I did read it, Jack. Your claim was "It
explicitly concludes that Einstein's exclusion from mainstream physics was
key to his achievement of revolutionary insight." This is not a claim supported by the article. The article does posit that, and I'm quoting them, "perhaps" that his unusual education did help him. Let's quote them in full:
"And with this quotation I return to my original theme, the education of Albert Einstein. It is not hard to see why Einstein spoke so critically not only of his own education, but of educators generally. As we have seen, Einstein learned physics pretty much on his own. He did not, it appears, learn a great deal from his teachers, who in turn, saw in him little promise. In the crucial years he worked entirely apart from the community of European physicists. It is a hard lesson for a teacher to come up against. But it gets worse. Suppose Einstein had been more malleable, more open to guidance from the ETH faculty. Or suppose he had won his assistantship and had come under the influence of a mentor, someone like Lorentz in Holland or Boltzmann in Vienna. Perhaps such a teacher, skilled at guiding and encouraging students, could have molded Einstein’s thinking, brought him into the mainstream, and directed him to the problems that the leaders of 19th c physics thought important. Einstein would surely have become a successful physicist; but would he have become the original, revolutionary shaper of 20th c physics? Perhaps he was better off at the fringes."
You should notice a few things here. The first of which is that their claim that he worked totally apart from the physics community in his "critical years" is not entirely true (as I raised in the previous post, he was in frequent contact with the scientific community during the development of General Relativity; however, even preceding his "miracle year," he was discussing his ideas with other students, and he clearly spent a long time talking to his advisor about electrodynamics prior to that and all of which had an impact on his thinking.)
Secondly, the reason they keep on using terms like "perhaps" is because they cannot be certain. It's true that Einstein had an unusual education in the sense that he largely ignored what was in his classes and did do a fair amount his own self-taught lessons, but as I've repeated over and over again, that doesn't mean that Einstein was without formal education and hadn't had a large amount of exposure to the scientific world by the time he had his miracle year. Classes are a small part of academia, and by the time Einstein had written his first papers, he had had a large exposure to academia and academic works. He didn't just conjure physics papers and teach it to himself.
It also doesn't change the fact that he worked with the scientific community after his theories were written, and they developed into theories accepted by the scientific community. It is this sense that I meant that he was educated like any other physicist and conducted research like any other physicist. You can't be good at physics with no exposure to the physics community. You can do your best work alone (that's fairly typical of the best physicists), you can be largely self-taught (as I've said, most PhD's are), and so on, but that's not the same thing as not being related to or not having any exposure to academia. And it certainly doesn't prove that he did his best work exclusively because he was "excluded from mainstream physics." In fact, as I've pointed out, he created General Relativity in direct contact with the academic community.
