The Great Man Paradox
thonyc.wordpress.com
thonyc.wordpress.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
It is our most precise characterization about what's weird about quantum mechanics. John Bell had no competitors and his work (1964) went unappreciated for a very long time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stewart_Bell
Without him, it is very likely his theorem would have remained undiscovered for many decades. At the least, we would have waited for quantum information theory to pick up steam in late '80s and early '90s (and I don't have a good sense the degree to which he contributed to that).
Ultimately no one is irreplaceable in science, but Bell arguably came as close as is possible in the modern era. The best argument against lionizing great men like him is that the property that makes them great -- a lone discovery unlikely to be made without them -- also means their work is often in an unpopular area and so has little impact...until the area gets so popular that it would have been discovered anyways!
In essence, Noether's theorem re-founds physics on an axiomatic basis.
Is it hard to acknowledge that the three of them were certainly great scientists, but many other people in the world could have done what they did were it not for fortune? Is there a limited capacity for greatness in the world?
Does it diminish Einstein's accomplishments to say that other people could have done what he did and achieved the same things he did, but that he was the one who happened to do it? The research was still incredibly important and the impact on human knowledge and on society was still massive; it doesn't get less impactful because other people could have done it too.
Well, yes it does. That's the paradox. Greatness must surely be, no pun intended, relative to something. If other people not only could, but would have achieved the same feat, how can it not diminish the special-ness of a particular person doing it? And yet, many people feel, instinctively, that what Einstein, Newton, etc. did is, in some sense, special.
You argue that the resolution to this is to recognise the importance of the results themselves. I would argue that is missing the point. The historical importance of the theory is a different thing from the achievement of the person who discovered it, although the more impact theories will, inevitably, draw more attention to the accomplishments of their discoverers.
My resolution to this paradox is to recognise that the standards of greatness for an individual's achievements cannot be fairly compared with those of a group. They can only be fairly compared with what could be expected of the average individual human in the same circumstances.
When judged against the abilities and achievements of the average, or even above-average, human, what Einstein achieved was incredible. Likewise, we instinctively respond positively to any story of success against adversity, even if the actual achievement isn't special out of a particular context. A person injured in a car accident, who spends a year obstinately learning to walk again, isn't achieving anything that most children don't do, but we applaud their determination, and the outcome in the context of their individual situation.
Great scientists present us with achievements on the opposite end of this spectrum. They are gifted individuals who did even more than could have been expected, and in the context of what the average individual human achieves in their lifetime, there's no doubt that they are something special.
From popular expositions of Einstein's work, you would think he came up with the profoundly counter-intuitive ideas of spatial contraction and time dilation single-handedly and out of the blue, yet the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction hypothesis was already well established within the field. This short article gives an idea of how the relevant ideas developed through collaboration:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation#History
Why? In particular, does Einstein become less great if we realize that all his college classmates wrote papers about really interesting and important things that were too ahead of his time to be understood until today? I guess you could argue that.
Or maybe we should back up a bit. What is the purpose of declaring someone "great"? Are we responding to our inherent desire to praise good humans for its own sake? Or are we seeking to inspire some behavior / incentivize a particular change in society, or something else? I think there are decent arguments for both, but correlating "great" with "unique" makes more sense to me if we just want to respond to our desire to praise people who seem special.
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/extracting-the-stopp...
https://youtu.be/LPBjcMKiezg?t=36m50s
Either way this clip from The Ascent of Man is always worth watching, as is the whole series. It was the inspiration for Carl Sagan's Cosmos which I understand is fondly received in this community.
It is not only about who could do X, but also when they did it in a historical context.
Of course sometimes it really is merely a matter of propaganda, or being the first widely publicized person to do X.
I mean people have been doing this since the myth of Prometheus :-)
But that adds nothing to the post. It could have been left out entirely because it is implied in every single blog post on the internet. And if you really are uncomfortable enough with something you are publishing that you feel the need to explicitly add a hedge like that to it... maybe you should leave it in draft mode for a couple days until you either decide it truly is ready to publish, or figure out what else is needed.
I felt a similar way about the philosophers I had to read while studying the subject in school. Some of the strange beliefs many early philosophers seemed to describe in their works always led me to think (a) there were probably a large number of philosophers during that time who had ideas more worthy of exploring, but (b) since these philosophers in particular were so prolific it was probably next to impossible during those times to have fruitful conversations across generations without large works to act as a fulcrum from which future conversations on the same topic could continue.
Was there some element of luck that let them succeed first over their contemporaries? Would the same things have been discovered just several years later? Probably but the class of people who could have been substituted for Einstein is small enough and unique enough that celebrating Einstein, Maxwell, Plank, Newton, etc, seems the same as celebrating that class of people as a whole.
I find this a bit superficial: If only one person can do something, s/he is great. If there are only two, both are not great.
We have some redundancy of greatness, but not a lot: If you'd thrown the top 10 physicists in the world under a tram, at any moment in time, progress would suffer greatly.
Bonus fact: There are about 100 recorded runners who have ever ran 100m in under 10s. While that achievement is now considered "mundane", I find all 100 of them Great.
In some cases, if their work was not of that depth and quality, the field's progress may not have proceeded as rapidly.
Edit: Is their quality and depth unique then? I feel sorry for this paradox, it was really going places for a minute.