This is not about Einstein, but rather about the danger of holding an opinion on a topic which you have not researched for decades. People make political choices with incomplete information, then become emotionally invested and unwilling to pay attention to evidence that contradicts a preference. This tendency is easy for demagogues and journalists with an agenda to exploit.
Snark can be true. It’s a comment that applies to all of us, actually. Even me! My fill-in-the-blank theory of mind explains it. Instead of going around with holes in our picture of the world, we color them in. Like the optic nerve does. But it doesn’t explain why so many people with deep expertise in one area assume that they are experts in everything else too.
Hi! I wanted to comment on this piece. I am a physics PhD student, and I fully agree that we need to let this idea of the perfect genius go. I write a lot about it myself. However, I do think some of the physics criticisms in this piece aren't that well-founded and some generalizations aren't accurate and fall for stereotypes of what it means to be a scientist.
First, I think it is important to distinguish between popular fame vs. recognition within academia. Poincare and Minkowski are two names I am very familiar with, and every physicist will be. Physicists will know their contributions and that their work was as important as Einstein's, but most of the world might not know about them, and that's actually okay. The thing about Einstein is that he was able to put together some puzzle pieces in a quite pragmatic and elegant way, and of course, the beauty of "E=mc^2" caused quite a steer for so long with the general public. That being said, within the field, we don't really pay much attention to "fame" and many physicists dread it, because of how it many times popular media misrepresents the work we do and leaves important contributors in the dark. Both Paul Dirac and Richard Feynman considered rejecting the Nobel Prize, and only refused to due to the fact that would have brought them more attention than just receiving it.
To add, making mistakes doesn't make you a 'worse' physicist. The field of physics is full of 'flops'. Paul Dirac's career after the 1930s was considered a bit of a flop, and that's okay. He was a bright man that followed the 'wrong' path, it happens. Furthermore, I think judging Einstein by things such as "giving terrible arguments about the existence of black holes" in 2025, after humanity developed the technology to photograph two black holes, is quite unfair. If you study the math behind black holes, you can understand why they seemed so far fetched to him. In physics, when we run into singularities or infinities, it is pretty much given to assume there is either something wrong or missing in the theory. As physicists, we find ways to work around those infinities/singularities within a given framework or we move on to something new. Black holes are very 'trippy' mathematically to say the least, and even now we don't really have any idea what happens beyond the horizon, let alone at the singularity. Einstein had a point. This is to add to everything Mario mentioned below, like the comments on gravitational waves and the conclusions about a static universe.
Finally, I find the generalization about scientists being fully obsessed with their work and nothing else quite misleading and a mere stereotype. There are some scientists who fit that image, and who don't read or engage with anything that is not the science itself, but that doesn't really apply to many (and I believe most) of us. Robert Oppenheimer was actually an avid reader, poetry writer and believed it was important for scientists to immerse themselves in humanities. Richard Feynman was a painter, drummer and worked in politics of education. Einstein himself was a great violinist. One of my former supervisors, who is a very famous particle physicist, told me he started college as a philosophy major before switching to physics. A lot of my peers have studied physics alongside humanities. A friend did physics and philosophy, another history and math, and I even know a girl who was doing physics and theater! I have a background on political activism, painting, writing and before switching to a double major in physics and mathematics, I was a political science and creative writing major. I studied classics for four years before that, to the point I could translate Latin texts in my head. I read A Hundred Years of Solitude when I was eleven, and I also know so much about physicists because I love reading biographies in my spare time. Most scientists I know are very multifaceted, and there is a lot of depth to them.
Now, we are human, and we make mistakes and have misjudgements. I had my fair share and I am only in my early twenties (and I am still more self-aware than a man in the 20th century). But I think we can both call out the toxic culture around God-like figures and be fair. Einstein was wrong about a lot of things, and his contributions to science were still great! Who is the greatest physicist of all time? I couldn't tell you and it doesn't matter. I still agree with you that we need to stop putting these people in pedestals. They are as capable of being wrong as we are, even if one or twice they were very right.
Edit: I am dyslexic and make a lot of typos! I am just correcting those.
…..Einstein read the New York Times and a couple of fashionable books on politics and history, and decided that such inputs were more than enough for his superior IQ to conclude that Communism was the way of the future…..
In the early 1980s, Emmanuel Todd built an extensive argument that the political-ideological choices of people worldwide are to a great extent a function of people’s experiences in their childhood homes. Fast forward forty years, his argument still holds quite well:
In defense of Einsteins political "errors", I think it's important to remember where he came from. He didn't only read the Times, he also lived through WWII, sort of a catastrophe of nationalism. Before that, he had witnessed first hand the failure of liberal democracy in Weimar Germany to prevent the rise of Nazism.
Given that, I find it natural to push towards other directions of societal organization. And not necessarily that wrong when you consider his perception of the starting position.
