daniil's Journal: The Einstein Defense

This JE was inspired by a Slashdot article.

Every time someone makes a bold, yet dubious scientific claim (that they've debunked the Quantum Theory, invented a new and extremely powerful power source, proven that time doesn't exist, and/or so on), someone will invariably invoke what I would call the Einstein Defense: Einstein was a lowly patent clerk, yet he managed to revolutionize science; surely this guy can be right as well?

Well, no. Not really. First of all, Einstein's existence does not prove this guy right by way of analogy. Secondly, it's a bad analogy anyway. Your common crackpot scientist bases his (or her? I don't know, I've yet to see a female crackpot scientist...) "discoveries" on misconceptions of scientific theories -- or indeed on misconceptions of what a scientific theory is. This is usually because they don't have any education in physics -- unlike Einstein, who had a "real" degree in Physics (ok, so he was oficially a Physics and Maths teacher by training, but back then, this was what training to be a Physicist was all about. You couldn't just study Physics). As to him being "just a patent clerk", then I'm under the impression that it was not unusual for a patent clerk to publish papers in science journals. In fact, it was considered a matter of honour.

So, in this respect, Einstein wasn't someone completely unusual, a man "out of the woods". He was a talented physicist, for sure, but the common image of him as someone with no formal education is just a myth. A myth that has inspired quite a lot of pseudoscience. Please stop propagating it.

Of course I haven't really studied his life that thoroughly, so I may have gotten something wrong here. Feel free to correct me. Or something.

Einstein ahead of his era

[anonymo]

Indeed, he was just as outstanding as e.g. Kepler, Newton and other great researchers who were ahead of their own time. The first physical measurement of the relativistic theory on Earth was in a huge accelerator in Europe when they found out that the particles took different time to arrive to a point and that to the mext point at the next segment of the accelerator at the same speed depending on the moon's position.
It took several months to the researchers to realise that the accelator's circle become defo