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~ The Bright Truth About Einstein |
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The
Bright Truth About Einstein Albert Einstein, whose name is synonymous with genius got lousy grades. And was bad in Math. The story persists in books, websites and even cartoons. In The Authoritative Calvin and Hobes, Calvin says, "You know how Einstein got bad grades as a kid? Well mine are even worse!" Calvin may have been a bad student, but Einstein wasn't. To be sure, the father of relativity fought against authority. He hated rote learning so much that he often refused to go along with teachers and often got his knuckles rapped, according to Einstein biographer Denis Brian. He admitted to havinga bad memory, and his grades were not always perfect. But he was a fine student in most subjects, Einstein scholars say. In an 1895 letter by a close family friend looking after the then 16-year-old Einstein, he was referred to as a "wunder-kind". There are no records of Einstein's grades in primary school, according to Robert Schulmann, a contributing editor to the Einstein Papers Projecct at the California Institute of Technology and a historian of science. The head of Einstein's Munich secondary school published his mostly did well (he always, for example, received at least a 2 in Latin, with 1 the highest and 4 the lowest). The myth that his grades were bad may have arisen because of what happened when he went to school in Switzerland. All this has nothing to do with relativity, but it had much to do with Einstein's contemplation of relativity. Einstein became the emblem not only of the desire to know the truth but also of the capacity to know the truth. In his 1993 novel, Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman writes, "In this world time is a visible dimension. Just as one may look off in the distance and see houses, trees, mountain peaks that are landmarks in space, so one may look out in another direction and see births, marriages, deaths that are signposts in time, stretching off dimly into the far future." It does not take much of another stretch to attach godhead to such a vision, though that was hardly Einstein's own feeling. In 1895, he failed a test to study at a Zurich polytechnic university. According to Schulmann, the failure was probably because of his lack of knowledge in Frence. In the fall of 1896, he entered the same school, and for the first two quarters, he got mostly 1s and 2s in his courses, with 1 being the best and 6 being the worst. Then the school reversed the system, making 1 the worst and 6 the best. His record suddenly shows mostly 6s and 5s. Some Einstein biographer didn't know about the policy change. To read Einstein's essays in Out of My Later Years is to see that he held none of the artistic or political ideas that were extrapolated from his work. Whatever revisions he made of Newton, he continued to side with his predecessor on the issue of causality. He abhorred chaos and revolution for its own sake. He was devoted to constancy as much as to relativity, and to the illogical and the senses. In the end, his most useful gift may be not that he pulled the world apart but that once that was done, he strove to put it back together. Boston University professor Thomas Glick said it is also often said that Einstein was such a poor mathematician that he was unable to count note when he played the violin. When playing with oters, he often came in late, but that was most likely from a lack of concentration, Glick said. The is also no evidence for this commonly told story: a little girl approached him on the street and asked him some arithmetic question from her homework, and he flubbed it, saying, "I was never good at that." "Einstein was a very good mathematician, obviously," Glick said. Other Einstein myths persist: that he was dyslexic, that he had attention deficit disorder. There is no evidence of either, Schulmann said. The myths persist, he said, because somehow they make people feel better. "Part
of it is wishful thinking," Schulmann said. " 'If he did
badly, then my child can be a genius, too.' " -END
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