Scientists who never won a Nobel Prize | Hacker News Reader

Scientists who never won a Nobel Prize

wondersofphysics.com

98 pointsmmhsieh99 comments

Personally, I think the Nobel in Chemistry should have gone to Harry Noller (UCSC), who established that the core function of the ribosome is implemented by RNA, not proteins. After 20+ years of making his case and generally not being believed (even though he had excellent data), a competitor did a crystal structure proving him right and won the prize.

https://reports.news.ucsc.edu/breakthrough/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/10/08/nobel-committee-skips... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2821081/ https://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/2018/11/19/gene-machine/

Harry was my advisor and helped me start my career in computational biology back in the mid 90s. I asked him recently about the Nobel and he said it didn't bother him since one the Nobel was awarded, nobody ever doubted he was wrong about the ribosome again.

+1 for Noller. In a previous life, I worked as an undergrad in an RNA lab (remains the best job I have ever had) and we studied Noller's work closely.

Harry was a great teacher (I had him for Biochem 101 and a lab class). Very understated but quite good at communicating his enthusiasm for the biophysics underlying biology). The lab class, "Biology of Macromolecules" was challenging: you're handed a pile of microbial cells, told the species, and then you have to go to the primary literature and learn how to purify restriction endonuclease from it (using the original methods) and then map a plasmid. I remember he said something which sounded arrogant, but I later learned was excellent advice: "most of you are going to take the entire quarter to run your experiment. I would do all the lab work in 1 long day- the moment you crack those cells open, proteases are going to start eating your REs".

He did say that if I wanted to be a successful scientist, I should never have a girlfriend or get married, or have kids, because those all eat into your ability to spend 18 hours in the lab every day (I married my college girlfriend, was a modest scientist, and transitioned to software engineering, and then had kids; there's no way I could handle being a successful scientist while having a family).

I got into the UCSC grad program at the time you were there but didn't go. Funny how our paths almost crossed. I actually wanted to study with Haussler whom I met over lunch once. Yeah, I chose the SE life with family, kids myself. IMO there are too many scientists discouraging students from being scientists. Yeah, it is hard, but anything of value is going to be a challenge no matter what you do.

Haussler was my undergrad advisor (along with Harry). I remember I tried to get a job working for Harry, and when he turned me down his postdoc said "Hey, David Haussler over in CS is starting up a computational biology group, you should go talk to them". That was one of the most valuable pieces of long-term career advice I could ever get.

Personally I now actively advise people to avoid becoming (academic) scientists unless they are willing to dedicate an unreasonable amount of their life to it (more or less agreeing with Harry). It's really unfortunate but there just aren't enough jobs out there and too many of the folks who do manage to get positions aren't particularly honest or ethical.

I know plenty of scientists who perform at the very highest levels at top tier institutions and have families. Yes, they're quite busy, but I strongly disagree with the framing that scientists can't have families. I know you're not advocating that in your post, but figured it was worth mentioning (especially as these tropes can negatively impact representation of women in science)

I know such people too, but most of them said they've had to make major sacrifices in their family life to be successful.

Well there are many great scientists that should won Nobel Price. My favorite was Antonin Holy [0].

Very humble guy who invented a lot of modern drugs, but who didn't like to go conference circus road which is required to get the prize (paraphrasing his words). He worked in the lab till his dead, lived in cheap house and commuted to work by public transport even after earning hundreds of millions, or more, in fees for his discoveries.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%C3%ADn_Holý

Surprised to see Kristian Birkeland missing from the list. Nominated 7 times, but never won.

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristian_Birkeland

"Birkeland organized several expeditions to Norway's high-latitude regions where he established a network of observatories under the auroral regions to collect magnetic field data. The results of the Norwegian Polar Expedition conducted from 1899 to 1900 contained the first determination of the global pattern of electric currents in the polar region from ground magnetic field measurements. The discovery of X-rays inspired Birkeland to develop vacuum chambers to study the influence of magnets on cathode rays. Birkeland noticed that an electron beam directed toward a magnetised terrella was guided toward the magnetic poles and produced rings of light around the poles and concluded that the aurora could be produced in a similar way. He developed a theory in which energetic electrons were ejected from sunspots on the solar surface, directed to the Earth, and guided to the Earth's polar regions by the geomagnetic field where they produced the visible aurora. This is essentially the theory of the aurora today."

"In 1913, Birkeland may have been the first to predict that plasma was ubiquitous in space. He wrote: "It seems to be a natural consequence of our points of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and flying electric ions of all kinds. We have assumed that each stellar system in evolutions throws off electric corpuscles into space. It does not seem unreasonable therefore to think that the greater part of the material masses in the universe is found, not in the solar systems or nebulae, but in 'empty' space."[7]"

"In 1916, Birkeland was probably the first person to successfully predict that the solar wind behaves as do all charged particles in an electric field: "From a physical point of view it is most probable that solar rays are neither exclusively negative nor positive rays, but of both kinds".[12][13] In other words, the Solar Wind consists of both negative electrons and positive ions.""

Without him, the modern study of cosmology and planetary science would be a mess.

Freeman Dyson is a glaring miss here.

