Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Why no new Einstein? New philosophy thread.

From the Race to Nowhere thread:


The question is "Why not?" It used to be that there were big breakthroughs every decade. What's so different now? Is it just that the problems are harder? Has something else changed?

It's hard to say that the problems are harder when you don't know the answers and are comparing to stuff that's already been solved. For example, the problems that Einstein solved were really thorny. By the mid-19th century, people knew that there were gaps in Newtonian physics: what the equations said and what the observations showed were different (e.g. the orbit of Mercury didn't fit the predictions of Newton's theory). But no one could figure out why. This was a very difficult problem and it was Einstein who figured it out. The answer was that space and time are a single continuum and that the curvature of spacetime affects gravity. This affects the motion of Mercury.

So I'm going to be agnostic on whether the problems are harder.

However, I do know that what's required for breakthroughs like Einstein's involve creativity and thoughtfulness (plus other stuff, like circumstances, being stubborn and a willingness to challenge dogma) in addition to a high IQ. See this article by a well-respected theoretical physicist for some ideas on the subject.

I've been thinking a lot recently about how the US school system and our university system de-emphasize creativity and thoughtfulness. This is in addition to the huge problem we have with low standards and over-focusing on low-achievers.

The K-12 system focuses on scores on multiple choice (MC) tests. STAR tests, Iowa tests, ERBs, SATs, MAP tests: they're ubiquitous. And they don't measure problem solving ability, synthesis of knowledge, ability to draw conclusions from different ideas, or creativity. The answer is always right in front of you, your goal is to get it an move on to the next problem fast, and if you don't know the answer, you have to eliminate the wrong answers, guess, and move on.

If ever there was an effective format for squashing creativity and thoughtfulness, a multiple choice test was it. Compare:

• "Jane Eyre's interest in Mr. Rochester changed when he a) lost a leg, b) lost his sight, c) divorced his wife, d) all of the above."
• "Compare the heroines in Jane Eyre and Madame Bovary. What were the primary circumstances or traits that formed their characters? How did these circumstances and traits affect what ultimately happened to them? Use examples from each novel to support your points."

Compare a test that gives you 54 MC questions and grid-in questions in 1 hour and 10 minutes (SAT math) with this test, which is a high school exit exam in mathematics in Ireland (but not the higher-level test; this one is called "Ordinary level."). Students must answer ~42 questions in 2.5 hours. For the higher-level test, check out the Honours level paper (~30 questions in 2.5 hours). Oh, and everyone takes TWO math exams at their chosen level, not just one. Honours English requires only 3 questions and one essay in nearly 3 hours. But you have to read and think.

The problem continues at the graduate school level, with the GRE math tests testing arithmetic (!) through geometry and no more. Even the math subject test relies on answering a lot of MC questions in a short period of time (66 in 170 minutes; google it). Again, you have to be able to answer the question quickly and move on to score well. No serious thought is required.

University hiring and tenure practices also rely on industrial metrics: number of publications and journal impact factors, number of grants and type (e.g. an NIH R01 has more prestige), number of clinical trials as PI, etc. They want people who can get lots of grants and churn out lots of papers. Finish and publish and move on! You should be submitting grant applications at every NIH deadline! Work all weekend if you have to! Just get it done! This stuff is important but it isn't everything.

The problem is that the tiger-science approach leaves no room for the creative thoughtful types who want to ponder a problem, find a new answer, and maybe create a new model (Grinity calls this way of thinking slow and deep). When we focus too much on work that derives from existing models ("normal science"), projects aimed at finding new models ("revolutionary science") can't get funded. They don't have enough preliminary data (because by the time they do, they aren't new ideas anymore). They're weird. They might not work out. Heaven forbid that something might not work out and we might not get an ROI (return on investment) on that project.

So the creative thoughtful intelligent types languish: they can't get an academic job or keep one (because you don't get tenure if you don't crank out lots of papers), the tiger-science way of thinking dominates academia...and everyone wonders why we haven't had a major breakthrough in theoretical physics since the 70s. It's because we've set things up that way. We are deliberately squandering our national creative and thoughtful talent in favor of impact factors.

Sorry, but the whole system is a mess. In putting so much of our emphasis on simplistic metrics like standardized test scores and journal impact factors, we've begun to discard creativity and thoughtfulness. Sure, we've made our schools and universities look "productive" in a narrow and industrially defined way, but ultimately, we'll run out of steam when the existing models get used up.

Thoughts? Thanks for reading this far.