I don't want to sound pedantic, so apologies in advance. Here's a list of things I would object to:
- I would not say gravitational waves are the only logical conclusion of GR, not sure what you meant by that but there are lots of other observable predictions of GR on the one hand and on the other hand you can have gravitational waves in theories other than GR
- Minkowski's contribution is crucial to express special relativity in the elegant geometric form we got used to, but it's not true that SR would not hold up without it
- I am not sure which paper you are referring to here "Einstein’s later paper on general relativity only served to seal the prohibition on travelling faster than light", at any rate the c speed limit holds already in SR
- "the speed of light is the universe’s sole constant" not sure what to make of this one, surely G and h are considered universal constants too
- "That’s why Einstein’s stance against gravitational waves makes little sense: the logical conclusion of his own insights is that gravity doesn’t really exist as a force of nature" I don't see how this follows: in fact there was doubt around whether GW were detectable until much later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_bead_argument At any rate electromagnetism treats both the magnetic and electrostatic forces as forces, yet we have EM waves
- "Einstein won his Nobel Prize not because of that central idea of general relativity but largely because of his discovery that a beam of light is not a wave but rather a collection of discrete wave packets. This is a key insight leading to quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle, God’s dice and the notion that electrons are not really orbiting protons in the atomic nucleus" conversely this description of Einstein's work on the photoelectric effect gives him too much credit, as at the very least I would say that the "discovery that a beam of light is not a wave but rather a collection of discrete wave packets" is shared with Plank's much earlier work on blackbody radiation
- "believed in a static universe" arguably everyone did back then, and even today we cannot really claim that we understood the nature of the cosmological constant
"I don't want to sound pedantic, so apologies in advance."
Why apologise? Roman didn't mind being pedantic.
Great job of correcting Roman's diatribe against Einstein's scientific ability. One should take the veracity of Roman's gossip about Einstein's personal life with a grain of salt.
Einstein was by no means perfect; he had faults, but he was a genuine genius. Einstein fully accepted that he built on the discoveries of past geniuses. He was a master of critical thinking and imagination.
This is not about Einstein, but rather about the danger of holding an opinion on a topic which you have not researched for decades. People make political choices with incomplete information, then become emotionally invested and unwilling to pay attention to evidence that contradicts a preference. This tendency is easy for demagogues and journalists with an agenda to exploit.
Even Einstein didn’t know what he didn’t know!
Snarky comment.
Snark can be true. It’s a comment that applies to all of us, actually. Even me! My fill-in-the-blank theory of mind explains it. Instead of going around with holes in our picture of the world, we color them in. Like the optic nerve does. But it doesn’t explain why so many people with deep expertise in one area assume that they are experts in everything else too.
"It’s a comment that applies to all of us, actually."
Your comment appears to me to be for snark, not enlightenment.
" But it doesn’t explain why so many people with deep expertise in one area assume that they are experts in everything else too."
Einstein had opinions; he never claimed he was an expert on anything.
Sigh
Great comeback.
Eh, nothing new. Plato's *Apology of Socrates* probably ought to be mandatory reading in school.
Hi! I wanted to comment on this piece. I am a physics PhD student, and I fully agree that we need to let this idea of the perfect genius go. I write a lot about it myself. However, I do think some of the physics criticisms in this piece aren't that well-founded and some generalizations aren't accurate and fall for stereotypes of what it means to be a scientist.
First, I think it is important to distinguish between popular fame vs. recognition within academia. Poincare and Minkowski are two names I am very familiar with, and every physicist will be. Physicists will know their contributions and that their work was as important as Einstein's, but most of the world might not know about them, and that's actually okay. The thing about Einstein is that he was able to put together some puzzle pieces in a quite pragmatic and elegant way, and of course, the beauty of "E=mc^2" caused quite a steer for so long with the general public. That being said, within the field, we don't really pay much attention to "fame" and many physicists dread it, because of how it many times popular media misrepresents the work we do and leaves important contributors in the dark. Both Paul Dirac and Richard Feynman considered rejecting the Nobel Prize, and only refused to due to the fact that would have brought them more attention than just receiving it.
To add, making mistakes doesn't make you a 'worse' physicist. The field of physics is full of 'flops'. Paul Dirac's career after the 1930s was considered a bit of a flop, and that's okay. He was a bright man that followed the 'wrong' path, it happens. Furthermore, I think judging Einstein by things such as "giving terrible arguments about the existence of black holes" in 2025, after humanity developed the technology to photograph two black holes, is quite unfair. If you study the math behind black holes, you can understand why they seemed so far fetched to him. In physics, when we run into singularities or infinities, it is pretty much given to assume there is either something wrong or missing in the theory. As physicists, we find ways to work around those infinities/singularities within a given framework or we move on to something new. Black holes are very 'trippy' mathematically to say the least, and even now we don't really have any idea what happens beyond the horizon, let alone at the singularity. Einstein had a point. This is to add to everything Mario mentioned below, like the comments on gravitational waves and the conclusions about a static universe.
