a member of the scientific elite, refused to go all the way. Making trains run in a common time frame required coordination of two clocks by sending a signal between them and correcting for the time of travel. "Clocks synchronized in that manner do not therefore show the true time, but what one might call 'local time,' so that one of them is slow with regard to another," Poincaré said. To Einstein, the consummate outsider, discarding the master clock that keeps true time was the logical next step.

Even if Einstein were not on the scene, relativity was in the air, and it would have only been a few years before one of his physicist contemporaries would have derived a full exposition of the theory. Special relativity brought together time and space, energy and mass, the electric and magnetic forces. But Einstein wasn't finished - his compulsion toward unification, a trait common to all genius, continued to surge ahead. ("I am driven by my need to generalize," he wrote in a 1916 letter to a fellow physicist.)

His 1905 theory applies only to bodies in uniform motion traveling in straight lines. The general theory of relativity, published in 1916, took into account that moving things change speed and direction - in other words, it encompassed the effects of acceleration, and that most universal of accelerations called gravity. Einstein created a geometrical description of gravity that depicted massive bodies such as stars curving space and time around them. Unlike his special theory, general relativity arrived unannounced from the deepest reaches of the master's mind, a work of unadulterated genius whose insights might not have been achieved for decades without Einstein's presence.

As always, Einstein was best at reducing things to their essentials: "I have no special talents; I am only passionately curious." If he suddenly came back, courtesy of a nearby time warp, he would be taken aback by the commodification of his name and image and the burgeoning make-your-kid-an-Einstein industry. Amazon.com sells the Baby Einstein Caterpillar Discover & Play Activity Center for $79.99. Super Saver Shipping is not available for this item.
Gary Stix (gstix@sciam.com) is an editor at Scientific American.
More sources:

A summary of Einstein's papers is available at the American Institute of Physics Web site. www.aip.org/history/einstein

Albert Einstein: Image and Impact.
http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/

Galison, Peter. Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps. W.W. Norton & Company, 2003

Think Like Einstein. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/time/think.html

Next genius:

Alexander Hamilton.