Thinking IELTS Listening Reading Practice

Thinking IELTS Listening Reading Practice

Lecturer, author or publisher: Robbert Dijkgraaf on Tech Insider

Thinking IELTS Reading Practice

Who was Albert Einstein?

Einstein was a true genius and he’s the example we all aspire to be as a scientist, but already, as a child, he had a very original way of thinking.

I’m Robbert Dijkgraaf. I’m the director and Leon Levy professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and I’m a theoretical physicist.

Einstein’s Original Way of Thinking

So, from the very beginning, for Einstein, his imagination was crucial. He was not such a good student because he was a very original thinker. And I think that was, kind of, the magic touch that he had. He always had a completely original point of view. He somehow didn’t conform to the existing theories and he was always thinking in his own particular way. His favorite way to operate as a scientist was the thought experiment and he describes, for instance, the crucial moment where he essentially discovered the theory of general relativity.

Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity

He was watching some workers on the roof of a building. He thought what would happen if they would fall down? And then, he realized that if you fall down, you no longer experience gravity, and, in some sense, that’s the natural motion. And that actually led him to derive the theory of general relativity. He described that moment as the happiest moment in his life. Later, he said something that I actually find personally very comforting. He said that imagination is much more important than knowledge because knowledge describes what we know, whereas imagination is describing everything that we can potentially know in the future.