{"id":812,"date":"2005-01-25T06:27:18","date_gmt":"2005-01-25T13:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=812"},"modified":"2005-01-25T06:27:18","modified_gmt":"2005-01-25T13:27:18","slug":"young-einstein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2005\/01\/25\/young-einstein\/","title":{"rendered":"Young Einstein"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The nice thing about <a href=\"https:\/\/myaccount.nytimes.com\/auth\/login?URI=www-nc.nytimes.com\/2005\/01\/25\/science\/25eins.html&amp;REFUSE_COOKIE_ERROR=SHOW_ERROR\">this<\/a>  New York Times article about the Einstein and the World Year in Physics, is that they provide a picture of Einstein when he was rather young.  Isn&#8217;t it strange how the picture of Einstein many of us have in our head&#8211;the picture many of associate withe genius&#8211;is of the older Professor Einstein, and not of the young man working in a patent office?<br \/>\nMany argue that today no one &#8220;working in a patent office&#8221; could produce the same quality papers as Einstein did in 1905.  But I doubt this.  Maybe it&#8217;s because I still believe that our next fundamental breakthroughs in physics will be both revolutionary and simple.  I guess this sits me on the opposite side of much progress in theoretical physics, which has seen a progressive increase in the level of sophistication, from special relativity to quantum theory to general relativity to quantum field theory to the standard model to superstring theory.  But I&#8217;m a sucker for simplicity, and especially for conceptual simplicity.  There are many ideas which are conceptually simple, but whose consequences are very difficult to sort out.  And if it&#8217;s a simple idea with deep consequences which leads to the next new set of ideas in physics, then why can&#8217;t it come from someone passionate who isn&#8217;t sitting behind the standard academic bandwagon?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The nice thing about this New York Times article about the Einstein and the World Year in Physics, is that they provide a picture of Einstein when he was rather young. Isn&#8217;t it strange how the picture of Einstein many of us have in our head&#8211;the picture many of associate withe genius&#8211;is of the older &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2005\/01\/25\/young-einstein\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Young Einstein&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}