Einstein’s Playful Curiosity
A wonderful and powerful tool to understand the world.
I am also interested in how he came up with ideas and the way his brain worked. A while back I did a deep dive and collected a bunch of quotes of his from older writings or things directly attributed to him. It has a heavy focus on his process of creativity and intuition.
You and your readers might like it as supplement:
The most relevant quote being:
A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. That means it is not reached by conscious logical conclusions. But think it through afterwards you can always discover the reasons which have lead you unconsciously to your guess and you will find a logical way to justify it. Intuition is nothing but the outcome of accumulated earlier intellectual experience.
(‘Einstein from ‘B’ to ‘Z’’ Stachel, 2001, pp. 89)
To be honest, I mostly collected them because I was getting sick of seeing so many incorrect and falsely-attributed quotes floating around.
Incidentally, one of my friends from college wrote a cute fiction book where they explored his personality. The book asked the question “What would happen if Einstein came back form the dead, but as a zombie?”. It’s a really fun read and took great pains in trying to be authentic despite it being a work of fiction.
He’s often framed as very thoughtful and philosophical. However, one of the features that really stood out to me in the book, and while investigating his quotes and history, was how playful he was. Apparently he had been really into jokes, silliness, and comedy — In fact, the classic pose of him sticking his tongue out was because he had been grumpy and wanted to mess with the paparazzi hounding him.
The technique he used to come up with his greatest ideas, what he called “gedankenexperiment”, is essentially just his playfulness taken seriously. Or as you alluded to in your piece, “90% of creativity is just Showing up”.
In my exploration of the subject of Einstein’s creativity, one idea stood out among the rest. This idea has helped give me hope and the strength to continue on my own creative endeavors. That idea was how Douglas Hofstadter framed Einstein’s struggle to be understood:
There’s an analogy he made for me once. Einstein, he said, had come up with the light-quantum hypothesis in 1905. But nobody accepted it until 1923. “Not a soul,” Hofstadter says. “Einstein was completely alone in his belief in the existence of light as particles — for 18 years.
“That must have been very lonely.”
— The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think
I often find myself thinking of how lonely Einstein must have been for those 18 years. Thinking of how he still persevered despite the loss of his first marriage, and the struggles he must have faced due to the war. Thinking of how he sought out friends and intellectual peers who appreciated him — musing at how much he wrote to them. Many of the things we have to quote of his are letters to friends around the world.
Surround yourself with people who’ll remind you:
