Re: Is this true?

On Tuesday, May 1, 2012 1:49:10 PM UTC+1, Lance wrote:
On May 1, 1:59 pm, Peter Brooks
wrote:
On May 1, 11:56 am, Lance <lanceg...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:> .

Oddly I don't think this excerpt tells us anything at all. I suspect
we all try to look at problems from as many different perspectives as
we can. That is hardly news. The difference between me and Einstein
doesn'nt lie in trying to view things from multiple points of view, it
lies in the fact that Einstein succeeds in finding new ways of viewing
things and I don't. But how Einstein succeeds isn't that clear from
this excerpt.

No, you're probably right. My view is that working in the Patent
Office probably gave him precisely the sort of training required for
such inventive thought - not that history is littered with ex-
employees of Patent Offices who've made similar strides...

I suspect that the thinking required of patent clerks is largely
algorithmic. Procedures to check whether someone else has previously
filed a similar patent. Procedures to decide whether the patent is
sufficiently original. And the like. I think the advantage of
Einstein's period in the patent office was that the office was not
busy and he had time to think.

Lance

I'm plodding through Isaacson's biography of Einstein at the moment, and it is suggested there that Einstein benefited both from the nature of his work at the patent office and from the 'free time' it allowed him. A good read:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Einstein-Life-Universe-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1847390544/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335914169&sr=1-1

Dave Smith
.

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