Even the most brilliant mind in history couldn’t have achieved all he did without significant help from the minds of others.
Perhaps the most commonly told myth in all of science is that of the lone genius. The blueprint for it goes something like this. Once upon a time in history, someone with a towering intellect but no formal training wades into a field that’s new to them for the first time. Upon considering the field’s issues, they immediately see things that no one else has ever seen before. With just a little bit of hard work, they find solutions to puzzles that have stymied all of the greatest minds in the field that approached those problems previously. They wind up revolutionizing their field, and the world is never the same. It leaves one with a strong take-home message: that if you were that inexperienced person with a similarly towering intellect, and you had the good fortune of coming into a field just as that legend did, then you, too, could make those great breakthroughs that the world’s greatest professionals are all currently missing.
That’s the myth we frequently tell ourselves about Albert Einstein. That he, an outcast and a dropout, taught himself everything he needed to know on his own about physics and astrophysics. Just through his own, private, hard work, he revolutionized the our understanding of reality in a number of profound ways. In the early days, his work — inspired by this thoughts about light — gave us the photoelectric effect, special relativity, and E = mc², among other advances. Later on, his work, also in isolation, gave us General Relativity, arguably his greatest achievement and possibly the greatest of all achievements in the 20th century. All by his lonesome, Einstein single-handedly dragged the field out of Newtonian stagnation and into the 20th, and now the 21st, centuries.
That story isn’t just a complete fabrication; it couldn’t be farther from the truth. Here’s what really happened.
There are components of that myth that are true, of course. It’s true that back in 1905, Einstein published a series of papers that would go on to revolutionize a number of areas of physics. 1905 is often referred to as Einstein’s “miracle year” because of those publications, which gave us:
- the photoelectric effect,
- special relativity,
- Brownian motion,
- and the infamous mass-energy equivalence of E = mc².
But those substantial advances could hardly have been said to have occurred in a vacuum, or that Einstein in some way was an outsider to the field of physics.
Quite to the contrary, Einstein himself, although German-born, moved to Switzerland specifically to study physics and mathematics. At the age of 17, he enrolled in the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program in Zürich, where he graduated in 1900. That might not sound impressive, but today that University is known as ETH Zürich, and has had a total of 22 Nobel Laureates come through it: Einstein included.
Yes, it’s true that he went to work at the Swiss patent office, but that wasn’t the only thing he was doing; he was concurrently continuing his studies in Zürich at the same time. This is little different than various work-study jobs, or part-time jobs, that college students often take on to help finance their educations in more modern times. Moreover, it was his friend and classmate, Marcel Grossman, whose connections (through his father) got Einstein the job. (Grossman didn’t need that job, as he had secured teaching positions to finance his graduate education.)
Additionally, Einstein wasn’t identifying problems that had gone unnoticed by others. Instead, there were well-known pieces of evidence that had been discussed — for decades, at that point — as being evidence for physics beyond what the ideas of Newton could hope to explain.
Newton’s Universe, for one thing, was deterministic. If you could take any system of particles and write down their positions, momenta, and masses, you could calculate how each and every one of them would evolve with time. With infinite calculational power, you could compute this to arbitrary precision at each and every moment in time. Maxwell’s equations brought electromagnetism into the same realm as Newtonian gravity and Newtonian mechanics. Those were the foundational pillars of physics at the time of Einstein’s birth.
But puzzles arose, and were well-known for those final few decades of the 1800s.
- Radioactivity had been discovered, and the time at which any atom would decay was known to be random and indeterminate by any means other than experimental; only by watching an individual radioactive atom could you know when it would decay.
- The law of mass conservation was violated for certain radioactive decays; the mass of the initial atomic nucleus was greater than the mass of all of the particles produced in a radioactive beta decay, showing that mass was lost, not conserved, in these reactions.
- It was known that objects did not obey Newton’s laws of motion when they moved close to the speed of light: time dilation and length contraction had already been discovered and described.
- And the null results of the Michelson-Morley experiment had been robustly determined, disproving the original notion of the luminiferous aether.
Perhaps most importantly, Mercury’s orbit almost, but not exactly, matched the predictions of Newtonian gravity. When the precession of Mercury’s orbit was calculated in detail — accounting for the gravitation of the planets and moons (532″ per century) as well as the periodic change in Earth’s equinoxes (5025″ per century) — it came up short of observations (5600″ per century) by a tiny but significant amount: 43 arc-seconds per century. That less-than-1% difference was small, sure, but profound.
What was causing it?
Einstein didn’t know, either, when he began his physics career in the early 1900s. In fact, this was a problem he thought about quite often, but made no progress on it initially. However, there were areas where he did make progress, with his first series of papers in 1905 making quite a splash.
