If We Cloned Einstein...

[EWright]

Who would he become today? (With and without deliberately imposed influences... please avoid arguing the inability to sucessfully clone a healthy human).

[alxian]

damn, you had to mention the inability to rebuild his mind and bidy through exposing the clone to his impossible to emulate life experiences.

[Fishteacher73]

Arguing as a determinist, you can replicate the conainer, but not the experience. Perhaps he would be hanging out w/ Hawking, perhaps he would be selling weed w/ his stoner dropout buddies... Who knows. I just will arguee fervently that the environment (which is not replicateable) would have as much an influence as the genes.

[CraigD]

Fun question!

 

Einstein was certainly a smart man, but his great significance as a physicist was largely, I think, a case of living in the right time and place to read a lot of Physics, connect the work of many others, and draw novel and original conclusions. After his early successes with the photoelectric effect and Relativity, his success was mostly as a popular figure, not a physicist.

 

Had a perfect clone of Einstein been born around 1980 and had a cultural and educational upbringing similar to the original’s, I suspect he would either be a career patent clerk or an obscure academic.

 

Recall that Minkowski, under who Einstein studied as an undergraduate and from whom he got much of his mathematic formalism, described him as “a lazy dog”.

 

This point of view make me optimistic that widely read generalists (like us) might make major contributions to science. Even those of us who have been called lazy dogs. I find Einstein inspiring not because he was a intimidating genius (he was not), but because he was a sort of science everyman.

[chatlack]

I think its better to say "If we knew all DNA codes and created the perfect living...."

:eek: :)

[niviene]

I think its better to say "If we knew all DNA codes and created the perfect living...."

 

"......then why would we clone Einstein at all?" :eek:

 

I think Einstein would be a well known physicist, like Hawking, etc. It depends really on how old you're suggesting he's cloned at... are you saying if he were born today? Or if he were cloned "exactly like he was" maybe at 50 years old or so, where he could look at today's deal immediately and start working on our problems? I bet he'd be working on an energy source rather than a bomb. I think the priorities have changed this time around, eh? I mean, we have different problems - ones he might not be as successful in figuring out as he was with other things.

[Qfwfq]

I agree that the genes aren't everything at all. I doubt there was anything tremendously exceptional about the man or his brain, from a physiological pov. People do have different IQs, at least partly determined genetically, but I doubt Einstein had them out of the ordinary. I would even go as far as saying that, if he hadn't had the right idea to solve the trouble between relativity and electromagnetism, sooner or later someone else would have.

 

I bet he'd be working on an energy source rather than a bomb. I think the priorities have changed this time around, eh?

I wouldn't be so sure of this!

[Tormod]

Who would he become today?

 

Me, of course. :eek:

[Little Bang]

There have been people with I.Q.'s over two hundred and most of them have contributed very little to new knowledge. Basically I.Q. is a measure of your ability to remember things with respect to people of your on age. A computer can remember any data that gets stored in it but it can not utilize that data to create new in sights. Thats what made Einstein so different. He could extrapolate the data to arrive at a knew level of understanding.

[EWright]

Me, of course. :)

 

:) Tormod, this is a scientific forum. If you can not address a question in a scientific way, you may have to banish yourself from hypography for all eternity. Please read our rules and try to abide by them. :)

[EWright]

"......then why would we clone Einstein at all?" :)

 

I think Einstein would be a well known physicist, like Hawking, etc. It depends really on how old you're suggesting he's cloned at... are you saying if he were born today? Or if he were cloned "exactly like he was" maybe at 50 years old or so, where he could look at today's deal immediately and start working on our problems? I bet he'd be working on an energy source rather than a bomb. I think the priorities have changed this time around, eh? I mean, we have different problems - ones he might not be as successful in figuring out as he was with other things.

 

:) You can't really clone someone so that they're born at age 50, can you? Oh, that poor mother! I certainly hope she isn't planning to breast feed! (Mustaches itch!)

[infamous]

Who would he become today?

I, and for that matter, nobody can forcast what he may have become. One could however determine that he would be at least 50 years behind times. Weather he was just right for the times in which he lived or, weather he could again astound the world with out of the box thinking will forever be the unknowable.

[Tormod]

Please read our rules and try to abide by them. :)

 

Rules??? :)

[Boerseun]

If Einstein was alive today, he would be:

 

Intelligent

Bright

Full of brilliantly creative ideas

Unable to do anything about it, because

He'd be a wage slave like the rest of us

 

On top of that, he'd be:

 

The father of one or more children

In a struggling cosmopolitan relationship

Having a girlfriend on the side, tho whom he thinks he's unloading his soul

(but she's only there for the shallow sex)

A bitter wife

Divorced pretty soon

Custody battles over the kids will destroy the last remnants of creativity in him left

And instead of his original work on relativity,

He'll forever be bitching about his relatives.

 

(insert Metallica riff here) Sad but true...

[infamous]

:) Tormod, this is a scientific forum. If you can not address a question in a scientific way, you may have to banish yourself from hypography for all eternity. Please read our rules and try to abide by them. :)

Nothing in our rules about expressing a little humor EW.................................Lighten up

[UncleAl]

Yesterday's Nobel Prize is tomorrow's homework. If you did a Boys from Brazil on Einstein (nature) and provided the appropriate environment as they grew up (nurture) you would get a bunch of exceedingly clever and capable mathematicians, physicists, and thereabouts. Ditto von Neumann, Rabi, Feynman... But we already have Ed Witten and many equal to him - for real.

 

Discovery requires more than core competence. Passion and a spark of craziness must be in there. Even that is not enough. It must be the right time. Things build and then the dam bursts. Einstein arrived when the necessary non-Euclidean maths had begun to mature, Newton was not compatible wtih Maxwell, and Lorentz and Poincare had all the pieces but not the assembled puzzle. 20 years earlier it could not have been done for lacking data and mathematics. 20 years later it would have been obvious and unavoidable.

 

Archimedes was within touching distance of the calculus. 2000 years later Newton and Leibniz did it independently and simultaneously. They wondered about infinitesimals. It's time had come.

 

What extraordinarily insightful question must be asked? That is the key! Once unsheathed it will unlock a large number of capable minds. Einstein wrote letters and read journal articles months after publication. We've got e-mail and the Web. Months have contracted into hours. Literature search is globally competent.

 

We still need that wildily fecund originating idea. Nobody knows how to create a mind that will think it for the first time.

[Tormod]

Nothing in our rules about expressing a little humor EW.................................Lighten up

 

I actually think he did, infy. :)