How do you define a breakthrough? Maybe breakthroughs are happening in other disciplines that will actually end up being connected to theoretical physics. Maybe we are having breakthroughs so often in other areas (computing, astronomy) that they hardly seem like breakthroughs anymore. Maybe someone has already had that paradigm-changing idea but it has gone unrecognized so far.

I agree that the system is flawed. It has always been flawed. Breakthroughs happen anyway as far as I can tell... they operate more outside the system than within it.

I am a professor of theoretical physics and I would dispute the fact that there has been no breakthrough in theoretical physics since the 1970s. I don't consider Baez to be giving unbiased opinions, since he takes a non-mainstream, minority perspective and dislikes much contemporary theoretical physics research. Google inflation, string theory, holography. Google Witten and Maldacena. They are the current generation of Einsteins. Of course as our understanding of physics jumps to higher and higher levels making breakthroughs is increasingly harder. Some periods are also easier than others, with obvious things there for the taking, stunning experimental data coming in. The early 20th century was clearly one such period (experimental results led to the development of quantum mechanics, for example). By contrast one of the stumbling blocks in theoretical physics since the 1970s has been the absence of new results in experimental (high energy) physics. Hopefully the current generation of experiments at CERN and elsewhere will finally give some stunning new experimental input, but even without such input there have been some beautiful theoretical developments in recent years such as the developing understanding of the holographic nature of gravity.

A breakthrough is an entirely new model. It's a new, unexpected way of thinking about an old problem that provides a new solution, makes predictions, and has implications for other areas. It uses information from an old model, but moves beyond the old model in a significant way --- not as a logical extension but as a jump. A breakthrough tends to change the way people in a field view the field.

Major breakthroughs in human science include (but aren't limited to) Einstein's ideas, Darwin's ideas, Newton's ideas, Galileo's ideas, and Copernican ideas. These ideas shattered everything that came before them. Less-major breakthroughs include washing your hands before you do surgery, the discovery of antibiotics, recording devices, telephones, and so on. The key is that it has to be a completely new idea, not an extension of an existing model. Some of these ideas seem obvious now ("Wash your hands!") but they weren't at the time.

I don't believe that we've been having these kinds of breakthroughs in other areas so often that we don't see them as breakthroughs.

It's true that they happen outside the system (e.g. Einstein). But not always (e.g. Newton, Cabibbo, Feynman, Rutherford, the Curies). What I'm arguing is that by shoving creative, thoughtful people out of academia, we're damaging our ability to keep, umm, breaking through.

The paper was written by Lee Smolin. It was freely available on Baez's site.

String theory is hardly an example of a breakthrough: it has too many solutions and too little proof of its claims.


Du-u-u-de. This is precisely my point about the problems in academia. We need room for minority perspectives (which string theory most definitely is not).

Speaking just to Darwin, he didn't come up with his ideas in a vacuum - they were an extension of an existing, although disfavored, model. The Wikipdia article on Alfred Russel Wallace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace#Early_evolutionary_thinking) lists off a handful of pre-Darwin proponents of evolution.

IMHO some distance in time is necessary to determining whether something constitutes a breakthrough - there's not enough historical perspective to assess the long-term impact of an idea that's only been around a short time.

Thanks for writing another content-rich thoughtful post Val. Didn't Einstein have a quote said about him, something like "on the backs of giants." Didn't his breakthroughs develop after the work of a couple generations of thinkers? Should we quit wrestling the one-arm bandit just because no one's hit the jackpot yet? Keep chiseling the rock face off the mine.
And why does everybody want an new Einstein anyway? I want a new Henry Ford to build me a cheaper line of rocket packs. Or a new better Al Gore so maybe we can really save the planet. Or a Louis Pasteur or Marie Curie to make everybody healthier. I wanna buy some baby Carl Jung dvd's from a sing-along collection so my kids can understand people better. (I hope Carl Jung was the Briggs-Meyer test one, if not I might have just said something I didn't mean to say. I know he's not the cigar smoking fetish one; that was Freud.)

Quote (me)
"on the backs of giants"

I see. You already went there when I was typing. That's what I get for taking so long to type a post, lol.

Sort of but not quite. Yes, many people (especially geologist and paleontologist types) believed that life had been around on earth for a very long time, and yes, they knew that living things had changed over time. Darwin's breakthrough was to work out that living things evolved from a common ancestor and that there was a mechanism that could explain how (natural selection).

Yes, Wallace had a very similar theory, but he also worked it out independently of Darwin and they were working at roughly the same time (though they knew each other and corresponded).

But this is also a point that I made originally: breakthroughs build on previous knowledge, but they make jumps. Natural selection and descent from a common ancestor were jumps, and they changed the game completely in biology, paleontology, and beyond.

