Genius Inboxes: How Einstein and Darwin did mail
According to an article in the New Scientist, Einstein and Darwin handled their correspondence in much the same way as we handle our inboxes today.
Or to put it another way, the arrival of email hasn’t altered patterns of communication and correspondence very much. The research, by a physicist at the University of Notre Dame, Albert-Laszlo Barabosi, suggests a fundamental human pattern of “communication in bursts”:
Both Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein relied on pen, paper, and the postal service to communicate with correspondents around the world. But researchers have now found the pattern of their replies is the same as that of computer users answering email today, with both following the same mathematical formula….
These two icons worked in a time when scientific communication was largely by written letter — Darwin sent at least 7591 letters in his career, and Einstein sent 14,500, writing an average of half a letter and one letter per day, respectively.
Yet despite the differences between electronic communication and paper, the same pattern held up — both men answered most of their mail quickly, within about 10 days. But some of the answers took months or even years to send (Nature, vol 437, p 1251). “From the scientific point of view, the interesting thing is that there is a fundamental way that we do things,” Barabosi says.
Hmmm…. “An average of half a letter and one letter per day, respectively”. Maybe something in our patterns of communication has changed after all.
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November 12th, 2005 at 8:06 am
sounds like a load of nonsense, as if they can compare any patterns of using paper vs email its crap and yet another useless article to entertain people. Nobody will ever know how these guys thought and/or handled their way of doing things. Who’s the idiot who wrote that article
November 12th, 2005 at 9:17 am
Physicists! What can you do? ;-)