Einstein Has Left the Building 443
Ant writes to tell us of an interesting editorial by John Horgan that is being run by the New York Times asking "will there ever be another Einstein?". The author looks at why Einstein holds such a hallowed position in public opinion and why it will be so hard for any one physicist to attain the same level of fame today. From the article: "The paradoxical answer, Gleick suggested, is that there are so many brilliant physicists alive today that it has become harder for any individual to stand apart from the pack. In other words, our perception of Einstein as a towering figure is, well, relative."
As Einstein once said... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:As Einstein once said... (Score:3, Interesting)
However i'm not sure that many of them Einsteins ever discovered that they are so brilliant at all...
Re:As Einstein once said... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is always a duck-billed platypus to throw a monkey wrench into the works...
Re:As Einstein once said... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:As Einstein once said... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you misunderstand modeling. Take a brick. The very act of measuring the length of the brick involves modeling. Most of us use a very simple model that we learned in elementary school: length, height, width, volume. length > width; width > height; volume = length * width * height.
But the brick doesn't have these simple dimensions. Look closely and you will see that the brick has rough edges. Our simple model of an ideal rectangular solid doesn't capture all of the details of our brick. I would go so far as to say that the brick doesn't have length, only our model of the brick does. Indeed, this discussion is actually about a model brick because like snowflakes and fingerprints, no two bricks are alike. So talking about bricks requires that we all share some mental model of what a brick is.
For an introduction to some of the difficulties of measurement, see Mandelbrot's description of the lenght of coasts in "The Fractal Geometry of Nature." [amazon.com]
Personality, not brains (Score:5, Insightful)
From Wikipedia:
Re:Personality, not brains (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that the same holds true of virtually any public figure, whether it's a singer, actor, or politician. How many times to we hear the media speak of a President of the US (past and present) working to build his legacy? I don't think that Churchill or FDR spent much time worrying about legacy, yet history counts them as great men. The more you try to secure your place in history, the more elusive it becomes.
Re:Personality, not brains (Score:5, Interesting)
"I don't think that Churchill or FDR spent much time worrying about legacy, yet history counts them as great men."
Churchill cared so much about his legacy that he wrote a 6 volume memoir of his actions during the war, modestly entitled "The Second World War [amazon.com]." It's good reading, but make no mistake about its purpose. From start to finish it's an apologia for his every action during that time.
And when talking about Roosevelts, I'm more prone to remember Eleanor Roosevelt [wikipedia.org] as the modest one. This is a woman who, in the dark days of segregation, drove through southern towns with a pistol on the seat beside her, to address groups like the NAACP. When a bunch of up uptight matrons refused to allow a black soprano to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington, she arranged to have the concert at the Lincoln Memorial. 70,000 people attended.
Eleanor Roosevelt was also the driving force behind one of the most important documents since Hammurabi - the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [un.org].
Churchill and Roosevelt were both extremely dynamic personalities who knew exactly how to present themselves to the public, and whose private faces were sometimes strikingly different from their public ones. That said, they both made important - critical, even - contributions to world history.
Re:Personality, not brains (Score:5, Interesting)
-- Winston Churchill
Currently, we have:
"To those of you who received honours, awards and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say you, too, can be president of the United States."
-- George W. Bush, speaking at Yale University's 300th commencement ceremony
Sorry, I don't know of any quotes that reveal much character from a US president in the last 40 years.
Here are some others though from before then:
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
-- Theodore Roosevelt
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
--Abraham Lincoln
Check out this progression:
"Government is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force. And, like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
-- George Washington
to:
"The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing."
-- Ronald Reagan, October 27, 1964
Re:Personality, not brains (Score:4, Insightful)
"Government is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force. And, like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
-- George Washington
to:
"The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing."
-- Ronald Reagan, October 27, 1964
There isn't as much difference between those statements as you seem to imply. Consider the very next sentance in Reagan's speech:
"Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, "What greater service we could render if only we had a little more money and a little more power." But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector. "
Also consider his famous line, "Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem." There's a reason why Reagan is considered the father of the modern conservative movement, and it's not because he was pro-government.
