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EINSTEIN & NEWTON: GENIUS COMPARED
The two scientific giants were alike in intellect and temperament
How can we measure the genius of Albert Einstein?
In many ways, the task is not possible. If we journey back through the centuries,
passing such towering figures as James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann,
Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Antoine Lavoisier, we must travel all the way to
Isaac Newton before finding another human being of comparable scientific
achievement. And before Newton, there might be none.
Both Einstein and Newton had intellects that carried them to every known continent
of their subjects and beyond. Newton invented the calculus, formulated the laws of
mechanics and motion, proposed a universal theory of gravitation. Einstein laid the
foundations for the two skyscrapers of modern physics, special relativity and
quantum mechanics, and created a new theory of gravity.
But beyond these particular achievements, both scientists radically changed
thinking in science. Both developed worldviews. Today we refer to the "Newtonian"
universe and the "Einsteinian" universe-the first being a world of absolutes, the
second a world of relativities. In the Newtonian universe, time flows inexorably,
always at the same rate, now and forever. Causality is as strict as a commandment of God. Without exception,
every effect has a cause. The future is completely predictable from the past. In the Einsteinian universe, time is not
absolute. The rate of temporal flow depends on the observer. Furthermore, according to the new quantum physics,
which Einstein helped to establish despite reservations, the intrinsic uncertainties of nature at the subatomic level
prevent forecasting the future from the past. Certainties must be replaced by probabilities.
These ideas are larger than scientific theories. They are philosophies, they are symphonic themes, they are
different ways of being in the world.
Both Newton and Einstein were principally theoretical physicists. Like many theoretical physicists, they did their
greatest work in their mid-twenties. Both tried their hand at experiments. Newton, the far greater experimentalist,
discovered among other things that white light is composed of a mixture of colors. Newton invented mathematics
that he needed. Einstein did not, but his brilliant intuition led him to study and adopt the obscure non-Euclidean
geometry of Riemann and Gauss for his geometric theory of gravity.
Both were artists. Both devoted themselves to simplicity, elegance and mathematical beauty. Like artists, both
preferred to work in isolation. Newton sequestered himself for months at a time when he was at work on a project.
Einstein never had any graduate students and rarely taught. Both were loners. Newton was the greater loner. He
seems to have been practically antisocial, and, as Voltaire noted at Newton's death, "in the course of such a long
life [Newton] had neither passion nor weakness; he never went near any woman." Newton even formulated a plan
to preserve his celibacy: "The way to chastity," he wrote, "is not to struggle with incontinent thoughts but to avert
the thoughts by some employment, or by reading, or meditating on other things."
In later life, Einstein involved himself with many social causes, such as supporting the League for Human Rights,
giving numerous lectures around the world on politics and philosophy and education, helping to found the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. Einstein had many romantic relationships in his life. But at the most personal level, he
seems to have been as solitary as Newton. In an essay published in 1931, at the age of 52, Einstein wrote:
My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack
of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a "lone traveler" and have
never belonged to my country, nay home, my friends, or even my immediate family with my whole heart.

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Both Newton and Einstein fiercely guarded their independence. Both worshipped their solitude.
Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein left profound legacies. Newton conquered the notion that some areas of
knowledge were inaccessible to the human mind, an idea ingrained in Western culture for centuries. In much
thinking before Newton, humankind was entitled to comprehend only what God deigned to reveal. Adam and Eve
were banished from Eden for eating from the tree of knowledge, God's knowledge. Zeus chained Prometheus to a
rock for giving fire, the secret of the gods, to mortal man. When Adam, in John Milton's Paradise Lost, questioned
the angel Raphael about celestial mechanics, Raphael offered some vague hints and then said that "the rest from
Man or Angel the great Architect did wisely to conceal." All these limitations and forbidden regions were swept
aside with Newton's monumental work The Principia (1687). There, in precise, mathematical terms, Newton
surveyed all phenomena of the known physical world, from pendulums to springs to comets to the grand
trajectories of planets. After Newton, the division between the spiritual and physical was more clear. And the
physical world was knowable by human beings.
Einstein, with his extraordinary and seemingly absurd postulates of special relativity, demonstrated that the great
truths of nature cannot be arrived at merely by close observation of the external world. Rather scientists must
sometimes begin within their own minds, inventing hypotheses and logical systems that only later can be tested
against experiment. For example, all of our experience since birth screams at us that time flows at a uniform rate,
and yet this belief is not true. Modern physics has at last advanced to an understanding of nature beyond human
sense perception and experience, teaching us that our commonsense grasp of the world can be mistaken. In this
legacy, Einstein overturned centuries of thought about the supremacy of empirical study and experience. He also
contradicted Newton's famous dictum hypotheses non fingo ("I frame no hypotheses"), by which the British scientist
meant that he was not an armchair philosopher, like Aristotle, but a scientist who based his theories on observable
facts.
In his autobiography, Einstein expressed his departure from Newton in this way: "Newton, forgive me; you found
the only way which, in your age, was just about possible for a man of highest thought and creative power. The
concepts, which you created, are even today still guiding our thinking in physics, although we now know that they
will have to be replaced by others farther removed from the sphere of immediate experience."
In an introduction to a 1931 edition of Newton's Opticks, Einstein wrote of Newton, "Nature to him was an open
book…In one person he combined the experimenter, the theorist, the mechanic, and, not least, the artist in
exposition. He stands before us strong, certain, and alone." If Newton could reappear in the future, in a forbidden
trick of time travel, he would probably say similar words about Einstein.
Alan Lightman is a physicist and novelist
Source: Scientific American, Sep2004, Vol. 291 Issue 3, p108, 2p