Motl & Smolin on Einstein

From Lubos Motl's comment I learned of Lee Smolin's Physics Today article Why no new Einstein?. Smolin thinks that physics departments in the US are not well structured to encourage the most creative and profound young physicists. Lubos offers tepid lip service to this notion and proceeds to prove that he misses the point entirely - not exactly unusual in his case. Along the way Lubos slams Einstein for knowing less differential geometry than is common among modern graduate students and for continuing to argue with orthodox quantum mechanics. He also throws in
Minkowski, his high school high teacher, certainly had a reason to call Einstein "the lazy dog". Einstein's poetry was mediocre and his violin skills were so-so.
I'm not quite sure whether Lubos is just creating a self-parody here or actually thinks he has said something interesting. More from Lubos
Later in his life, Einstein showed his inability to understand the new conceptual breakthroughs, especially those based on quantum mechanics. Because I believe that quantum mechanics represents the single most profound revolution in the 20th century physics, Einstein's misunderstanding of its inevitability was a pretty serious imperfection. Nevertheless, Einstein was able to transform his flawed opinions about quantum mechanics into something that led to great insights (about the entanglement) later.
So the point here is that Einstein's (deplorable to Lubos) stupidity led to EPR and Bell's Theorem, I guess. Read the rest of Lubos, if you like, but you will only find that his slavish devotion to (his conception of) orthodoxy is unbounded even by logical consistency. You might want to skip his 99 zillionth absurdly inappropriate invocation of "Cargo Cult Science."

Smolin's article, by contrast, has a lot of interesting suggestions. I don't know if they will help or hurt, or most likely, not even matter, but they might relieve some of the boredom in today's physics. Probably we will have to wait for the next breakthrough to be ready before the next Einstein, Dirac, or Feynman shows up.

ADDED: Lubos makes the valid (but fairly obvious) point that Einstein had a good knowledge of the physics of his time, and that that is a test for potential Crackpots. I don't think a mastery of superstring theory is included in the "physics of our time" category, but of course Lubos does. I suppose it's reasonable that anyone working in quantum gravity ought to know some strings at the level of Zwiebach, but not buying into the whole program is part of the point.

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