Val,
Awesome thread! Read everything you posted.

Then I went back to this and let my brain just enjoy the thought of space time continuum ...




Du-u-u-de.

Isn't this kind of thinking as narrow as those who thought the world flat and we had a breakthrough? There seems to be so much that someone could figure out and would be an 'a ha!' moment.

Didn't someone post a link to some 12 year old genius who had some ideas on the big bang theory? Remember how Feynman showed what happened to the Challenger with the rings in ice water? Like no one thought of that before?

Maybe someone's kid from this forum will someday make us rethink the current limitations of our theories.

Ren

I don't have much to add here but wanted to mention that if you enjoy this thread you might like Thomas Kuhn's book Structure of Scientific Revolutions, gets into the nitty gritty of on-the-backs-of-giants versus big jumps. Or just google Thomas Kuhn.

Polly

Polly, I second the recommendation.

Val, the flaw in your original post is that many many academics in the US were not educated in the US with the obsession with multiple choice testing.

True, but they join a system that selects for people who publish constantly and get grants by keeping their work within established models (my original post also spoke of this issue). The ones who are slow and deep either don't get hired or don't get tenure. The European universities are beginning to follow suit, too, unfortunately. It's late now and I'm too tired to look this up, but I know that the UK at least is having the same metrics-driven problems that we are (don't know the degree). My friends in Ireland have also complained about a more industrial culture at at least one major university there.

Breakthroughs---especially big ones---are rare events. All I'm saying is that I think our educational and academic research systems in the US are making it even harder for them to happen.

Note to other posters: yes, the Kuhn book is great! A lot of my thinking is influenced by his ideas.

Well. Hmm, a quick google turned up this page that shows Einstein, by his own admition, was "forced to cram all this stuff into one's mind for examinations whether one liked it or not." (p3) He argued against this method saying, "even the most voracious beast if forced to eat with a whip incessantly will lose his apatite." Apparently that was his education regardless. �

So that's cool. �Einstein himself agreed with you that the reason we aren't making any new Einstein's today is because "modern methods of instruction (could) entirely strangle the holy curiosity of enquiry."

According to the .gov site, this is how he did it�
"Einstein realized that the world described by Isaac Newton, in which one could add and subtract velocities, and that described by James Clerk Maxwell, in which the speed of light is constant, could not both be right. He decided to solve the problem�and special relativity was the result."
Neato factoid.

So today's �methods of education are no more likely to negate the miracle that kept Einstein-like creative genius from being squashed than when it reAlly happened with the first Einstein. �But I would say we could change the education because it's more humane and we're more evolved. �

If this anecdote from the article is true this is what I would change (if it wasn't true for him it sounds familiar):
"one day his teacher summoned him and told him it would be desirable for him to leave the school. �Astonished at the turn of events young Einstein asked what offense he was guilty of. �The teacher replied "your presence in the class destroys the respect of the students."

In the spirit of that statement I would want to see places of learning stop discrimination against people that value learning. �Just because it's humane. �How hard is that? �And it's not an excuse if the kid is blatantly smarter than the teachers. �
http://employees.csbsju.edu/cgearhart/Courses/Honors210/Einstein/Ein_Symp92.pdf

http://free.ed.gov/resource.cfm?resource_id=2079
K. Now I'm googling kuhn.

Eta, I think MosT teachers want to teach and a student who wants to learn will. Just saying there shouldnt be a question, ironically, since it is a designated place of learning, about a student who wants to learn.

Isaac Newton, speaking of breakers-through... "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." -
For a truly AMAZING guy, quite a stroke of humility.


Hey, why no mention of Hawking? Are his ideas about blackholes just too derivative of Einstein?

Kuhn wrote extensively about breakthroughs in knowledge. The existing "paradigm" is "what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share." and to break it requires a different view which begins by criticizing the things the current paradigm ignores. You cannot be mainstream and have a breakthrough.

There are a number of anomalies in the current paradigm that do not require "big science" to see. One is the Pioneer Anomaly and another is the Faint Sun Paradox. There are many others along these lines which are not explainable.

Then there is the problem of rent seekers taking over science. Global Warming is just one famous example.

I disagree about breakthroughs not happening recently. The most recent paradigm shift occurred in the 70s when Plate Tectonics was finally put on a firm footing

A lot of work went into validating the theory once people began to throw out much of the invalid work of the previous century. This breakthrough led to another on Ice Ages.

And then there is the microprocessor revolution which has not end in sight has driven down the cost of knowledge.

And lets not forget the discovery of DNA and the elimination of disease and death that will occur.