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Quote by: triad  Both. His degrees did nothing for him. Actually, after graduating from SFIT, he quit science for a year due to finding lectures and tests so intolerable in university that it gave him a buzz-kill. Mind you, he was only 16 - but he didn't need those diplomans considering he educated himself from the age of 15. |
That's just not true. He did quit school and then was unable to pass the entrance test to get into the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). Thus, he went back to school and finished his secondary education before being admitted to the ETH. That isn't quite the same as educating himself.
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If he educated himself without the internet, people in this day and age should be able to do so with the internet.
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Right. He educated himself by attending classes at the ETH and the University of Zurich.
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Einstein was an exception because he was a genius, but with the resources we have on the internet - a 12 year old kid should be able to teach themself geometry just like Einstein did at that age without the internet.
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That's just wonderful if it were true. Unfortunately, I suspect that learning something like differential calculus or linear algebra might be a bit of a problem.
Besides, Einstein would not have been appointed to positions at the University of Zurich, The University of Prague, the ETH, and the University of Berlin. Of course, while a professor at the ETH Zurich, Einstein was taught Riemannian geometry by another professor. Einstein found it useful in his general theory of relativity.
By the way, one of the 5 papers that Einstein published in the annus mirabilis (1905) was his dissertation for his PhD. Another was the paper for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, and yet another was the special theory of relativity. The last paper of 1905 was essentially a footnote to special relativity. It was about the equivalence of matter/energy.
Anyway, no matter how much time you spent on the internet or how much you think you know, a major engineering firm won't even look at your application if you don't have a real degree. No matter how much medicine you read about, you can't call yourself doctor and treat patients. You can't even call yourself a nurse and get a job without a diploma. You can probably think of many more examples.