It took Einstein, one of the most famous minds in history, about a decade to figure it out. But when I teach it I'll do a 10-week course, and in 10 weeks people will get a better idea of general relativity than Einstein really had in 10 years. That's because we have an advantage that Einstein didn't have. We have Einstein, and many others like him going before us, who've been able to take these super complicated ideas—understood at the time as being totally incomprehensible by anybody with a sub-Einstein level of intelligence—and boil them down to their essentials, and not make many of the same mistakes that were made by our forebears.
2mo ago