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I know anyone can understand and learn all of Einsteins theory's and equations. What if he had never been born? Is there anyone who is intelligent enough to have made the same discoveries?
Someone else would've discovered what he did, it would've probably just taken longer, and in the mean time stop gaps and alternative routes would've been taken. Whether the whole nuclear path would've came up so soon is the interesting bit (and well its implications for WWII and the Cold War, without the bombs those would've been a whole lot bloodier).
I dont know much, anything really, about physics but how much of Hawking is built on Einstein? Could he have reached those same conclusions without them? Honestly we'll never know, but I think we'd be behind where we are now
are you going to keep talking about it, or do something already?
soundwave591 wrote: I dont know much, anything really, about physics but how much of Hawking is built on Einstein? Could he have reached those same conclusions without them? Honestly we'll never know, but I think we'd be behind where we are now
Let me put it this way: I have a paper that will be published in a prestigious political science journal next spring; basically a condensed form of my dissertation. But in the last two editions of this quarterly publication I have read articles that have made arguments, and reached conclusions nearly identical to mine. This isn't because we acted in collusion, but because we saw the same, or similar, data and arrived at similar conclusions based on similar methodology.
Einstein is remembered because he was brilliant man who managed to publish a revolutionary paper in spite of his humble career. Compare that to Feynman, who is remembered by people that find physics to be cool.
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yeah I can understand that, much like darwin and wallace right? like I said I'm completely unfamiliar with physics and its history, much better with biology haha
are you going to keep talking about it, or do something already?
Since a lot of science is discovered in parallel, someone would have made the same conclusions.
Look at the problems Darwin had when publishing his books, as others had suggested the same when he was on his voyages.
I'm sure that Einstein wrote letters between his contemporaries who worked with him, yet he gets the credit for the discoveries.
Popular culture often attributes one thing to one person - its easy and simple to remember. What it neglects is that many times science isn't the brilliance of one person, but often a team and that often as not many people all over the world can be working toward the same or similar conclusions around the same time. Who gets published first is often the one that steals the credit.
So yes chances are the discoveries he made would have been found by others. Indeed if we go back to WW2 the Germans were working on their own nuclear weapon which was only marginally behind the Allies development rate.
Now of course sometimes you get someone who focuses on a subject so fully that they come to dominate the subject; breaking new ground and building upon that to the point where they are far and ahead of the rest. You also get situations where it takes a different viewpoint or theory from the established norms in order to understand and progress in certain areas.
So there is also a wealth of examples where someone has made discoveries which are far ahead or in areas their contemporaries didn't even know exist.
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Its very difficult to say if the existence of someone, or not, would have changed much.
Especially in a field where there is a lot of concurrent development and often people come to the same conclusion without any contact with each other.
Just look at Newton and Leibniz. If one of the other had not existed, we still would have calculus. Thats one of the more obvious examples as there was extreme rivalry between them.
But Einstein's removal from history would have at most set us back a decade or so.
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Johnnytorrance wrote: I know anyone can understand and learn all of Einsteins theory's and equations. What if he had never been born? Is there anyone who is intelligent enough to have made the same discoveries?
Einstein was the greatest American ever. I can't believe he doesn't have a comic book like Captain Einstein or something, swatting down Nazis with his octo-arms or fending off the Yankees with his good buddy Mark Twain!
Well, if Einstein didn't exist, particle physics would be very different. It really wouldn't be as simple as some of you seem to think, but I can't be bothered to go into the history. So yeah, very different.
On the other hand, removing Feynman would be much worse.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2014/06/09 18:05:18
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Overread wrote: So yes chances are the discoveries he made would have been found by others. Indeed if we go back to WW2 the Germans were working on their own nuclear weapon which was only marginally behind the Allies development rate.
The German effort was nowhere close to being able to build a nuclear device and for a number of reasons; most principally, the German leaders didn't push hard enough to do it and they simply ran out of time.
