Will we have to go through all this for everyone with Einstein's DNA traces? How many did we "lose" through history?
mathpages.com
Despite his love of physics, Einstein did not perform very impressively as an under-graduate in an academic setting, and this continued to be true in graduate school. Hermann Minkowski referred to his one-time pupil as a "lazy dog". As the biographer Clark wrote, "Einstein became, as far as the professorial staff of the ETH was concerned, one of the awkward scholars who might or might not graduate but who in either case was a great deal of trouble". Professor Pernet at one point suggested to Einstein that he switch to medicine or law rather than physics, saying "You can do what you like, I only wish to warn you in your own interest". Clearly Einstein "pushed along with his formal work just as much as he had to, and found his real education elsewhere". Often he didn't even attend the lectures, relying on Marcel Grossman's notes to cram for exams, making no secret of the fact that he wasn't interested in what men like Weber had to teach him. His main focus during the four years while enrolled at the ETH was independently studying the works of Kirchhoff, Helmholtz, Hertz, Maxwell, Poincare, etc., flagrantly outside the course of study prescribed by the ETH faculty.
Einstein later recalled that after graduating in 1900 the "coercion" of being forced to take the final exams "had such a detrimental effect that... I found the consideration of any scientific problem distasteful to me for an entire year". He achieved an overall mark of 4.91 out of 6, which is rather marginal. Academic positions were found for all members of the graduating class in the physics department of the ETH with the exception of Einstein, who seems to have been written off as virtually unemployable, "a pariah, discounted and little loved", as he later said. |
