Einstein's Sounding board ... Michele Besso...

5fish

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A bit of trivia Besso was an engineer and a friend of Einstein. He was also Einstein's sounding board while he worked on his Theory of General Relativity. Besso would discuss and even do some of the heavy lifting in the math with Einstein...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michele_Besso

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Besso was born in Riesbach from a family of Italian Jewish (Sephardi) descent. He was a close friend of Albert Einstein during his years at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich,[2] today the ETH Zurich, and then at the patent office in Bern, where Einstein helped him to get a job.[3] Besso is credited with introducing Einstein to the works of Ernst Mach, the sceptical critic of physics who influenced Einstein's approach to the discipline.[4] Einstein called Besso "the best sounding board in Europe" for scientific ideas.[5] In Einstein's original paper on special relativity, he ended the paper stating, "In conclusion, let me note that my friend and colleague M. Besso steadfastly stood by me in my work on the problem here discussed, and that I am indebted to him for many a valuable suggestion."

Besso died in Geneva, aged 81. In a letter of condolence to the Besso family, Albert Einstein wrote “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future only has the meaning of an illusion, though a persistent one.”[7] Einstein died one month and 3 days after his friend, on 18 April 1955


Here is the manuscript just sold for millions... Besso saved this copy...

The calculations of the Einstein-Besso manuscript were, however, frustrated by a number of unnoticed errors, and later in 1913 Einstein set aside this approach to general relativity out of concerns over its theoretical consistency. Besso left Zurich, taking the document with him. It is thanks to him that the manuscript has, almost miraculously, come down to us: Einstein would probably not have bothered to keep what he saw as a working document.

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In September 1915, Einstein returned to his earlier approach, and at last established the valid field equations for his new theory. He refined and published these in a legendary series of four articles in November 1915, in the third of which he demonstrated that his new theory could indeed account for the anomalous perihelion of Mercury, thus fulfilling the promise of the Einstein-Besso manuscript of two years earlier. The human understanding of the workings of the universe had been changed forever
 

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Here is a great article about their friendship and relationship... Einstein coming to terms with Mach...


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Besso would go on to become a sidekick, of sorts, to Einstein—a sounding board, as Einstein put it, “the best in Europe,” asking the right questions that would inspire Einstein to find the right answers. At times, though, he would seem to be something more—a collaborator, perhaps, making suggestions, working through calculations.

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If Besso never seemed to know quite what he was doing, it wasn’t for a lack of smarts. “The great strength of Besso resides in his intelligence,” Einstein would write, “which is out of the ordinary, and in his endless devotion to both his moral and professional obligations; his weakness is his truly insufficient spirit of decision. This explains why his successes in life do not match up with his brilliant aptitudes and with his extraordinary scientific and technical knowledge.”

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But there was something uncanny about Besso. Over the coming years, he would always show up at exactly the right moment, the perfect deus ex machina, handing Einstein books, innocently offering suggestions, prodding him, goading him, nudging him onto the right path, as if he had a plan. “I … watch my friend Einstein struggle with the great Unknown,” he would write, “the work and torment of a giant, of which I am the witness—a pygmy witness—but a pygmy witness endowed with clairvoyance.”


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By 1904, Don Quixote had become one of Einstein’s favorite books.


Two years earlier, an unemployed Einstein had put an ad in the newspaper offering physics tutoring for three francs an hour, and a philosophy student named Maurice Solovine had shown up at his door. They started talking about physics and philosophy and didn’t stop; the whole tutoring thing never even came up. Soon Conrad Habicht, a mathematics student, joined the conversation, and the three young bohemians formed something of a book club for highbrowed degenerates. They read works of philosophy and literature and discussed them, sometimes until one in the morning, smoking, eating cheap food, getting rowdy and waking the neighbors. They met several nights a week. In mockery of stuffy academia, they dubbed themselves the Olympia Academy. Besso was in Trieste working as an engineering consultant, but he came when he could, and as Einstein’s closest friend, he was made an honorary member of the Academy. Under Besso’s influence, the Olympians read and discussed Mach.


snip... Quantum Mechanics

As Einstein came to grips with Mach’s rejection of relativity, the world of physics was rocked by quantum theory, a revolution Einstein had helped to spark but now refused to join



 

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It sad but interesting about the brain... My hide opinion the changes in Einstein's brain were do to how he used his brain... the music part and the forth ridge... the brain grows to reflect how you use it the majority of the time... It nice to know but it should have been burned with the other ashes but its nice we now do have his DNA...
 

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Here is the guy Einstein was inspired by...


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Through his criticism of Newton's theories of space and time, he foreshadowed Einstein's theory of relativity.[9]

here is this...


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The Mach principle is a hypothesis claiming that the inertia of bodies is caused by the gravitational forces of mass around them, even at great distances. This idea substantially influenced Albert Einstein and his work on the general theory of relativity.

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Mach fiercely criticised Newton and had serious objections to Einstein’s work, specifically to his theory of relativity. And yet Einstein himself admitted how much he was influenced by Mach’s work. In a letter to Mach, Einstein says that it was especially Mach’s book on the development of mechanics that influenced him so much…

However, it was atomic theory Mach criticised the most. For Mach, the atom was a term that referred to something undefinable; something which complicates explanations of a number of phenomena. He felt that unproven ideas used for illustration were redundant and misleading. He claimed that all facts need to be based solely on direct perception. Facts were simply everything; no model ideas or even thinking about them were permitted.
 
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