But was that the result of several “bolts of inspiration” that struck him while pondering questions on his own? No. Einstein, despite what you might have been taught, had been working and studying continuously since his graduation. His patent office work largely consisted of examining electrical and electro-mechanical devices, including the transmission of electric signals and synchronization devices: work requiring him to engage his knowledge of theoretical physics, light waves, Newtonian mechanics, and electromagnetism. He studied physics independently with a group of physics and mathematics friends, including with special focuses on the works of Ernst Mach and Henri Poincaré. And, owing to his formal graduate studies, he was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Zürich for his dissertation, A new determination of molecular dimensions, with Professor Alfred Kleiner.
It wasn’t his dissertation that turned heads in 1905, however; it was his separate papers on the topics of:
- discovering the Brownian motion of particles under a microscope,
- the derivation of E = mc² and mass-energy equivalence,
- the discovery of the photoelectric effect, and
- the derivation of special relativity.
Yes, these discoveries were no doubt momentous, with Einstein approaching these problems in extremely creative and imaginative ways as well.
But these advances didn’t occur in a vacuum. Quite to the contrary, Einstein benefitted from friends, colleagues, teachers and mentors, the collaborative efforts of his first wife (whose contributions will likely never be fully known), and the input of many others during this time. His papers didn’t come out of nowhere, but rather built upon earlier ideas of Planck, Lorentz, FitzGerald, Thomson, Heaviside, Hasenöhrl, and Poincaré. In fact, Poincaré had independently derived E = mc² back in 1900; it’s possible that Einstein read that very paper as part of his study group, alongside Conrad Habicht and Maurice Solovine.
But what about General Relativity? Einstein, according to the legendary stories you might have heard about him, was simply thinking about physics — as he often did — when inspiration struck him in what he would later referred to as “his happiest thought” of all-time. This occurred in 1907 or so, and over the next 8 years, Einstein developed General Relativity, putting it out into the world in 1915. The rest was history.
Of course, Einstein really did think of “his happiest thought” during that time, and General Relativity was the final theory that ultimately emerged from it. But to understand where Einstein came from, we have to start with what this “happiest thought” actually was. It was to consider what difference there would be between the following two instances:
- an observer who was locked in a windowless room on the surface of the Earth, and experienced the force of gravity pulling everything down towards the center of the Earth,
- and an observer who was locked in a uniformly accelerating room in the vacuum of space.
For the observer inside the room in either scenario, Einstein reasoned, there was no way to tell the difference between the two cases. Everything inside would accelerate “downward” at 9.8 m/s2; the floor would push “upward” with a restoring, normal force to balance the downward pull; even light, if shone from one end of the room to the other, would travel in a curved path as dictated by either acceleration or gravitation. Known today as Einstein’s equivalence principle, it provided the conceptual link between motion, which was described by his (earlier, developed in 1905) theory of special relativity, and gravitation, which up until that point was a purely Newtonian phenomenon.
But even to arrive at this thought, Einstein was not operating in a vacuum, all on his own, at all. Einstein’s former professor during his undergraduate days, Hermann Minkowski, became enamored with special relativity, and was shocked that the same Einstein he had taught had developed it. “For me it came as a tremendous surprise, for in his student days Einstein had been a real lazybones. He never bothered about mathematics at all,” Minkowski wrote. But upon learning of special relativity, it was that same Minkowski who developed the mathematical idea of — and foundation for — spacetime, all building upon Einstein’s work. By placing space and time on the same mathematical footing, he set the stage for the mathematical development of General Relativity: the advance we remember him best for today.
Conceptually, Einstein’s “happiest thought” may have been preceded by some fascinating work by Henri Poincaré. Poincaré realized that Mercury’s orbit didn’t only require corrections for Earth’s precessing equinoxes and the gravitational influence of the other bodies in the Solar System, but also for the fact that, as the fastest planet, Mercury’s velocity with respect to the speed of light could not be neglected. With the advent of special relativity, he realized that Mercury would experience dilated time, and that there would be length contraction in the direction of its motion around the Sun. When he applied those two effects of special relativity to the orbit of Mercury, Poincaré found that time dilation and length contraction accounted for about ~20% of the observed extra precession (of 43″ per century) just by including the relativistic effects of motion.
How, then, would it be possible to:
- construct a physical theory that married gravitation to this new concept of spacetime,
- explain the precession of Mercury’s orbit,
- incorporate special relativity into the mix,
- and still be able to reproduce all of the earlier centuries of success that Newtonian gravity produced?
The “how” of how to do it wasn’t the idea of Einstein at all, but rather that of his friend and former classmate, Marcel Grossman. While Einstein had the idea of the equivalence principle, it was Grossman — the most mathematically adept of all of Einstein’s friends and peers — who had the idea to describe the Universe with non-Euclidean geometry as the spacetime fabric, rather than the Euclidean geometry of Minkowski space.