Re:Personality, not brains (Score:4, Insightful)
BWHAHAHA! Is this the same Einstein who pissed off 90% of his professors in college because he was such a rogue?
Einstein was a giant among physicists because of his extrodinary intelligence. He asked the questions no one else thought to ask, and produced the answers through nothing more than logical deduction. The answers he produced were so profound and world changing that it took decades for science to really grab ahold of them.
But perhaps the most interesting part about Mr. Einstein is that he was heavily anti-institutional. His rogue personality not only clashed heavily with the "established" scientific community (who thought they had all the answers when they had precisely zilch), but he tore them apart and made way for a completely new breed of scientist.
Will there ever be another Einstein? No. No more than there will be another Isaac Newton. There will be a completely new figure who will have such an incredible way of looking at the Universe that it will put everyone else to shame.
Re:Personality, not brains (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.timecube.com/ [timecube.com]
Re:Personality, not brains (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Personality, not brains (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Personality, not brains (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Personality, not brains (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Personality, not brains (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Personality, not brains (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Personality, not brains (Score:3, Informative)
What makes Einstein so-called "intellectual superior", as if this is some kind of competition, is that Einstein connected gravity together with the geometry
Re:Personality, not brains (Score:5, Funny)
Reporter : Mr Einstein, can you explain to us how the wireless works ?
Einstein : Well, you know the telegraph, it's like a very long cat, it has its tail in New York and its head in Los Angeles. You pull the tail and the head mews.
Reporter : Uh, yes...
Einstein : You see, the wireless works the same except there is no cat.
Re:Personality, not brains (Score:3, Insightful)
Lemme see, he was an anti-institutional rogue when he was a young student, and became a thoughtful, humble man when he matured. Whoever heard of that happening before?
Re:Personality, not brains (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Personality, not brains (Score:5, Informative)
They don't make 'em.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They don't make 'em.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Same with Stephen Hawking. He's famous in pop culture today mostly because of his disability, which fits with the media's love of handicapped geniuses (aside from eccentric looking geniuses, like Einstein).
Exactly! I think thats the point. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Exactly! I think thats the point. (Score:3, Insightful)
But of course leave it to someone on Slashdot to nit pick my comments.
Re:Exactly! I think thats the point. (Score:3, Interesting)
So then would it be wrong of me to point out that you spelled Richard Feynman's name incorrectly for a second time, even after I oh so subtly pointed out that fact in my last response? Or perhaps you were speaking of an alternate reality in which a low level government official inadvertently dropped the "n" when transcribing Feynman's last name on his birth certificate? :-)
Quick ask someone to name as many scientists as they can.
I
Re:They don't make 'em.... (Score:3, Informative)
Show me (Score:5, Informative)
Things have changed (Score:5, Insightful)
The unsolved problems that people are working on today are much more complex, so comparing the rates at which they are solved is meaningless.
When I was slogging through my 250 page PhD dissertation, I came across an article about disserations of such famous people as Schroedinger and other physicists of the 1920's - whose entire dissertations were about as long as Section 1.1 of my introduction.
Trying to compare now and then is all but irrelevant.
Re:Things have changed (Score:5, Funny)
When I was slogging through my 250 page PhD dissertation, I came across an article about disserations of such famous people as Schroedinger and other physicists of the 1920's - whose entire dissertations were about as long as Section 1.1 of my introduction.
Don't make excuses for yourself: Schroedinger's dissertation was of infinite length until observed.
~Will
Re:Easier than reading the Heisenberg paper (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Things have changed (Score:3, Insightful)
Or maybe it's just that nobody has found the simple solutions yet. Maybe the next Einstein will find something simple that makes string theory an embarassment in throwing brute mass math at the problem. Ya never know....
Thus the establishment has always argued (Score:3, Interesting)
Today I'm betting that, like then, there are still plenty of fundamental questions left to answer (although we might not know how to ask them yet). And the funny thing about truly fundamental questions is that they usually have pretty simple an
Re:Show me (Score:5, Funny)
So is your argument that publishing quality work is a zero sum game? I bet our good friend Einstein would have loved the Internet. Then he'd have blogged about ten good papers per year.
