Re:Einstein was no lone genius
by fsloth on Thursday November 26, 2015 @12:45AM
(#10631473)
I don't think it's revisionism, more like giving flesh to the skeleton of the popular version of a markable person. No one denies that it was Einstein that published those papers.
History is quite incomprehensible without giving a social context. Genghis Khan could have not conquered without the mongols being trained in hunting and herding, thus leading to the tactics that resulted in overwhelming victories.
Einstein could not have written the papers he did without the corpus of the scientific knowledge and the people around him. It was his will that drove him forwards but to truly undertsand his conditions better we need the historical context.
Maybe a stone age Einstein would have invented bronze. Who knows. But, theory of relativity even as a concept would have been beyond incomprehensible.
People do not exist in a vacuum. The social context is the ocean, the individual is the surfer on the waves. Individual impetus drives the person forwards but if the weather is not agreeable to his ambitions he cannot surf.
History is quite incomprehensible without giving a social context. Genghis Khan could have not conquered without the mongols being trained in hunting and herding, thus leading to the tactics that resulted in overwhelming victories.
Einstein could not have written the papers he did without the corpus of the scientific knowledge and the people around him. It was his will that drove him forwards but to truly undertsand his conditions better we need the historical context.
Maybe a stone age Einstein would have invented bronze. Who knows. But, theory of relativity even as a concept would have been beyond incomprehensible.
People do not exist in a vacuum. The social context is the ocean, the individual is the surfer on the waves. Individual impetus drives the person forwards but if the weather is not agreeable to his ambitions he cannot surf.