8+is+halfway+to+heaven.+In+the+purely+platonic+sense.

I feel an obligation to defend Frederic Golden’s assessment of Einstein as the ‘embodiment of pure intellect’. Perhaps the phrase cannot be taken literally, but the magnitude of a statement is not necessarily an exaggeration. I find the greatest evidence of this fact in his Theory of Relativity.

Many people herald Einstein’s Theory of Relativity without truly understanding what it would have taken to conceive of it with no similar idea to build upon. It is necessary to dive deeper into the mindsets of the scientific community at the time to truly understand what was accomplished.

The beauty of physics as compared to other sciences is that it’s intuitive. If you have any ability for spatial mechanical visualization, a force diagram resolves itself in your mind’s eye as naturally as you subconsciously calculate where a ball thrown at you will land. Granted, your mind can only create approximations while the field of physics creates exact values. Yet the basic premise, that most of physics is relatively easy to conceptualize on a basic level, remains.

Yet there are certain intelligences in the history of science that have groped far beyond what naturally and instinctually the human mind is built to grasp. Hendrik Lorentz, through the study of mathematics, determined that the speed of light is not as consistent as other speeds and developed the Lorentz transformation. And so I demand of you, in a time when the luminiferous aether was the accepted propagation of light, what kind of intellect could derive from mathematical equations that the speed of light was not constant for all observers?

I bring up Lorentz for two reasons. First, as a simplified parallel to what Einstein achieved, but also as benchmark with which to gauge Einstein’s intelligence. Lorentz’ realization, while grand, was incomplete. Einstein did with time what Lorentz could only do with velocity, and even then Lortentz did not fully understand it. Einstein stepped out of the indefatigable stream of time that only the ‘clinically insane’ of our society dared to question. He twisted the single most constant and undefeatable component of human existence into something from science fiction, a concept more suited to Isaac Asimov and a Hugo Award than established physics and a Nobel Prize. His twisted rules for time, however, did something that nothing from the minds of science fiction could: they answered a plethora of unsolved riddles of 20th century physics and spawned a wave of enlightenment and technology that we are riding into the 21st century upon its crest.