Think Like Einstein

POINT TO PONDER

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

                            -Albert Einstein

 

STORY LINE

The following article is an extract from the book How to Think like Einstein by Scott Thorpe (example of Reframe technique taught in OBT class):

 

The problem Einstein solved that gave us E=mc² was an old one. A generation of scientists had been trying to understand why light always seems to be going at the same speed relative to the observer. It was one of sciences’ most important and baffling problems. Many brilliant people came close to the solution, but they all failed because of a rule developed a hundred years earlier by Isaac Newton that stated that time was absolute. It did not run faster or slower. It was universe’s constant. Newton’s reasoning made sense and the idea became firmly embedded in the minds of every scientist that followed and they couldn’t even imagine breaking the “Time is absolute” rule, so they couldn’t solve the problem.

 

Their problem went something like “How can nature appear to act that way when we know that it can’t?”

They failed because they were looking for an answer that did not exist.

 

Einstein simply imagined that time could run faster for one object than for another. That changed the problem completely. A few lines of math started Einstein down a road that has revolutionized our world. Einstein solved science’s most difficult problem by breaking a rule.

 

He asked himself “What would nature be like if it did act the way we observe it to act?”

Einstein succeeded because he was working on a problem that enabled solution.

REFLECTION

We leave this week's reflection with Alber Einstein himself:

“I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had grown up.”