Unification: Einstein and Jobs Got It Right, But...
Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs unified the worlds they inhabited, mostly for good. However, those who attempt to emulate these giants need to understand them well before attempting to build similar unities of their own.
Both Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs were very similar.
They were independent thinking geniuses in their work life who worked long and hard to achieve perfection. They also found it difficult to suffer fools; could be devastatingly harsh on those who disagreed with them; believed intensely in the value of personal freedom; were outsiders in the social worlds they inhabited, yet felt mightily for the people who were affected by their work; had less than perfect family relationships; fathered illegitimate children they paid little attention to early in their lives; and, and this is a big and, built their careers on revolutionary unifying concepts that sought to simplify the world they lived in.
Einstein worked all of his life to build a unified theory that explained everything in the observable physical world. Jobs worked all his life to build a unified set of products. While what Einstein and Jobs each wrought is hardly comparable, their lives attracted Walter Isaacson to create two of the most enlightening biographies I’ve ever read.
Everything else aside, it is Einstein’s and Jobs’ commitment to unification that stands out in Isaacson’s Einstein and in his Steve Jobs. For both men, the goal of unification was always simplification; making it easier for people to work in a world that often seemed governed more by chaos than predictability and order.
In a brief period of a few months in 1905, while working as a patent clerk in Zurich, Switzerland, 26 year old Albert Einstein wrote three papers that overturned nearly 300 years of established scientific thought. The papers focused on treating light as particles (quanta) just like other physical particles, rather than waves; a proof of the then not so well accepted idea that atoms and molecules actually exist; and a theory that unified constant velocity and the constancy of the speed of light around a view of time as relative to an observer, not absolute as previously postulated. The latter paper presented Einstein's theory of special relativity.
A few months after the theory of special relativity was published, Einstein published another paper based on special relativity. This one presented one of the most famous equations of all time, E=mc^2 (energy = mass * the speed of light squared), which is the basis of, among other things, atomic energy. But Einstein wasn’t happy. He wanted a more general unified theory of relativity. It took him until 1915 to deliver that theory, which among other things brought into the mix varying velocity, a remarkable explanation for what we call "gravity", and the related concept of the curvature of the time/space continuum.
The rest of his life, Einstein continued to work on an even more unifying theory. Though he made some progress, Einstein never succeeded in building a theory that encompassed every phenomenon. But, Einstein brought a kind of unity to the sciences that, while sometimes difficult for we mere mortals to grasp, ultimately makes it easier to understand our universe and build better science and technology, as well as the horrendous kind that Einstein so abhorred as atom and hydrogen bombs came to be before his death in 1955.
Because he was a contemporary and his work was with concrete technologies, we know Steve Jobs accomplishments better than Einstein’s. So, I won’t take your time with Jobs’ unifying efforts. The important points about the Apple system that Jobs fathered are its unity and simplification. Apple controls most of the Apple ecosystem. Yes, there are software vendors and a few hardware vendors out there, but when you buy from Apple you get a mostly integrated product set. When something goes wrong, it’s pretty difficult for Apple to point fingers at others. Sure, even in the hands of a unique company such as Apple, creativity can be quashed, but, if you want something simple that works, well-constructed unified systems do make sense, whether in science or technology.
Now for the part I’m just a little bit scared about. Based mostly on the cult of personality surrounding Steve Jobs, I expect that unification will become a central theme of technology companies. In fact it already is. What else are "Cloud Computing", "Converged Infrastructure", "Virtualization" and "Unified Communications" all about? My fear is that technological unification will produce more figurative atom bombs and tightly controlled app stores, and less of the soul and mind freeing realities that can make our work and personal technical lives easier, more productive and more fun.
As companies from HP to IBM to Dell to Cisco to Microsoft seek to bring us more and more under their unifying umbrellas with comprehensive hardware and software solutions, we should be open to their promises of a good and easier life. But we and they also need to remember Einstein’s and Jobs’ devotion to the values of independent thinking, perfection and personal freedom. Unification without humanity, without attention to the real needs of those who will use unified creations, is not the answer.
Barry Gerber is Editorial Director for Bestofmedia USA, publisher of Tom’s IT Pro. He managed the Tom's Hardware site for several years, and oversaw creation of the site that is now Tom's Guide. Barry is the spiritual father of TIP, having devoted three years to its development. Barry spent many a happy year as in IT pro in finance, insurance, health and education. Also, he has written for a number of IT publications and published a number of IT related books. See here for all of Barry's Tom's IT Pro articles.
(Images provided by Simon and Schuster, publishers of Walter Isaacson's books, Einstein and Steve Jobs.)