Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
The flaws of the EU's asymmetric approach to imbalances | 132 comments (132 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)
Re: Self-censorship (none / 1)
He could publish at a very young age and before he had established a reputation because his theories explained observable phenomena in a way existing dominant theories could not. Much of his work was initially ridiculed outside a relatively small more receptive and enlightened circle

Index of Frank's Diaries
by Frank Schnittger (mail Frankschnittger at hot male dotty communists) on Wed Jul 20th, 2011 at 11:56:34 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: Self-censorship (4.00 / 2)
His problems were not related to being able to publish, but to being able to get a teaching position. Apparently he got his PhD in 1905, just before writing his ground-breaking papers and shortly after publishing his first paper. Before gettin ghis PhD he had spent time quallyfying himself as a teacher and got a job at the patent office to support himself. That doesn't sound like an outsider trajectory to me, nor was his work unconventional. The Papers by Planck on the photoelectric effect and by Lorentz on the Lorentz transformations were well known, mainstream results that Einstein built on.

Later, when he was formulating General Relativity he was competing with none other than David Hilbert to formulate a geometric theory of gravity. Again, not an unconventional pursuit.

Economics is politics by other means

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Jul 20th, 2011 at 12:12:19 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: Self-censorship (none / 1)
And I have no doubt that your points of departure would include Keynes and any number of well established thinkers (I hesitate to use the term economist as it is the construction of the "economy" that I am challenging).

Einstein wrote his first paper on magnetic fields aged 16 and had his first paper on Capillary forces published at age 22 around the same time as he got the patent job (through a friend) four years before he go his doctorate.

However let's not get sidetracked by Einstein.  What are you and Jake gonna do? :-)

Index of Frank's Diaries

by Frank Schnittger (mail Frankschnittger at hot male dotty communists) on Wed Jul 20th, 2011 at 12:29:56 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: Self-censorship (none / 0)
 Denis Brian's biography of Einstein ( http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780471193623-4 ) goes into detail about Einstein's troubles in getting a teaching post--or any other sort of career advancement, post-university.  Essentially, they boiled down to something that is classic about the interactions of many people who are inflicted with what's called "genius" in their intelligence.  Einstein had little patience for those in places of influence who--had he ingratiated himself to them and their egos, which he decidedly did not do--could have and usually in such circumstances would have helped his career along to its next phases.

  But he didn't demonstrate that patience.  He displayed the same blunt and unwelcome frankness common to geniuses' personalities toward these influential people and, stung, they simply shut his advancement off; only much later and with the help of others who were for exrtraneous reasons much more patient and sympathetic, did E. find the support needed to break the effective boycott in academia.

"In such an environment it is not surprising that the ills of technology should seem curable only through the application of more technology..." John W Aldridge

by proximity1 on Thu Jul 21st, 2011 at 10:20:49 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: Self-censorship (4.00 / 3)
He could publish at a very young age and before he had established a reputation because his theories explained observable phenomena in a way existing dominant theories could not.

And because physicists, whatever their other flaws, are working to improve their understanding of the observable universe.

Serious economists are not. They are playing power games, and that means that you need to do a whole lot more ass-kissing before your can start disseminating genuinely novel ideas.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Wed Jul 20th, 2011 at 12:15:04 PM EST
[ Parent ]

The flaws of the EU's asymmetric approach to imbalances | 132 comments (132 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
Display: