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As you might know from my previous letters, I’m reading about Einstein.
I even took the book with me on our vacation last week. Lisa’s like, “Of course, you’d read Einstein on vacation!”
But I find the lives of such people fascinating.
One of the most interesting to me is that Einstein developed his special and general relativity before he was 40 years old. The reason Isaacson says he was so successful so early is that he was stubborn and rebelled against authority. He wouldn’t be limited by orthodoxy and its leaders. He broke free of those limitations and imagined a whole new way of understanding the universe. He changed the direction of physics and even the way we understand and experience the world. His insights shattered the old way and ushered in a new way.
But even Einstein considered himself a blockhead after 40.
He confided in a friend that Fate was punishing him for rebelling against authority by making him an authority.
Einstein’s imagining of light as quanta… little packets of energy… was groundbreaking. It helped him predict, correctly, that light would bend with gravity.
But this idea also opened up the chaotic and unpredictable world of quantum physics that he would fight against for the rest of his life.
You see… Einstein searched for an underlying order, a determinism, causation, a unifying theory that would make sense of the whole universe. Otherwise, he proclaimed, physics is dead!
Quantum physics seemed to deny this.
So he denied quantum physics.
And stopped producing anything near as important as his relativity work.
The lesson for me in this is simple:
We can break free from limitations only to become enslaved to new limitations we are now comfortable with. So comfortable that we prefer these limitations and want them to stay this way and will fight to protect them.
I suppose the antidote to this is to remain fearless, rebellious, and curious.
I wonder, if Einstein kept searching for a unifying theory even in quantum physics, he might have eventually discovered it.
But he stopped halfway through his life.
And didn’t find it.
If there is one.
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