Are the Einstein's dreams about a final theory only dreams or real science?

Luis Gustavo Lira of Peru asks:
Einstein had come back to the quantum theory after focusing on relativity. What are the most important contributions to the quantum theory? Was Einstein a genious or a lucky scientist how did the right questions? Are the Einstein's dreams about a final theory only dreams or real science? Dear Luis,
Your questions are very deep. I shall try to answer them the best I can.

1. What are the most important contributions to the quantum theory?
   Einstein got the Noble prize for the photoelectric effect in which he showed that light can behave like a particle, thus becoming one of the founders of the quantum theory, In his later years he also developed the Bose-Einstein statistics (in collaboration with S. N. Bose of India).
2. Was Einstein a genious or a lucky scientist how did the right questions?
   I believe that Einstein was a genius but he was lucky also. If coming up with Special Relativity and General Relativity in addition to "minor" stuff like the Photoelectric Effect (for which he won the Nobel Prize) is not genius then what is? That said, there is always an element of luck inn any such success story. What if Einstein had been born as goatherder in an impoverished family, say in India? He would probably have never learnt how to even read and write, forget about penning E = mc²! What I mean to say is that there is always an element of luck with the genes we are endowed at birth, the place we are born, the attitudes of the family/society towards curiousity/education. To use another analogy a seed thrown in an arid desert will die, but planted in fertile land will grow big.
3. Are the Einstein's dreams about a final theory only dreams or real science?
   Einstein's dreams about a final theory were dreams. He never succeeded in combining electromagnetism with general theory of relativity. But then isn't real science about dreams? Dreams of understanding the universe... The theory of everything has been a sort of a holy grail and physicists like Weinberg and Salam won the Nobel prize for making some progress towards it (more specifically for uniting electromagnetism and the weak interaction). Maybe just this year there will be a paper which combines the two or maybe we will have to wait until 2105 (if any of us reading this blog is still alive).

Comments

[Dennis Sustare]

"What if Einstein had been born as goatherder in an impoverished family, say in India?"

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a poor child in India, was largely self-taught in mathematics, and yet became one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.

I'm not convinced that a goatherd could not become a great theoretical physicist... and if his goats grazed near CERN, who knows what might happen!