Re:Show me (Score:5, Insightful)
Now you (usually) need huge accelerators and expensive satellites to collect fundamental data... and when those things produce readings, many people find out about them simultaneously, and the race is on. We just don't build many of these in a year, and we don't build the stuff that would really show us something exciting, since it would cost too much. So fundamental physicists may be somewhat starved for data, which is why they to off on adventures into this purely abstract mathematical string theory wonderland. Of course, they're a clever lot, and if we let them work on it longer, maybe the will find a way to test it.
Re:Show me (Score:4, Interesting)
And now with databases and networking we can aggregate data across disciplines like never before. Fertile ground for a new Einstein, I would have thought.
complexity does not necessarily mean brilliance (Score:5, Interesting)
It's like the way Copernicus swept away the huge complexity of the Ptolemaic astronomer's theory of planetary orbits, all those cycles and epicycles, with the simple and powerful idea of the elliptical orbit. Or how Mendeleev replaced the 18th century's bewildering lists of correlations between chemical properties of substances with the simple and powerful organizational principles of the Periodic Table.
Even in my own experience as a theoretician I find the truly brilliant ideas are not complex. They're insights that drastically simplify and clarify. They're the kind of things that, when you understand them, make you slap your head in awe and envy.
So, from this point of view, the hideous complexity of modern high-energy physics theories could well be a sign that they lack brilliance, that another Einstein is needed to clear away all the baroque epicycles, so to speak, and replace it all with something beautifully simple and far more powerful.
Of course, this might not be true -- it might instead be the case that the basic structure of the universe is simply too complex for ordinary humans to understand even its principles. But I find this hard to believe (for no logical reason, I admit).
So I personally disagree with Mr. Horgan. I think he's just channeling Albert Michelson in 1896 ("The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered....Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.") Like Michelson, Horgan thinks that because no revolution has happened in 50 years one will never happen. But it was almost 300 years between Newton and Einstein. So I'd give it another century or two before giving up.
This is pretty obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is pretty obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is pretty obvious (Score:4, Informative)
There was a world war going on in 1905 when he published his papers? Really? Which one?
Re:This is pretty obvious (Score:3, Informative)
Are you really that sure about that?
I'll agree that the chances of another discovery where such a profound statement (that energy and mass are convertible) can be made in so simple a form is unlikely, but by no means is it impossible. I have a suspicion that if you went to 1904 and asked someone if such a statement c
Chaitin recommends (Score:2)
Re:This is pretty obvious (Score:2)
Einstien was a "big picture" type of guy, details were something he "looked up" to confirm the picture.
Einstein was the frst slashdotter! (Score:5, Funny)
At first, he was a troll.
Then he became interesting.
But he was very underrated.
His theories were all flamebait.
But he was very informative.
And insightful.
Once in a while, funny.
And now he's getting overrated?
Wow!
Re:This is pretty obvious (Score:5, Funny)
I agree.
MOD EINSTEIN UP!!!
Uh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Uh? (Score:2)
Hawking: "Your theory of a donut-shaped universe is intriguing, Homer. I may have to steal it."
Homer: "Wow, I can't believe someone I never heard of is hanging out with a guy like me."
Re:Uh? (Score:2)
Re:Uh? (Score:2)
Anyway just because Homer doesn't know him doesn't mean that no braindead idiots know him. Fry knew him and worked at the pizzaria he frequented.
Re:Uh? (Score:4, Insightful)
So he's done some novel things within cosmology, along with Penrose, Rees, and others, but how does that compare with Einstein? Which of Hawking's discoveries do you think is worthy of a Nobel Prize, specifically why should Hawking get one over other cosmologists? Einstein should have had at least a few more Nobel prizes (special relativity itself is worthy, not to mention GR, and his study of Brownian Motion is pretty good too).
While Hawking is well-known (he'd probably be less famous if he wasn't in a wheelchair), Einstein's research ran a much wider gamut, including opening up entirely new areas of physics.
