All right, let’s be very picky. What is “really Swiss?” Einstein was born in Germany and did poorly in school out of boredom because his higher mental faculties were occupied with trying to understand the nature of light. He moved to Switzerland to attend technical school and became a Swiss citizen, which I believe would make him Swiss. (Aren’t naturalized American citizens “Americans?”) He was employed by the Swiss Patent Office in 1905 when his thinking about light resulted in publication of his second paper which would later become the Special Theory of Relativity.
He maintained his Swiss citizenship after returning to Germany to teach and do research, and even after he became a U.S. citizen in 1940.
Invention vs. discovery. It’s a matter of semantics. One definition of an invention is “the creation of something in the mind.” What Einstein “invented” was a new way of thinking about light, time, physics and cosmology in general. His inventive insights, which resulted in major discoveries in physics, also had a major practical impact on future thinking about time and such mundane timekeeping machines as cuckoo clocks and world-class Swiss watches.
Bernard,
I was not being totally serious about the Swiss thing.
It’s not true, however, that invention vs. discovery is a matter of semantics. I know the words are frequently misused, even incorrectly defined, but once you understand it, the difference is quite simple, and quite important. It’s not the intention of the words that matter, but what they are about. True science discovers things, it does not invent them. Inventors, designers, and technologists invent things.
You can invent all kinds of iron tools and machines, but you cannot invent iron, you have to discover it.
You can invent a laser, but you have to discover the quantum excitation of light before you can invent it (which Einstein did, by the way). You cannot invent the quantum nature of matter, because it has always existed.
You can invent an atomic bomb, but you fist have to discover the nature of atoms and relationship between matter and energy (which Einstein also did). You cannot invent the nature of atoms because that has also always been true.
See the difference. You cannot discover what is invented because it does not exist until someone invents it. You cannot invent what is discovered because what is discovered has always been there, just not yet discovered.
If you wanted to say Einstein invented a way of expressing some of things he discovered, that might be ok, but it’s the things he discovered for which he is most famous.
Hank