Albert Einstein's most famous work, Zur Elektrodynamik Bewegter Körper...

Albert Einstein's most famous work, Zur Elektrodynamik Bewegter Körper, explains the most complex and revolutionary thought mankind has ever produced, special relativity, on 30 pages.
Is it fair to say that any literary work longer than this is intellectually bloated and unnecessary?

literature in general is unnecessary.

Please don't be alive anymore

an innocent thread died for this

Counter-argument?

>le science
>complex
>revolutionary

>argument
>fair
>supposed to be willing to entertain a 20 yo undergrad

>Is it fair to say that any literary work longer than this is intellectually bloated and unnecessary?

No.

That said, you can probably summarize your thoughts pretty thoroughly within 30 pages. Many authors do exactly this, you can usually skim a first and last chapter and get a pretty solid idea of a thesis. To explain it in depth, however, and to address potential critiques / explore alternative viewpoints / thoroughly support your argument it requires more. This is harder to do when you can't provide equations, which is what much of Einstein's paper is composed of. Not all thoughts = explanations of physics. It can sometimes take a lot more work to explain and defend concepts in say, the humanities.

Not to mention if Einstein wanted to explain his theory to laymen rather than other physicians it would also take a lot more work - he would need to elaborate on and explain many things he assumes his reader knows. So your audience also needs to be considered.

>Not to mention if Einstein wanted to explain his theory to laymen rather than other physicians it would also take a lot more work - he would need to elaborate on and explain many things he assumes his reader knows. So your audience also needs to be considered.
In other words, any literary creation of a large volume is low-brow in nature?

You're really fond of simplistic answers, aren't you? You missed the rest of my post I see.

In some cases, a literary work being large means yes, it's trying to be understandable to a wide readership. In other cases it is trying to explain itself. That can be done by supporting your argument with numerous examples / pieces of evidence, or addressing critiques that someone might have if they read your arguments.

The thing is - and I'm speaking as a layman so if this board has physicians who want to tell me I'm full of shit please do - that when you're proving a physics theory, usually your theory speaks for itself. You go "This is how I think it works, observe the phenomenon for yourself and see if it fits the equation."

This can be a lot harder to do if you're, say, trying to prove what the best form of government is. In that case the onus is often on the writer to provide the examples of their ideal form of government, reason out why it succeeded, how it succeeded, how you can achieve it, how it can go wrong, how to prevent it from going wrong, examine other forms of government and their flaws, etc. Generally with these sorts of books you've got "This is what I think is the case." which fits easily within 30 pages, and then the rest is unpacking the argument. That said, a lot of lengthy tomes would probably benefit from a bit more brevity and yes, some authors do drone on pointlessly or pad out their arguments.

Basically, user, if you want to read the cliffnotes of books you'll probably get a good enough gist that you can pretend you know what you're talking about and impress all your friends, but you probably won't be very well aware of the ways in which they supported their argument and came to their conclusions. You're basically taking their theory on trust, because you stopped at the conclusion and didn't follow how they got there.