Re:Uh? (Score:5, Funny)
While Hawking is well-known (he'd probably be less famous if he wasn't in a wheelchair)
The wheelchair and speaking device is the tradeoff for sacrificing all that DEX and CHA for the high INT.
Re:Uh? (Score:3, Interesting)
The intelligence he probably had, but there are a lot of brilliant people who never get that far. One of the reasons he's come so far is because he's had a lot of time to work on it sitting in his wheelchair. Most discoveries are made by relatively young people, often single and often without children. Cue the "geeks can't get laid" jokes, but it is much simpler than that.
If you got up early to get the k
huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
There were *many* brilliant physicists in Einstein's time as well.
As modern physicists approach Einstein's fame... (Score:5, Funny)
Hey ScutMon... (Score:2)
no need for name calling (Score:2, Funny)
reign in the drug companies (Score:3, Interesting)
With all the parents doping up their kids on antidepressants [newstarget.com], I'd say not likely. (We're already seeing that Generation Y can barely wipe its own nose [suntimes.com] in the workplace. )
Re:reign in the drug companies (Score:3)
Applied Theory? (Score:5, Insightful)
Einstein's work straddled this line within his lifetime, making him a figure of daunting intellectual prowess and yet still accessable (in some small manner) by the average man. Surely this combination of theory and practice has strengthened his legacy.
More over, Einstein lived at the height of the modernist movement in world history - a time when advances in technology could do no wrong. In the minds of many (and they would be wrong) he single-handedly brought about the revolution in the views society holds on technology. While Einstein is not to be entirely credited or blamed for post-modernism, he is often thought of as the turning point by the public at large.
Information technology, more than any other force, has accelerated the theoretical side of physics away from the applied aspects of the same. We are capable of manipulating mathematics with far greater precision and finess than the physical world we inhabit. As a consequence, it would seem unlikely that any physicist will straddle that line between the theoretical and applied worlds in the near future.
The Conclusion is astonishing (Score:5, Insightful)
Resume padding (Score:5, Funny)
Dude! You forgot to mention Archimedes! :) (Score:2)
Hindsight is 20/20 (Score:5, Insightful)
Deep vs Narrow (Score:5, Insightful)
First, once you get an iconic person, that's it. The game is up for quite a while. Ever notice how all the caricatures of muscle-types take after Governor Arnold? Or how all psychiatrists take after Freud? This is not because we haven't had people with more muscles (we have) or analysts who have not helped larger numbers of people. When you have an icon, you might as well keep it. It's a reference that everyone already "gets".
Second, I would argue that as time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to dominate a field. Look at da Vinci. He was a brilliant man to be sure. But if he were alive today, he'd never have been able to master so many fields. There is just so much research out there about the most minute aspect of any field that no one would have time to keep up. And why would we idolize the guy worked in one very small subset, when these people of past years could dominate so many fields? In a way, they had it easy. Anything they looked at represented a new area of science much the way that any explorer who sailed from Europe a thousand years ago would have been able to claim a new territory. It's much harder now; I've tried!
Also, for those of you who have read the story, I suppose the article should not have asked "Will there be another Einstein?", but rather "Will there be another ThatGeek?". And no, there won't be as I've already registered the nick.
Einstein could be understood (Score:3, Insightful)
Those 2 things make Einstein much more tangible to the average person. One can remember what he actually did, and see an enormous practical application.
Re:Einstein could be understood (Score:4, Insightful)
I think general relativity is a very different story. Without Einstein, it might have taken decades to work it out. I mean, really, it's just an amazing piece of work, and something that's hard to work up to incrementally.
So you're right about E=mc^2 being easy for people to remember, but in a way that's a shame, because it shouldn't be taken as anything like his greatest work.
The atomic bomb ruined physics in many ways (Score:2, Insightful)
After the invention of the atomic bomb, governments realized that physicists could actually do something useful. Funding poured in and physics became a business.
A different but similar thing happened to programming in the dotcom boom. The field got flooded with people who were in it for the money and not for the love of the game.
