Why is Albert Einstein considered by some to be the smartest scientist in the world?

Answer 1

With all due respect to the memory of one of the rarest and most beautiful intellects in human history, Einstein has been dead for several decades, and so he is not the smartest scientist in the world. It is not even clear that he was the smartest while he was alive. He was one of many very powerful thinkers in the early and middle years of the last century, but he did have some differences of scientific opinion with some of them, some of which he lost. The word 'smart' indicates a relative level of knowledge and information. Information is important, but does not by itself define intelligence. Intelligence is an ability to de-construct, simplify, integrate, sythesize and re-imagine something, to think 'outside the box' and to solve problems, sometimes in breathtaking new ways. This is very much like what children do from birth on, as they test out and co-create the new world they are entering. Einstein certainly had the gift of intelligence in abundance, and there is a possibility that he had more of it than anyone else ever had or ever will have. But it is not really useful to speculate about this. People like Einstein are already breathing such rarefied air that distinctions among them are meaningless. I think we often miss one of the important lessons that people like Einstein give us. Freeing oneself from 'established' truth, and thinking a problem through with simplicity and clarity are really the kernel of genius, not accumulated book knowledge. We all have the seed of genius in us, but we get way too caught up in understanding how 'the other guy solved it'. That said, Einstein did have more than his share of brilliant insights, any one of which would have made his career. He did work on the photo-electric effect, and developed the general and special theories of relativity, theories which changed our world forever. Although he had some problems with Quantum Theory, he made some contributions to that field as well. He (working with Bose) predicted the existence of the Einstein-Bose Condensate, a markedly Quantum phenomenon, which has just been produced in the laboratory over the last few years.