This makes sense, as this type of mathematical ground was Grossman’s specialty. In particular, Grossman had become an expert in Riemannian geometry, where two parallel lines did not necessarily always remain parallel, but could converge and meet or diverge and get farther and farther apart, as dictated by the (possibly curved) underlying geometry. Differential geometry and tensor calculus were precisely the language required to describe the Universe that Einstein was trying to picture, and Grossman was the one who put it all together. From Einstein and Grossman working together, a key paper emerged in 1913: Outline of a Generalized Theory of Relativity and of a Theory of Gravitation. This was the first of two fundamental papers that would lead to the establishment of General Relativity as humanity’s best theory of gravity.
But even this specialty was not unique to Grossman and, through him, Einstein. Many brilliant minds had been developing it for decades, dating back to before the birth of both Einstein and Grossman. Absolute differential calculus, as a field, had been introduced by Elwin Christoffel in 1869. Many issues remained unresolved throughout the 1800s with that branch of mathematics, which only achieved completion in 1900 with the work of Gregorio Ricci and Tullio Levi-Civita. (These last names — Christoffel, Ricci, and Levi-Civita — will be familiar to anyone who’s studied General Relativity.) There were numerous mathematicians studying precisely this field at the time, and one of them, the legendary David Hilbert, almost arrived at the equations that would describe gravitation in the Universe before Einstein did. (Although Hilbert was almost certainly aware of Einstein’s contemporaneous work.)
In every physical theory where you have mechanical motion, there’s a quantity you can define — known as “the action” — that must be minimized in order to figure out what the path of that object will be. In Newtonian mechanics, it was Hamilton’s principle of least action that led to the equations of motion; in the context of a general theory of relativity, a new action principle would have to be discovered. That action principle was formulated independently by both Einstein and by Hilbert at around the same time, and is today known as the Einstein-Hilbert action. It’s this action principle, when correctly applied to the physics of the system, that leads to the modern Einstein field equations.
None of this, of course, diminishes the actually genius of Einstein, nor to take credit away from him for the breakthroughs that he himself made. He fully deserves credit for developing and putting forth all of the ideas for which he is credited: Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, E = mc², and both special and general relativity. He really did make those advances, and his contributions were the primary ones in all of those instances. Rather, these stories are to better provide context as to how these great advances were made. Einstein was not, as the common narrative often goes, a lone genius who was working outside of the strict confines of academia, who was able to revolutionize the field precisely because he was an outsider, unconfined by the dogmatic and restrictive teachings of his day.
Rather, it was precisely because Einstein had the education and background that he did — his own unique toolkit, as it were — that he was able to approach this variety of problems in a self-consistent, non-contradictory way. It was because of his friends and collaborators that he was exposed to ideas that helped him to progress, rather than stagnate. And it was because of his willingness and even eagerness to rely on the input and expertise of others, and to take inspiration from them and incorporate it into his own work, that his excellent ideas, many of which were profound but that began as mere seeds, were able to sprout into the towering achievements we still acknowledge today.
Back in 2021, I wrote an essay entitled, What if Einstein never existed? At the end, I contrasted the narrative of the lone genius with the attempts made to solve many of the outstanding problems of their time by other, less heralded scientists, and discovered that most advances would have occurred even without the person who made the key breakthrough.
- Georges Lemaître and Howard Robertson each put together the expanding Universe independently of (and prior to) Edwin Hubble doing so.
- Sin-Itiro Tomonaga worked out quantum electrodynamics independently of both Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman, who did it independently of one another. (All three were recognized with the Nobel Prize in physics for the achievement.)
- Robert Brout and Alexei Starobinskii each published papers with key realizations concerning what we now know as cosmic inflation, as did Rocky Kolb and Stephen Wolfram, well before Alan Guth’s revolutionary paper that’s generally acknowledged as the birth of inflation.
What would the world have been like without Einstein? Would we ever have had come upon General Relativity without him? I think the answer, without any serious doubt, is yes. Many others, even at the time, were close behind him, with several prominent scientists and mathematicians pursuing the same ideas contemporaneously. In fact, if he hadn’t listened to input from the world-class minds around him, Einstein wouldn’t have had anywhere near the successes or the impact that he did. Although our culture loves soundbites, with perhaps the most famous from Einstein being, “imagination is more important than knowledge,” these sorts of advances absolutely require both. Regardless of the ratio of “inspiration” to “perspiration” required, there’s simply no way around the need, if you want to make a meaningful advance, for expertise and hard work.
Starts With A Bang is written by Ethan Siegel, Ph.D., author of (affiliate links following) Beyond The Galaxy, Treknology, The Littlest Girl Goes Inside An Atom, and Infinite Cosmos. His latest, The Grand Cosmic Story, is out now!
Einstein the “lone genius” is a complete myth was originally published in Starts With A Bang! on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