Re:The atomic bomb ruined physics in many ways (Score:4, Insightful)
That's right, it's not like governments ever funded people to use physics to predict the trajectory of a bullet from a large gun before the atomic bomb. And moreso, it's not like they ever decided that for large distances the Coriolis force and air resistance need to be properly accounted for and thus they never needed to fund the development of electric computers.
Nor did they ever need to understand physics to figure out the design of aerofoil wings, or the best shape to make ship hulls, before the atom bomb.
Re:The atomic bomb ruined physics in many ways (Score:3, Informative)
So, ye
It's All Relative... (Score:2)
Yeah, Isaac Newton felt the same way after the apple hit him in the head.
Einstein had Charisma (Score:4, Informative)
Einstein put Relativity on the table, which was previously unknown except to a few as something funky going on with Maxwell's equations under a Galilean transformation. This was an entirely new field. And, when extended into General Relativity, is a huge deal. Not many people get to discover a whole new field of physics like that. Newton did with mechanics. But with E&M, it was several people making discoveries, such as Ampere and Faraday and some others. And the full theory wasn't really collected nicely until Maxwell, who also corrected Ampere's Law. And that's only the classical theory, Quantum Electro-Dynamics is another huge thing. But within classical E&M, you can say Maxwell fully documented it, but it was already an explored field (no pun intended, seriously).
Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics had many people make major contributions, specifically when thermodynamics was found to be described entirely within statistical mechanical formalism. Boltzmann made major contributions, eg coming up with entropy and statistical ensembles, but his work wasn't accepted by the community and he ultimately wound up killing himself.
One physicist that may have come close to Einstein in breadth is my favorite, Lev Davidovic Landau. Any graduate student of physics should be familiar with at least some of his ten-volume "Course of Theoretical Physics", otherwise known as Landau-Lifshitz. Landau's grad students were known to be confused during meetings where he would shift topics from superconductivity to hadron interactions, etc. Landau made many amazing contributions, and also won a Nobel Prize, but he wasn't able to open up any entirely new fields of study like Einstein was able to. He made contributions to other fields, such as 2nd-order phase transitions, superconductivity and superfluidity, etc, but no entirely new fields.
Finally, Einstein was also rather active politically and socially, he didn't confine his efforts to the laboratory (well, really his desk since he was a theorist). He also had quite a unique physical appearance, which also contributed to his popularity. But I think, from a popular point of view, his contribution of relativity, which is probably one of the biggest scientific blowbacks to something that was previously accepted as scientifically true and complete, was the dominant factor. Of course scientifically he made many other major contributions, but for the newspapers, trumping over Newton is a rather 'hot' story.
Didn't anyone see Family Guy? (Score:4, Funny)
My take on this... (Score:3, Insightful)
On one hand, there is the issue that information that humans possess is increasing at exponential rate, if not faster. At one point in history, you could be a painter, a sculptor, a mathematician, a philosopher, a physicist, among other things, and still be useful to the society in all of those areas. Today however, such thing is unrealistic due to the fact of how deep each area goes, and how much must be learned of the works of those who came before you in order for you to get to the level of being able to make personal contributions.
On the other hand, you do have to remember that a century or two ago, physics was thought to be a "finished" science. As in, many physicists around the world believed that the Newtonian model has given them all that is needed, and most viewed physics as a done deal. We understand how it works, nothing more is left to learn, move along. Then came Einstein and turned the whole thing upside down.
While on my commutes to and from university last semester, I downloaded audio lectures on particle physics. One of the very first things the professor said was "today, most particle physicists believe that we have a solid understanding of what the world is made up of, and that, unlike a few decades ago, we really have gotten to the bottom layer of the universe." He ended the lectures (which were extremely interesting btw) by saying that as good as the standard model of physics is, we still have 23 quantum numbers that are unattainable through mathematics, ideas which defy logic, and a bunch of other theories like string which may also be onto something.
