Root for the outlier: In search of an alternative management paradigm

Abstract

This year marks the centenary of one of history’s greatest restatements on space and time: Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Like it or not, Einstein is alive and well in our deeply interconnected lives on this planet. Every aspect of daily life—be it Androids, offices or shopping complexes— is under an Einstein shadow. Theoretical physicists like Lee Smolin have for long argued that the frontiers of knowledge have not moved beyond the point where Einstein left it. That assertion, however, could be contested particularly since it’s made by Smolin, an Einstein fan who has positioned himself as an iconoclast academic and intellectual soothsayer with teaching stints at Yale, Syracuse University and Pennsylvania State University. Famous for his shrill, fiction-style books on the pressing problems of science, this Harvard alumnus mercilessly yanks down ‘the gods of contemporary physics’ and employs tell-tale anecdotes (some of them of questionable veracity) to establish his point. In one of his controversial books, The Trouble with Physics, he had the courage to declare the ‘in-fashion’ string theory in physics as a grand failure. Smolin is currently a professor at Canada’s Perimeter Institute. A peculiar name for a research centre in theoretical physics, Perimeter has a ‘volcanic’ mission—to seek a ‘collision of intellect, imagination and inspiration’. As a responsible member of Perimeter’s faculty, Smolin is left with no alternative but to be on a collision course with his own fraternity. In his recent essay in Logos, titled ‘Einstein’s Legacy: Where Are the “Einsteinians?”’, Smolin makes the following revelation, ‘Physicists I’ve met who knew Einstein told me they found his thinking slow compared to the stars of the day. While he was competent enough with the basic mathematical tools of physics, many other physicists surrounding him in Berlin and Princeton were better at it. So what accounted for his genius? In retrospect, I believe what allowed Einstein to achieve so much was primarily a moral quality. He simply cared far more than most of his colleagues that the laws of physics have to explain everything in nature coherently and consistently. As a result he was acutely sensitive to flaws and contradictions in the logical structure of physical theories.’ … Read more at: https://openthemagazine.com/essays/open-essay/root-for-the-outlier/