vol III chap 12 sect 3
Previous: 12.2. Quantum Hall effects.
12.3. Types of schools and learning trajectories.¶
Albert Einstein predicted the phenomena of condensation in the following publication Quantentheorie des einatomigen idealen gases. Königliche Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Sitzungsberichte, (1924), 261–267. At that time, he was a mature and well recognized physicist of 45 years of age. The phenomenon was experimentally discovered till 1994 by Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle. What did Einstein learn to be able to make a theoretical prediction that was experimentally verified after 70 years? An answer to this question can be related to the notion of curriculum and two possible manifestations in Einstein´s life concerning learning: prescriptive learning and emergent learning.
Unlike what is simple to learn and has been previously prescribed, learning the new is difficult, especially in recently explored topics, when important problems are poorly explained or badly solved; also when writing lacks precision, coherence and clarity. Prescriptive learning and emergent learning consider in different ways how the following elements are described in the next Table.
Albert Einstein learning trayectory.¶
Einstein’s life began in Ulm, Germany on March 14, 1879, and ended in Princeton, United States on April 18, 1955. For more information see the references at the end of the chapter. Next, we might ask in what types of schools did he learn.
Punitive barrack whose objective was to obey. His preuniversity learning was subjected to a traditional German instruction almost exclusively reduced to the transmission of information that had to be accepted and digested without questioning. Although he excelled in mathematics and physics, his school performance was mediocre and sometimes even poor. He paid little attention to the requirements of prescriptive learning related to encyclopedic-type content, implied conventional rote procedures, mainly expressed in terms of dogmatic, sectarian or authoritarian attitudes: to obey and not to think. He challenged systems and institutions and as an original and persistent autodidact, he began to generate some emerging learning of great creativity that he would later apply in all his intellectual productions. More rote learning than critical thinking.
Efficient factory whose objective was to produce. He could not be accepted to study physics at a university; after several attempts he was accepted at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. He independently learned what was prescriptive but interested him, and he took time to work on emerging learning outside what was established. Instead of repeating other people's ideas, he thought and persistently followed challenging questions that apparently made no sense to others. On December 13, 1900, he sent to the journal Annalen der Physik his first scientific paper at the age of twenty-one.
Emotional festival whose objective was to create. Throughout his life, his research work was empowered by a continuous emergent learning that made possible a unique scientific career where three epochs can be identified:
(1) Revolutionary explosion. In a period of 195 days five publications were submitted and accepted and at the end of the same year a sixth paper was submitted; he was 26 years old. Although those publications were written in German, in the second column of next Table 12.2 all the titles are in English. It is remarkable how self-explanatory those titles are.
(2) Leadership in theoretical physics. His realistic position regarding the existence of atoms and molecules remained against the opinion of many physicists in the early twentieth century. He convinced through the explanatory and predictive value of his theories. As an example of this capacity Table 12.3 indicates the number of years elapsed between five Einstein theoretical prediction and the experimental observation or calcution of the phenomenon in consideration.
(3) Search and discrepancy. During many years he concentrated on problems that remained unresolved, like a unified field treatment of gravitational and quantum phenomena. He participated also in debates with Niels Bohr (1885-1962) about the interpretation of quantum mechanics and with David Hilbert (1862-1943) about the formulation of gravitational theories. Although his emergent learnings was declining, he published several books and wrote many letters and articles about philosophy of science, pacifism, politics, education, morality, cosmic religiosity, ...
By all means, a lot of learning can be obtained by analizing Einstein´s learning trajectory.
REFERENCES¶
Superconductivity on twisted bilayer graphene.
Cao, Yuan; Fatemi, Valla; Demir, Ahmet; Fang, Shiang; Tomarken, Spencer L.; Luo, Jason Y.; Sanchez-Yamagishi, Javier D.; Watanabe, Kenji; Taniguchi, Takashi; Kaxiras, Efthimios; Ashoori, Ray C.; Jarillo-Herrero, Pablo (5 de marzo de 2018). Correlated insulator behaviour at half-filling in magic-angle graphene superlattices. En Springer Science and Business Media LLC, ed. Nature 556 (7699): 80-84.
References concerning Einstein.
MLA style: Press release. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2024. Tue. 30 Apr 2024. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1998/press-release/
References about Einstein.
EINSTEIN, ALBERT, Out of my Later Years, The Philosophical Library, New York, (1950).
EINSTEIN, ALBERT, Ideas and Opinions, Wings Books, New York, (1954).
FRANK, PHILIPP, Einstein: His Life and Times, Alfred A. Knopf Inc., New York, (1953).
GAL-OR, BENJAMIN, Cosmology, Physics and Philosophy; Springer-Verlag, New York, (1983).
GOLDBERG, STANLEY, Understanding Relativity. Origin and Impact of a Scientific Revolution, Birkhäuser, Boston, (1984).
JAMMER, MAX, Einstein and Religion. Physics and Theology, Princeton University Press, Princeton, (1999).
KUHN, THOMAS S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, (1970).
LANCZOS, CORNELIUS, Albert Einstein and the cosmic world order, Interscience Publishers, New York, (1965).
LAUGHLIN, ROBERT B., A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down. Basic Books, New York, (2006).
PAGELS, HEINZ R., The Dreams of Reason. The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity, Bantam Books, New York, (1988).
PAIS, ABRAHAM, Subtle is the Lord… The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford University Press, Oxford, (1982).
RIGDEN, JOHN S., Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, (2009).
SCHILPP, PAUL ARTHUR, Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist. The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 7, Evanston, IL, (1949).
STACHEL, JOHN, Einstein Miracolous Year. Five Papers that Changed the Face of Physics. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey (1998).