Overall, I think that if any conclusion is to be made about the state of physics today, I would say that no, Einstein hasn't left the building. In my opinion, we are still missing something crucial about the way the world operates, but we may not realize this until advances in other technology areas such as space travel. Individuals still can make great breakthroughs, but because of issues such as the amount of foundational knowledge, the number of people working on the same things, and the money needed for some of the research, it may be more likely that future discoveries will need to be left to teams of scientists, rather than individuals.
Re:My take on this... (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless and until somebody can work around that rather fundamental set of issues, it seems like these more aesthetically pleasing models
General improvement? (Score:5, Insightful)
I played the violin for about 15 years, and had to stop, because for me the strain of a performance + the need for constant practice overshadows the joy received from playing. I now play quite happily at the back of the second violins in an orchestra - room for fun, and mistakes are rarely heard
Anyway, my point is, perhaps something similar is happening in the field of science.
Re:General improvement? (Score:3, Funny)
Not that I, by any stretch of imagination or schooling have the right to comment, but, I will.
No, there aren't many who are at the level of Heifitz.
As an aside, your post and profession provide me with an opportunity to ask if you know whether an anecdote I've heard is apocryphal. I was told Fritz Kreisler loved the night life and hated to practise. On occasion he shared the stage with Sergei Rachmaninov who would request Kreisler put in some audition time only to be
wrong.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm no Einstein, but I do think in a Bergeronian way. I take a concept, invert it entirely, and think - Why has traditional thinking prevented this from working? and Could it actually work (contrary to popular accepted practice)? Ignore the existing reasoning for why it doesn't work. You will either a) confirm that it doesn't work; b) have an epiphany and a resultant breakthrough or c) something else
Traditional thinking dictates that a square peg can't fit into a round hole. Of course traditional thinking doesn't consider that obscure 4th Dimension - which makes it possible to fit a square peg into a round hole.
Re:wrong.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:wrong.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, kid, your brilliant physics was trumped by your incorrect use of basic vocabulary. Don't get too hopeful about that philosophy degree, eh.
All it takes is a new view of the universe (Score:2)
We don't need another hero... (Score:5, Insightful)
On a scientific level, had Einstein not existed, someone else would have done the work eventually - the tools and conditions were in place for these discoveries to be made. But on a societal level, it probably would have been necessary to invent him...
Unexplained Phenomena (Score:3, Insightful)
In retrospect we realize that these were major problems that required fundamental new theories.
There are also some Unexplained Phenomena today, it's just a question whether these are misinterpreted experiments or something new that existing theory can't explain.
When there comes to be too much unexplained stuff, people start thinking outside the box, and we get another Feynman. Or Einstein.
Experiments and Focus (Score:5, Interesting)
Einstein, and the rest of the quantum physicists, were following up on the recent discovery of both radioactivity and the unification of electricity and magnetism by Maxwell.
The point I am (longwindedly) making is that ultimately new data drove the physics. We are at a point right now where it is so expensive to probe in areas we have not looked that we have an embarrassing richness of theories to match a paucity of data. The only clear-cut result that I know of that is outside the bounds of the Standard Model of particle physics is the recent revelation that neutrinos seem to change their type (electron, mu, and tau) as time passes, based on the distribution of neutrinos received on opposite sides of the Earth from the Sun (Sci-Am, I think about a year or two ago). In biology, OTOH, we have just recently been able (due to computer horsepower) to sequence massive numbers of genes, as well as make crude computer simulations of what kind of proteins these genes would construct. It is a new tool, the computer, that is allowing biology to seize the spotlight.
There will be more Einsteins, but perhaps in biology rather than physics for a while....
(DISCLAIMER: IANA scientist, but sometimes wish I was....)
strange viewpoint (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, why should we expect another Einstein, or Newton? Given that anyone's accomplishments must be measured relative to the common populace, we would expect people of such stature to be rare.
There are many factors that go into what makes someone great. Part of it is certainly being in the right time and place. Another is the social climate. Is Einstein the equal of Newton, or vice versa? That is difficult to say. They lived in completely different times. Could one do the same accomplishments as the other? One common element that appears between the two is that they were both fairly prolific (Newton did calculus, physics, and ironically enough, why light is a wave). I'd be curious if other people could come up with other historical science figure that also had several major findings. Feynman? Turing?
