



Technology Einstein with a PC: A bigger genius? By Kevin Maney, USA TODAY

Kevin Maney For other columns by Kevin click here. More Tech columnists: Edward C. Baig

Tamara Holmes

Larry Johnson

Kim Komando

Sam Meddis

Robin Raskin

Bruce Schwartz

Joel Smith

Elizabeth Weise What if Albert Einstein could've had a computer?



Right now, Einstein is red hot. He was just named Time's person of the century, beating out tough competition such as Franklin Roosevelt, Gandhi and Britney Spears. He's the subject of a half-dozen books in the past year and is featured on the Albert Einstein: A Man for All Seasons 2000 calendar. He's still doing Apple Computer ads.



That last one is pretty darn ironic because Einstein got famous without the use of technology. He never touched a computer.



Einstein is celebrated because he came up with several of the most difficult, groundbreaking and far-reaching scientific discoveries of the past 100 years -- discoveries that otherwise probably wouldn't have come until decades later. He made all of them in an age when mechanical punch-card tabulating machines were radical information technology. He came up with special relativity in 1905, general relativity in 1915 and his cosmological theory in 1917.



"Einstein didn't even use pencil and paper" in much of his work, says Amir Aczel, author of one of the current books on Einstein, God's Equation: Einstein, Relativity, and the Expanding Universe. "He was a thought experiment kind of guy." He'd imagine objects in an elevator to devise gravitational theories. "In his mind, (he) placed many clocks at various places in space and imagined them flying at different speeds, deducing that space and time were relative," Aczel writes in his book.



Once Einstein had a theory, he'd need an equation to describe it. That would require doing math -- hard, grueling, blood-draining math. Math that was so complex, even Einstein had to get help to figure it out, which means he at one time felt the same way I did in Mrs. Dodd's AP math class.



Einstein did his math by hand. It would take him years. He'd make mistakes. One error, when calculating the deflection of a ray of light just grazing the edge of an object with the mass of the sun, took him four years to find and fix.



Today, scientists live and breathe computers. To them, computers are the equivalent of weight-training rooms for football players. They could do their jobs without them, but then they'd get squashed into the turf by the competition.



Computers do a lot of things for scientists, says Randy Isaac, vice president at IBM's Watson Research Labs. Some of it is mundane. Spreadsheets do basic arithmetic in a split second. Equations can be manipulated, run and checked with ease. "Theorists can much more quickly generate specific predictions of their special theory," he says. "Experimentalists can much more quickly gather and analyze data to tell the theorists sooner than ever that none of their theories are right and they better get back to the drawing boards."



Those are basically time savers and error eliminators. A step deeper is simulation.



One Maryland lab now has a complete, 3-D simulation of the Chesapeake Bay running on a supercomputer, allowing it to test theories about how the ecosystem works and see the results as if they were real. The University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana developed a simulation of the galaxies that lets a scientist "fly" anywhere in the known universe and see cosmological events.



What if Einstein had that stuff?



Think it could've hurt his efforts? What made Einstein great was not that he was smarter than anyone else. It was that he was able to break through accepted concepts of his time and think about things in brand-new ways. Maybe computers would've distracted him. He could've gotten sucked into a vortex of FreeCell and Web surfing and lost his way.



But maybe not. "I do not believe that computers have compelled people to think less," says Michael Levine, physics professor at Carnegie-Mellon University. "I think of computer technology not as replacing but rather as extending and complementing our other abilities in understanding the physical universe."



Computer technology would've done the same for Einstein, radically leveraging his brainpower. Einstein tended to seize mathematical tools that would help him generate his theories, so he probably would have embraced computers.



Give Einstein a supercomputer around 1905 and where might we be now? "I think science would've been pushed ahead a lot," Aczel says. "It's possible he would've come up with the theory of everything."



That would be huge indeed. Einstein's general theory of relativity does not jibe with quantum theory, which describes the actions of the tiniest particles. Scientists are still struggling with the enormous task of finding a theory that applies to both. For one thing, it seems to require 11 dimensions, which can be a problem because we are only comfortable living in four, and the Fifth Dimension never did much for anyone after Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In.



Uniting the theories would be like finding the keys to the universe. If Einstein had computers, he might've done that 90 years ago. All this time, we could've been using that equation to crack the riddles of creation and remake a better life on earth. And maybe, sometime long ago, mankind would've been able to take a different turn, so that we'd never have wound up today with IncrEdibles push-up Chili Mac on a stick. Kevin Maney covers technology for USA TODAY. Copyright © 1999, USA TODAY. All rights reserved.