Expand your Problem Horizon

If we begin with certainties, we shall end in doubts; but if we begin with doubts, and are patient in them, we shall end in certainties.

Francis Bacon

After completing his schooling, Albert Einstein chose to undertake a teaching diploma in mathematics and physics at the Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich in 1897. He was 17 years old. In his excellent biography, Albrecht Fölsing relates how Einstein - despite his youth - was left largely unimpressed by the intellectual state of physics at the end of the nineteenth century:

“There was dogmatic rigidity on the matters of principles. In the beginning (if there was a beginning) God created Newton’s laws of motion, together with the necessary masses and forces. This is the lot; everything else derives by deduction from the development of suitable mathematical methods.”

Many of Einstein’s contemporaries, preoccupied with finding an explanation for why wave-based light was able to be propagated through a vacuum, postulated the existence of a weightless, transparent, entirely undetectable substance known as ‘ether’. Dissatisfied with such an approach, Einstein opted instead to pursue a rigorous course of self-study in his free time:

“I soon learned to ferret out that which might lead to the bottom of things, to disregard everything else, to disregard the multitude of things that fill the mind but detract from the essential.”

Fölsing goes on to document the actual manner in which Einstein began to approach his investigation of the fundamental underpinnings of physical phenomena:

Our earliest information on these reflections comes from a conversation which Max Werhtheimer, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, had with Einstein...Wertheimer had represented Einstein’s ‘problem horizon’ during that first probing phase as follows:

“What if one were to run after a ray of light? What if one were riding on the beam?…If one were to run fast enought, would it no longer move at all?”

In all probability, Einstein turned these problems over and over in his mind…certainly we know of no partners in his conversation or studies in literature that could have led him to such ideas.

Einstein’s pursuit would last for seven years, the latter portion of which saw him employed in the Swiss Patent Office:

He got on well with the director…but he complained about the workload, “I have a frightful lot of work. Eight hours at the office each day and at least one private lesson, and then I have my scientific work.” Once he had settled in, though, he found his forty-eight hours per week at the office tolerable.

Despite these competing demands, Einstein persisted, finally publishing his landmark treatise On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies in 1905:

At the age of twenty-six Einstein had succesffuly brought to fruition an intllectual adventure which had occupied him for a decade (if we include his schooldays in Aarau) and which had held him in thrall for at least seven years: the relativity principles in electrodynamics…These ideas involved a complete rethinking of the entire conceptual tradition of modern physics from its beginning.

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

There are of course many lessons to be drawn from Einstein’s tireless pursuit, but what struck me above all was his preoccupation with problems. While many contemporaries were seeking a solution to what they perceived to be minor inadequacies of the current paradigm, Einstein was content to reflect upon, experiment with, and refine his understanding of its underlying flaws.

Not just one problem, mind you, but problems upon problems, constantly turning them over, examining them, leaving them where they were, and returning to them. Gradually, this led to an expansion of what Wertheimer characterizes as Einstein’s “problem horizon” lending breadth and depth to Einstein’s understanding that, in due course, led to the entire edifice of contemporary physics to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

There is a kernel of a lesson in that for ourselves.

Often, when faced with a seemingly intractable problem, we search furiously for a solution; and in an age of abundance, apparent solutions are always near at hand: this product, that book, those experiences, ad infinitum. We become preoccupied with the extraneous and the “multitude of things that distract from the essential.”

What we often fail to do, because of the inherent discomfort, is what Einstein did: we fail to stay with the problem for longer. Our minds seek completion: close loop, tick box, problem solved. We tire of being in the middle. We tire of the process.

Einstein was content to sit, year after year, with a set of problems. In time, as he gained confidence in his conception of a new set of fundamental principles, the breadth and depth of his problem horizon began to expand, and thereafter the solution presented itself.

Thus, when brute force fails to suffice and the obstacle ahead - whether personal or professional - remains unmoved, it may be worth taking a leaf out of Einstein’s book and stepping back. Eschew the shortcut and ignore the hack. Stay with it longer.

Expand your problem horizon.

The solution will follow.