Wow, is that real?! Great find! I'm surprised Einstein spent enough time at chess to know what a Ruy Lopez was, and to be able to find such powerful tactical moves. I've read that Einstein possibly wasn't really a genius, and I know that sheer intelligence does not mean a person is a good chess player, so such strong play surprised me.
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One might expect that Einstein's brain was far beyond an ordinary
human's, that it must have been huge, perhaps with areas that were abnor-
mally large. In fact, the opposite has been found (it is slightly smaller, not
larger, than normal). Overall, Einstein's brain is quite ordinary. If a neurolo-
gist did not know that this was Einstein's brain, he probably would not give
it a second thought.
The only differences in Einstein's brain were rather minor. A cer-
tain part of his brain, called the angular gyri, was larger than normal, with
the inferior parietal regions of both hemispheres 15 percent wider than aver-
age. Notably, these parts of the brain are involved in abstract thought, in the
manipulation of symbols such as writing and mathematics, and in visual-
spatial processing. But his brain was still within the norm, so it is not clear
whether the genius of Einstein lay in the organic structure of his brain or in
the force of his personality, his outlook, and the times. In a biography that I
once wrote of Einstein, titled Einstein's Cosmos, it was clear to me that certain
features of his life were just as important as any anomaly in his brain. Per-
haps Einstein himself said it best when he said, "I have no special talents. . . .
I am only passionately curious." In fact, Einstein would confess that he had
to struggle with mathematics in his youth. To one group of schoolchildren,
he once confided, "No matter what difficulties you may have with math-
ematics, mine were greater." So why was Einstein Einstein?
First, Einstein spent most of his time thinking via "thought experiments."
He was a theoretical physicist, not an experimental one, so he was continu-
ally running sophisticated simulations of the future in his head. In other
words, his laboratory was his mind.
Second, he was known to spend up to ten years or more on a single
thought experiment. From the age of sixteen to twenty-six, he focused on the
problem of light and whether it was possible to outrace a light beam. This
led to the birth of special relativity, which eventually revealed the secret of
the stars and gave us the atomic bomb. From the age of twenty-six to thirty-
six, he focused on a theory of gravity, which eventually gave us black holes
and the big-bang theory of the universe. And then from the age of thirty-six
to the end of his life, he tried to find a theory of everything to unify all of
physics. Clearly, the ability to spend ten or more years on a single problem
showed the tenacity with which he would simulate experiments in his head.
Third, his personality was important. He was a bohemian, so it was natu-
(p. 133)
ral for him to rebel against the establishment in physics. Not every physicist
had the nerve or the imagination to challenge the prevailing theory of Isaac
Newton, which had held sway for two hundred years before Einstein.
Fourth, the time was right for the emergence of an Einstein. In 1905, the
old physical world of Netwon was crumbling in light of experiments that
clearly suggested a new physics was about to be born, waiting for a genius to
show the way. For example, the mysterious substance called radium glowed
in the dark all by itself indefinitely, as if energy were being created out of thin
air, violating the theory of conservation of energy. In other words, Einstein
was the right man for the times. If somehow it becomes possible to clone
Einstein from the cells in his preserved brain, I suspect that the clone would
not be the next Einstein. The historic circumstance must also be right to
create a genius.
The point here is that genius is perhaps a combination of being born
with certain mental abilities and also the determination and drive to achieve
great things. The essence of Einstein's genius was probably his extraordinary
ability to simulate the future through thought experiments, creating new
physical principles via pictures. As Einstein himself once said, "The true sign
of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination." And to Einstein, imagina-
tion meant shattering the boundaries of the known and entering the domain
of the unknown.
All of use are born with certain abilities that are programmed into our
genes and the structure of our brains. That is the luck of the draw. But how
we arrange our thoughts and experiences and simulate the future is some-
thing that is totally within our control. Charles Darwin himself once wrote,
"I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in
intellect, only in zeal and hard work."
Kaku, Michio. 2014. The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind. New York: Doubleday.
Please be relevant, helpful & nice!