The Einstein Effect by Cohen Benyamin;

Author:Cohen, Benyamin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Incorporated

Einstein came up with many of his best ideas by devising thought experiments and would often daydream to help figure out complicated concepts. He believed that you could stimulate new ideas by allowing your imagination to wander, without worry about existing constrictions. When you set out to solve a problem you are, in effect, within the confines of that question. But Einstein gave himself permission to just let his mind wander. He often played classical music on his violin as a brainstorming technique. There is science to back up this method. Researchers at the University of California in Santa Barbara studied a group of physicists, artists, and writers and asked them the following: When that “aha” moment came, what were you doing? Turns out that many of them had their big discovery when they were focused on something mundane.

It’s one of the reasons Einstein loved to go sailing. He found peace and serenity aboard boats, away from the adoring crowds. “A cruise in the sea is an excellent opportunity for maximum calm and reflection on ideas from a different perspective,” the physicist wrote while floating near the shores of Panama. His wife, Elsa, added: “There is no other place where my husband is so relaxed, sweet, serene, and detached from routine distractions, the ship carries him far away.” And so, I’ve decided to write this chapter while on a boat in the middle of a lake in my town. Surrounded by nature and the occasional jet-skier, and with poor cell service and no internet to distract me, I’m beginning to see what Einstein was talking about.

By all accounts, I’m a better sailor than Albert Einstein. Which isn’t saying much. Sailing was one of Einstein’s favorite pastimes, yet the irony was he wasn’t really that good at it. “According to his biographers,” wrote Philip R. Devlin, “he would lose his direction, his mast would often fall down, and he frequently ran aground and had near-collisions with other vessels.” What’s more, Einstein rarely wore a life vest and could not even swim. This meant he was constantly having to be rescued—sometimes by kids and other times by nearby boaters. There’s a classic headline from the New York Times that reads: “Relative Tide and Sand Bars Trap Einstein.” Another headline read: “At relativity, a genius; as a sailor, not so much.”

But for Einstein, who called sailing “the sport that demands the least energy,” it was an escape. “He used to sail as a way to think. He loved the serenity of it,” said Jim Lynch, whose novel Before the Wind opens with this line: “Einstein wasn’t a great sailor, probably not even a mediocre one.” As Walter Isaacson noted in his biography of Einstein, “He usually went out on his own, aimlessly and often carelessly. ‘Frequently he would go all day long, just drifting around,’ remembered a member of the local yacht club who went to retrieve him on more than one occasion. ‘He apparently was just out there meditating.’”

Lynch told me that there are lots of stories of Einstein being towed back in.

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