It the largest thing that stands out to me if Einstein had never been born was what would have happened with the American/Canadian/British nuclear program since it was his prestige as a scientist that helped convince the US government to devote time and money to the Manhattan Project. Leó Szilárd most likely wouldn't have been able to convince Roosevelt to take the idea seriously. The Manhattan Project had no influence on the outcome of the War in Europe, but the War in the Pacific might have been much, much different.
It's hard so say whether or not someone would have figured out relativity or not; it is certainly easy for us to sit here and say that someone else would have figured it out because after 100+ years we started to take it for granted. As much sense as it makes to us now, it's hard to forget the idea itself was so revolutionary at the time. It turned our understanding of physics completely upside down.
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I think Newton probably gave physics more of a kick forward than Einstein did. That isn't to say anything bad about Einstein, but rather just a comment that Einstein was working in an established field, with lots of very smart people able to dedicate their professional lives to advancing the field. Whereas Newton was working in a field more of gifted amateurs, and so the talent pool and output each year was a lot less.
Overread wrote: Indeed if we go back to WW2 the Germans were working on their own nuclear weapon which was only marginally behind the Allies development rate.
It was miles behind. The Manhattan Project had nearly unlimited support, able to call in whatever scientists and resources they needed, while the Nazi program was the redheaded stepchild, passed from bureaucracy to bureaucracy, battling all the time for funding. By the end of the war, when the Nazi leadership was dumping money in to whatever superweapon they could think of, the nuclear program was still fighting to prevent its men getting sent off to the front, so that should say something.
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Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”
--Isaac Newton
All science is built on those that came before. Of course in cases like Einstein, it’s more like giants standing on the shoulders of giants. But if he wasn’t there, someone (or a collaboration or series of people) would have done the same thing.
It was miles behind. The Manhattan Project had nearly unlimited support, able to call in whatever scientists and resources they needed, while the Nazi program was the redheaded stepchild, passed from bureaucracy to bureaucracy, battling all the time for funding. By the end of the war, when the Nazi leadership was dumping money in to whatever superweapon they could think of, the nuclear program was still fighting to prevent its men getting sent off to the front, so that should say something.
Not to mention that Germany would never have the resources to build a bomb even if they found out how.
Nevelon wrote: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”
--Isaac Newton
All science is built on those that came before. Of course in cases like Einstein, it’s more like giants standing on the shoulders of giants. But if he wasn’t there, someone (or a collaboration or series of people) would have done the same thing.
Exactly this. If Einstein had never been born, things would likely be no different than they already are. While he certainly presented a memorable face, it's not like he was not breaking ground with unprecedented new ideas in a field no one else was deeply involved. There was controversy that some of his publications had quite a bit of similarity to well-known work by some of his contemporary peers, and who were not included in his sources or attributions despite laying a lot of groundwork for high end physics that would have been very odd for him not to be familiar with. It's just that since so very few of them had the verve or personality of Einstein that they didn't imprint themselves into the collective memory like he did. He was not some mad genius working alone in a mountain tower like some maniac wizard - he co-authored papers, was in think tanks, on research teams.
Einstein built his reputation around a single summer, in which he churned out four papers, each of which would have been the masterwork for a distinguished physicist.
I'd guess few, if any, of those ideas would have waited more than a decade if he hadn't have thought of them. Odds are, it would have been four different guys, but still.
The other reasons Einstein is so lionized is because he kicked off one of the great paradigm shifts in science history. A lot of classical, mechanistic physicists saw the field as shrinking in scope in the late 19th century, with little to do but fill in the corners. Einstein helped to change all that, but showing that the wierdness that was unexplained by Newtonian physics actually could not be explained, and that many of our assumptions about the universe were wrong.
That's actually more the reason than his actual discoveries.
I'm actually reading the Science of Discworld 4 right now, and they go into it a bit.
Specifically, they mention a mathematician who was very close to independently coming to Einstein's famous curved space-time doohickey.
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