quondam @ archinect/79/7911y.htm
how should someone feel after visiting a museum?
Rita Novel 2005.04.02 09:48
"Here we suddenly remember that, of course, the very same thing is true for scientists themselves. The most creative ones, almost by definition, do not build their constructs patiently by assembling blocks that have been precast by others and certified as sound. On the contrary, they too melt down the ready-made materials of science and recast them in a way that their contemporaries tend to think is outrageous. That is why Einstein's own work took so long to be appreciated even by his best fellow physicists, as I noted earlier. His physics looked to them like alchemy, not because they did not understand it at all, but because, in one sense, they understood it all to well. From their themetic perspective, Einstein was anathema. Declaring, by simple postulation rather than by proof, Galilean relativity to be extended from mechanics to optics and all other branches of physics; dismissing the ether, the playground of most nineteenth-century physicists, in a preemptory half-sentence; depriving time intervals of inherent meaning; and other such outrages, all delivered in a casual, confident way in the first, short paper on relativity--those were violent and "illegitimate" distortions of science to almost every physicist. As for Einstein's new ideas on the quantum physics of light emission, Max Planck felt so embarrassed by it when he had to write Einstein a letter of recommendation seven years later that he asked that this work be overlooked in judging the otherwise promising young man."
--Gerald Holton, EINSTEIN, HISTORY, AND OTHER PASSIONS (Woodbury, AIP Press, 1995), pp. 13-14.
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