I cannot believe it. (Score:3, Insightful)
A humoristic and personable genius figure--or at least he comes off as such in his books. Maybe it's all crap--I don't know. I seriously think that his image could bolster the reputation of physicists the world over.
The building is now a Walmart (Score:3, Interesting)
Even if you don't subscribe to the "myth of genius", men of such rounded accomplishment are very rare. Knowledge has expanded so rapidly that it is hard enough to know your own field, let alone know enough worth saying about other fields. Perhaps Einstein's was the last generation that could span, if not all knowledge, then a substantial part of it. We are all specialists these days.
Besides, we now live in a world in which enterprise and individuality of the Einsteinian kind are less appreciated. Since his heyday, so much has been subordinated to the dismal science of economics, the realm where the beancounter is king and inspiration is seen as a shocking waste of tax dollars or corporate profits. Arguably, the closest equivalent to Einstein today is not a scientist but the Dalai Lama, another gifted communicator who understands that knowledge alone is not enough.
Re:Of course there will be another (Score:3, Insightful)
that, but also. (Score:3, Insightful)
That, but also, he was an interesting character. He's got a catchy tagline (E=MC2). He had funny hair.
The fact that he was utterly brilliant, and revolutionized the way we see the world takes a back seat to the fact that your average person sees him as they would a cartoon character. Until we get another person with a comparable combination of brilliance and memorable traits, then no, we won't see "another Einstein."
Re:that, but also. (Score:2, Funny)
Chuck Norris is an interesting character. Chuck Norris has got a catchy tagline ("Guns don't kill people. Chuck Norris kills people."). Chuck Norris had funny hair [wwwin.com]. Yet Chuck Norris will never be as famous as Albert Einstein. (I've heard it rumored that Chuck Norris even discovered a new theory of relativity involving multiple universes in which Chuck Norris is even more badass than in this one, but
Re:WWII (Score:2)
Re:WWII (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm having trouble parsing this one; if it's radical, it can hardly be common place, no?
Re:What about... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What about... (Score:4, Interesting)
On what grounds?
This is completely false. There are many tests that could confirm string theory. Whether there are any (below the Planck scale an accessible to human experiments) that can falsify it is another matter.
This is also far from true. The foundations are speculative but there are many physical reasons why those foundations were postulated. Polchinski gives a good overview.
I did get past graduate QM, and graduate quantum field theory, general relativity, and string theory as well, and I would respectfully suggest that you do some reading about its motivations and accomplishments before you dismiss it. You will note that Glashow doesn't even call it rubbish, let alone "patent" rubbish (implying that it is obviously wrong). He merely says that it has not yet suceeded in making any new predictions that have been confirmed by experiment — which is true, but does not make a theory "rubbish".
Personally, I think it is rather overhyped relative to its accomplishments, but the fact remains that it is the best candidate we have for either a "theory of everything" or even just for a theory of quantum gravity (and I am saying this from the perspective of someone who has worked on a competing theory).
Re:Comparing Einstein to today's physicists is NOT (Score:2)
This is a statement of staggering stupidity.
Re:Newton (Score:4, Interesting)
Einstein, on the other hand, was NOT mathematically gifted by any stretch (although he wasn't stupid, either), but had an amazing ability to understand the physical principles and their general consequences. Plus, he was far more loveable than the cold, often caustic Newton.
Re:Newton (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Newton (Score:4, Informative)
I'll agree that if you're using physical laws to do calculations and you use Einstein instead of Newton to calculate the flight of a baseball, you're doing way too much work.
But that doesn't make Newton right.
I'm gonna quote Feynman because he expresses my feelings very well. This is from Six Easy Pieces (p3 in my copy; you can also find it in the "atoms in motion" chapter of Lectures), but I should say that this is a thought I've had long before reading this:
Re:Sour grapes? (Score:2)
John Horgan?! No way! He's not like that at all. Yeah. Read The End of Science [amazon.com]. John Horgan is a grumpy, jealous, cynical agitator.