Even Einstein feared change

Steve Safran July 6th, 2007

(This essay originally appeared in the Thursday, July 5, edition of the AR&D Media 2.0 Intel newsletter.) I’m reading “Einstein,” the new biography by Walter Isaacson, and there is a passage that struck me as relevant to local media companies. We all think of Einstein as the ultimate revolutionary. He stood up to very old notions of nothing less than time and space. (Try explaining to people that time is relative and you’ll still get puzzled looks, 100 years after Einstein figured it out.) Many of his contemporaries hated him. He looked at old science and paid it no deference at all, and along the way redefined physics. But it turns out that, as soon as he turned 40, he became an old grump.

Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity were so controversial, even among his fellow scientists, that he didn’t win the Nobel Prize for them. Everyone agreed he deserved a Nobel, mind you - it’s just that relativity was so controversial, that the committee decided to sidestep it completely and they gave him the award for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.

That’s right: E=MC², the most famous formula of the 20th century, did not win Einstein a Nobel Prize. It was too controversial.

So there was no mind more open in the 20th century than that of Einstein’s. Except that after he turned 40, he didn’t care much for new ideas.

Quantum physics came along and started to throw a wrench in some of Einstein’s elegant thought experiments. Suddenly, the man who was open to breaking the rules hated the new rule-breakers. Isaacson’s biography portrays a man who was gleeful in tearing up the established way of thinking - until he turned 40. From the book (p. 317)

Why was Einstein so much more creative before the age of 40 than after? Partly, it is an occupational hazard of mathematicians and theoretical physicists to have their great breakthroughs before turning 40. “The intellect gets crippled,” Einstein explained to a friend, “but glittering renown is still draped around the calcified shell.”

And there’s this marvelous passage on the same page:

In one of his most revealing remarks about himself, Einstein lamented, “To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.”

We have all experienced this in our careers in television. We were innovative and even rebellious early on. As young journalists, we took issue with the establishment. If doing something was safe, chances are you wanted no part of it. You railed against management that was out of touch, and you had better ideas. You may have even been blessed at some point in your career with a Murrow or other important prize.

But then fate makes us authorities ourselves.

Suddenly, like Einstein, we fear The New Thing. And the internet is that New Thing. We can’t let the calcified shells around television and local journalism prevent new innovations. We can’t rest on our laurels - or, as Einstein did, on his laureate - and wish away the web. Just as quantum theory did not negate E=MC², the web does not negate journalism and does not do away with our business. But it does change the approach and the questions.

Toward the end of his life, Einstein recognized he had been too stubborn in fighting ideas that other scientists postulated after he had turned 40. We don’t have that long. The quantum leap has already happened. It’s up to us to recapture our spirit of curiosity and adventure and make sure our business never “gets crippled.”