Take Note.

About twenty years ago, I read Walter Isaacson's book on Albert Einstein. Einstein was one of those people I had heard about my whole life, yet I knew nothing about him. I'm not talking about "knowing" his physics, but something about his development and emergence as a thinker and a scientist appealed to me. I read in Isaacson's book about Einstein's 1912 manuscript titled "On the Special Theory of Relativity."

Some time after that I was down at the Strand bookstore on 12th and Broadway (18-miles of books) and I found a copy as marked-down as a neutrino some moments after the Big Bang.

That was incentive-enough to buy it. Though down at the Strand, I seldom spend more than lunch money on a single volume, this time I went a little nuts.

My ability to comprehend Einstein is about as keen as my ability to understand an Archie comic written in Cuneiform. I can recognize works of genius, but to be honest I can make neither head nor tail of what's happening.

Nonetheless, I spent time with Einstein's book, and I discovered something.

I think there's value to be gained simply by seeing how people puzzle through problems. 

When I was a kid in grade-school and high-school math, teachers always exhorted us to "show our work." To my eyes there's something to be gained from seeing how other people reason even if you don't understand what they're reasoning toward or what it all means.

Something Zen about the journey goes here.

I think you can learn about solving just from being near people and the puzzles they have solved. You can usually spot a certain doggedness and willingness to cross things out. You can usually appreciate the sweat and ardor applied to the problem they were set on solving.

Since I stumbled upon Einstein's 1912 work, I've made a practice of buying other such facsimiles. It's not a mania. But when I see one, I check the sofa for loose change and find a way to usually buy it.

In my lap as I type this sits a moleskine-sized replica of Isaac Newton's college notebook. Again, I don't know what the hell it's doing there or why I ordered it from an esoteric publisher in the UK.

There are two more items like these sitting less-than-an-axe-length away from where I'm typing this.

Johnny von Neumann's plans that led to the first modern computer, the forerunner to the one you're likely reading this post upon.

Parenthetical on Johnny: 

And last, Alan Turing's "Mathematical Theory of ENIGMA Machine." Turing helped break the unbreakable nazi code which might have won the Allies World War II, or at least shortened its duration. This reproduction, like the von Neumann volume and the Newton book is from an English publisher called Kronecker Wallis. 

Kronecker Wallis is a wonderful and strange company. Invariably I order something twice because in my eagerness I press buttons too soon and too often. They always send me a personal note checking on me, making sure I'm not quite as dumb as I look. 

If after reading this, you order something from them, tell 'em George sent you. They'll probably give you a discount, and me, too.

BTW,

If you're interested at all in genius, you might like this book, which I enjoyed on Enrico Fermi. Having married a Jew, Fermi fled from Fascist Italy, landed at Columbia and began, really, the Manhattan Project. After Pearl Harbor, Fermi was classified as an 'enemy alien.' As such, he was not allowed to take the ferry home to New Jersey from Columbia. 

You'd think once you'd won a Nobel Prize you'd be pretty secure about your standing in the intellectual firmament. But I have a feeling physicists are just as insecure as you and I. I remembered, then found this passage. A coda to this post.