Stephen Black wrote: > ...[...]An important aspect of how science operates is that > it isn't who you are that counts; it's what you have to say. And this > leads to an interesting game, if anyone cares to play it. Can you > name individuals who are noted for their contributions in fields > other than the one in which they have formal qualifications? > > Off the top of my head, I can think of three: > > [...] > 2. A clerk in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, who had failed > the entrance examination to a technical university. > > Albert Einstein. Need I say more?
I hope not, since you have (uncharactistically) managed to get this one wrong! Einstein�s higher education qualification was in physics -- he obtained a physics diploma at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic at Zurich. This was a rather more impressive Institute than its name might indicate, providing a thorough education in classical physics, as well as astronomy and astrophysics � and one of his teachers was the world-renowned mathematician Hermann Minkowski. He was not a very diligent student (Minkowsky later recalled Einstein as �a lazy dog�!), tending to neglect his college work to follow up his own interests at home, e.g., the electromagnet theories of Clark Maxwell that were to have a great influence on his development of Special Relativity a few years later. He achieved a moderately good diploma, but failed to obtain the teaching post at the Polytechnic for which he applied, probably because he was not on good terms with the professor of physics Heinrich Weber, a conservative type who did not take kindly to Einstein�s lack of respect for authority. After a short period in a temporary teaching post in a school, he obtained the position in a patent office during which period he worked on several disparate problems in physics, including relativity and the photoelectric effect (for which he was later awarded the Nobel Prize). >[Einstein] failed the entrance examination to a technical university. This is true, but gives a highly misleading impression. 1. Einstein had no formal schooling for more than a year prior to taking the exam. He left Germany at the age of 15 to follow his parents to Italy, and never got round to enrolling in a school. 2. He was tutored for a short period before taking the Zurich Polytechnic entrance exam, which he failed. But two things need to be taken into account here. First, he was some 18 months short of the normal age at which students took the entrance exam. Second, the exams he failed were biology, chemistry and French, but his results in physics and maths were so exceptional that the Principal of the Polytechnic recommended to Einstein�s parents a Swiss secondary school where their son could get his other subjects up to scratch. There is a myth that Einstein was educationally mediocre in his early years. Nothing could be further from the truth. When Einstein was only 12 a medical student lodger in his parents� house, Max Talmey, started introducing the precocious boy to books on maths and physics, which he worked at on his own. Talmey recalls that at the age of 13 Einstein was also reading Kant, while working his way through a book on Euclid�s geometry, and that in mathematics he had soon gone beyond the level at which Talmey could follow. The relatively recent release of letters in the Einstein Archive reveals a letter from Einstein�s mother to his grandmother when the boy was 7 reporting that �once again he was ranked first [in his class], he got a splendid report card,� which rather knocks on the head the commonly-held belief that Einstein was backward in his early years. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.human-nature.com/esterson/index.html http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=10 --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
