If We Cloned Einstein...

[EWright]

Who would he become today? (With and without deliberately imposed influences... please avoid arguing the inability to sucessfully clone a healthy human).

[alxian]

damn, you had to mention the inability to rebuild his mind and bidy through exposing the clone to his impossible to emulate life experiences.

[Fishteacher73]

Arguing as a determinist, you can replicate the conainer, but not the experience. Perhaps he would be hanging out w/ Hawking, perhaps he would be selling weed w/ his stoner dropout buddies... Who knows. I just will arguee fervently that the environment (which is not replicateable) would have as much an influence as the genes.

[CraigD]

Fun question!

Einstein was certainly a smart man, but his great significance as a physicist was largely, I think, a case of living in the right time and place to read a lot of Physics, connect the work of many others, and draw novel and original conclusions. After his early successes with the photoelectric effect and Relativity, his success was mostly as a popular figure, not a physicist.

Had a perfect clone of Einstein been born around 1980 and had a cultural and educational upbringing similar to the original’s, I suspect he would either be a career patent clerk or an obscure academic.

Recall that Minkowski, under who Einstein studied as an undergraduate and from whom he got much of his mathematic formalism, described him as “a lazy dog”.

This point of view make me optimistic that widely read generalists (like us) might make major contributions to science. Even those of us who have been called lazy dogs. I find Einstein inspiring not because he was a intimidating genius (he was not), but because he was a sort of science everyman.

[chatlack]

I think its better to say "If we knew all DNA codes and created the perfect living...."

[niviene]

Originally Posted by chatlack

I think its better to say "If we knew all DNA codes and created the perfect living...."

"......then why would we clone Einstein at all?"

I think Einstein would be a well known physicist, like Hawking, etc. It depends really on how old you're suggesting he's cloned at... are you saying if he were born today? Or if he were cloned "exactly like he was" maybe at 50 years old or so, where he could look at today's deal immediately and start working on our problems? I bet he'd be working on an energy source rather than a bomb. I think the priorities have changed this time around, eh? I mean, we have different problems - ones he might not be as successful in figuring out as he was with other things.

[Qfwfq]

I agree that the genes aren't everything at all. I doubt there was anything tremendously exceptional about the man or his brain, from a physiological pov. People do have different IQs, at least partly determined genetically, but I doubt Einstein had them out of the ordinary. I would even go as far as saying that, if he hadn't had the right idea to solve the trouble between relativity and electromagnetism, sooner or later someone else would have.

Originally Posted by niviene

I bet he'd be working on an energy source rather than a bomb. I think the priorities have changed this time around, eh?

I wouldn't be so sure of this!

[Tormod]

Originally Posted by EWright

Who would he become today?

Me, of course.

[Little Bang]

There have been people with I.Q.'s over two hundred and most of them have contributed very little to new knowledge. Basically I.Q. is a measure of your ability to remember things with respect to people of your on age. A computer can remember any data that gets stored in it but it can not utilize that data to create new in sights. Thats what made Einstein so different. He could extrapolate the data to arrive at a knew level of understanding.

[EWright]

Originally Posted by Tormod

Me, of course.

Tormod, this is a scientific forum. If you can not address a question in a scientific way, you may have to banish yourself from hypography for all eternity. Please read our rules and try to abide by them.