Finally, I find the generalization about scientists being fully obsessed with their work and nothing else quite misleading and a mere stereotype. There are some scientists who fit that image, and who don't read or engage with anything that is not the science itself, but that doesn't really apply to many (and I believe most) of us. Robert Oppenheimer was actually an avid reader, poetry writer and believed it was important for scientists to immerse themselves in humanities. Richard Feynman was a painter, drummer and worked in politics of education. Einstein himself was a great violinist. One of my former supervisors, who is a very famous particle physicist, told me he started college as a philosophy major before switching to physics. A lot of my peers have studied physics alongside humanities. A friend did physics and philosophy, another history and math, and I even know a girl who was doing physics and theater! I have a background on political activism, painting, writing and before switching to a double major in physics and mathematics, I was a political science and creative writing major. I studied classics for four years before that, to the point I could translate Latin texts in my head. I read A Hundred Years of Solitude when I was eleven, and I also know so much about physicists because I love reading biographies in my spare time. Most scientists I know are very multifaceted, and there is a lot of depth to them.
Now, we are human, and we make mistakes and have misjudgements. I had my fair share and I am only in my early twenties (and I am still more self-aware than a man in the 20th century). But I think we can both call out the toxic culture around God-like figures and be fair. Einstein was wrong about a lot of things, and his contributions to science were still great! Who is the greatest physicist of all time? I couldn't tell you and it doesn't matter. I still agree with you that we need to stop putting these people in pedestals. They are as capable of being wrong as we are, even if one or twice they were very right.
Edit: I am dyslexic and make a lot of typos! I am just correcting those.
"It turns out that it's pretty easy to be less wrong than Albert Einstein."
It wasn't easy for you! Einstein is held in high esteem for a good reason. Your pretentious comment is unjustified.
…..Einstein read the New York Times and a couple of fashionable books on politics and history, and decided that such inputs were more than enough for his superior IQ to conclude that Communism was the way of the future…..
In the early 1980s, Emmanuel Todd built an extensive argument that the political-ideological choices of people worldwide are to a great extent a function of people’s experiences in their childhood homes. Fast forward forty years, his argument still holds quite well:
https://policytensor.substack.com/p/the-churchs-crusade-against-cousin
In defense of Einsteins political "errors", I think it's important to remember where he came from. He didn't only read the Times, he also lived through WWII, sort of a catastrophe of nationalism. Before that, he had witnessed first hand the failure of liberal democracy in Weimar Germany to prevent the rise of Nazism.
Given that, I find it natural to push towards other directions of societal organization. And not necessarily that wrong when you consider his perception of the starting position.
I think you mix up scientific skepticism with disbelief a LOT.
All this vitriol would mean more if you cited your extensive catalog of faults.
Your first few paragraphs mix general and special relativity in a confusing way
I'm not an astrophysicist, Mario, feel free to correct me!
I don't want to sound pedantic, so apologies in advance. Here's a list of things I would object to:
- I would not say gravitational waves are the only logical conclusion of GR, not sure what you meant by that but there are lots of other observable predictions of GR on the one hand and on the other hand you can have gravitational waves in theories other than GR
- Minkowski's contribution is crucial to express special relativity in the elegant geometric form we got used to, but it's not true that SR would not hold up without it
- I am not sure which paper you are referring to here "Einstein’s later paper on general relativity only served to seal the prohibition on travelling faster than light", at any rate the c speed limit holds already in SR
- "the speed of light is the universe’s sole constant" not sure what to make of this one, surely G and h are considered universal constants too
- "That’s why Einstein’s stance against gravitational waves makes little sense: the logical conclusion of his own insights is that gravity doesn’t really exist as a force of nature" I don't see how this follows: in fact there was doubt around whether GW were detectable until much later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_bead_argument At any rate electromagnetism treats both the magnetic and electrostatic forces as forces, yet we have EM waves
- "Einstein won his Nobel Prize not because of that central idea of general relativity but largely because of his discovery that a beam of light is not a wave but rather a collection of discrete wave packets. This is a key insight leading to quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle, God’s dice and the notion that electrons are not really orbiting protons in the atomic nucleus" conversely this description of Einstein's work on the photoelectric effect gives him too much credit, as at the very least I would say that the "discovery that a beam of light is not a wave but rather a collection of discrete wave packets" is shared with Plank's much earlier work on blackbody radiation
- "believed in a static universe" arguably everyone did back then, and even today we cannot really claim that we understood the nature of the cosmological constant
Noted!
"I don't want to sound pedantic, so apologies in advance."
Why apologise? Roman didn't mind being pedantic.
Great job of correcting Roman's diatribe against Einstein's scientific ability. One should take the veracity of Roman's gossip about Einstein's personal life with a grain of salt.
Einstein was by no means perfect; he had faults, but he was a genuine genius. Einstein fully accepted that he built on the discoveries of past geniuses. He was a master of critical thinking and imagination.
"I'm not an astrophysicist,..."
Neither was Einstein; he was a theoretical physicist.
Mario is.
"Mario is."
But the subject is Einstein, not Mario. One does not need to be an astrophysicist to understand Einstein's theories.
You sound like the kind of guy who enjoys being blocked.
You sound like the kind of guy who doesn't like the truth.