</a>Influences on Einstein's creativity

Einstein's Implicit Theory of Relativity - of Cognitive Property? Unexamined influence of patent office procedures (Part #3)

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The continuing puzzle to many historians of science and researchers on creativity is how a patent office clerk (third class) could elaborate a theory of such profound significance to the future of physics in the absence of any conventional interaction with physicists. John Stachel (How Did Einstein Discover Special Relativity?, 1983) provides an excellent account in support of conjectures on how this may have been possible.

Curiously, it would appear that no consideration is given to the effect of the disciplines and preoccupations of the Patent Office on Einstein's creative thinking, whether these influences were explicit -- or implicit and unacknowledged in some way. His time at the Patent Office has often been described as a complete waste of his talents (see "Moonlighting in the Patent Office" in Gary F. Moring, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Einstein, Alpha Books, 2004) or as a temporary job with no connection to his interests in physics. Reference is however made to Einstein's own account of the vagaries of the creative process, which presumably may be considered a form of recognition by him of the catalytic potential of such influences. He himself considered that time to be the most creative/productive in his life.

It is intellectually offensive to physicists, representing one of the purest and most noble of the fundamental sciences, that anything of significance should emerge from the relatively ignoble context of a patent office. Yet curiously both contexts have similar concerns with defining domains of invariance in space and time and with clarifying the "lawful" or "legal" relationship between them.

It is also the case that physicists themselves are most anxious to ensure the priority of their claims to discovery and to guarantee their rights of ownership to any associated intellectual property. Curiously the process of filing and examining a patent for validity (discussed below) bears a strong systemic resemblance to the process of submitting a paper to a reputable journal necessitating peer review prior to acceptance. This similarity may even extend to the manner in which property rights are subsequently (re)assigned.

Suppose therefore that, contrary to general assumption, the patent office procedures were indeed fundamental to Einstein's creative process. In the case of Ludwig Wittgenstein, such a seemingly "ridiculous" possibility has been extensively argued by the philosopher Susan G. Sterrett (Wittgenstein Flies a Kite: a story of models of wings and models of the world, 2006). This "nurture" perspective may prove more fruitful than the "nature" perspective which, as noted by Steve C. Wang (In Search of Einstein's Genius, Science, 289, 5484, 1 September 2000, p. 1477), resulted in the 240 pieces of his brain, removed at his autopsy in 1955, being finally examined in 1985 and with new neuroanatomical tools in 2000. And as Wang remarks:

The most important question may be why we perform these analyses at all, and what we really hope to find. Just as Einstein captured the essence of energy and matter in his famous equation, so we seek to capture the essence of genius. Our pursuit perhaps reveals more about ourselves than about the nature of genius.

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