Feynman and Schwinger shared the 1965 Nobel in Physics for their respective perspectives on Quantum Electrodynamics. But it was Dyson who unified Feynman's diagram approach with Schwinger's field model.

Shinichirō Tomonaga also shared the 1965 Nobel for this work, and his work was much more fundamental to QED than Dyson.

The Nobel Prize can go to at most three people.

Thanks for pointing that out. My apologies for missing Tomonaga. Was going on my anecdotal memory, should have researched.

Could you elaborate on about why Tomonaga work was more fundamental to QED than Dyson? Thank you

Sticking Hawking and Tesla in with Bose and Poincare is .... eccentric. It's not a popularity contest.

Fun fact: one of Bose's grandsons worked as a bartender at Triple Rock in Berkeley for a while.

Yeah, I sort of felt the same. But everyone is going to disagree with another's list so.....

I mean, Tesla was as ubiquitous (if not more) in my EE degree as Bose and Poincare were in my Physics degree. I don't think I heard Hawking mentioned once during my Physics degree but I also didn't care to take any astronomy coursework.

Hawking was a cosmologist not an astronomer. It would have come in any class covering advanced black hole theory.

Hawking came up a decent number of times in my astronomy/astrophysics classes. Hubble came up everywhere.

Any list that doesn't include Sommerfeld is written by amateurs. But it's unsurprising. He's the best physicist no one has heard of.

Aside his long list of accomplishments which span pioneering work in all of physics, from QM, relativity, to fluids, he also accomplished:

- Arguably the father of QM, since the "founders" were all his students and built upon, or generalized his ideas.

- Four of his students got Nobel prizes. Three of his post-docs got the nod. One of them, Pauling, got two Nobel prizes. His students include Heissenburg, Debye, Bethe, Pauli.

- Nominated 84 times.

- His work on Special Relativity helped it gain acceptance

- Wrote some of the best physics books.

> Nominated 84 times.

Interesting, the article says that "Poincaré was nominated a record 51 times for the Nobel Prize but never won."

The article is wrong on it being a record. According to the Nobel Foundation's nomination database, Arnold Sommerfeld was indeed nominated 84 times and won 0: https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.ph...

> Poincaré was nominated a record 51 times for the Nobel Prize but never won.

I feel Poincaré did a lot of good work in physics but he was not... a closer, I guess. He (along with other people) had the basics of relativity on their hands in the early 1900s, but for whatever reason it was Einstein who published the fully-formed conclusions of that whole collective process of exploration.

Poincaré did a lot of great work in math. I think of him as primarily a mathematician.

> Tesla

Great engineer, but I don't see how he belongs here.

There’s also Henry Moseley who likely would’ve won the 1916 prize in physics but died in 1915 as a soldier in WW1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moseley

his death sparked the government to change its policy of enlisting scientists

Rosalind Franklin - X-ray crystallographer who helped decipher the structure of DNA.

Carl Woese - Discoverer of the 3rd domain of life archaebacteria among other scientific accomplishments.

Rosalind Franklin definitely belongs on the list. However her not getting the prize has a simple reason. She died of ovarian cancer before the prize was awarded for DNA, so couldn't have been considered.

Ironically her cancer could well have been caused by the research that she was not publicly recognized for.

Yes. That is true. She passed away before the Nobel. Anyone interested in this topic should read "The Double Helix" by Watson. It is a real page turner and discusses how Watson and Crick kind of stole Franklin's research.

Absolutely.

Now there is an interesting question. How could Watson and Crick have figured out Franklin's data faster than she did? The answer turns out to be coincidence. There are 230 crystallographic groups. As a crystallographer, Franklin knew them all, and had to rule them all out. However Watson had done his PhD research on a protein that happened to have the same crystallographic group as DNA. So he knew one group really, really well and it turned out to be the right one.

Sometimes luck is more important than skill.

I don't think what you said is accurate. First, the work was done in fibre diffraction (2d pattern), not crystal diffractionso I'm not certain that crystallographic groups even apply (typically for representing 3d symmetry groups). Second, nothing in the W&C paper has to do with determining the crystallographic group, rather they proposed a model which was consistent with the diffraction data, but also with a wide range of other observations, such as Chargaff's rules, which led to the modelling of base pairs with the correct eno/ketol forms. What Franklin did know was that the structural was helical, but not that it was a double helix with antiparallel strands (and that's what W&C posited, leading to the most wonderfully stated conclusion of all time ("it has not escaped our notice...")

A few other important points: Franklin published a paper in the same journal edition as W&C with her own work. W&C thanked Franklin (she's in the acknowledgements). She got more credit than people today believe (mainly because of the misleading book "Dark Lady" and the terrible book "The Double Helix").

The best original source I've found on this is The Eighth Day of Creation, which is based on primary sources (Franklin's notebooks which she willed to Aaron Klug, along wiht interviews with most of the people involved). After reading that I concluded that the work Franklin did on this project did not warrant a Nobel Prize even if she had not died before it was awarded.

(my PhD is on DNA structure, and I spent a huge amount of time researching its history)

I will second “The Eighth Day of Creation” (which despite its cool title, has nothing to do with religion).

I can’t agree with your conclusion, though. It’s very clear she should have been awarded the prize, not Wilkins (who I think should not have received the prize even “in place of” Franklin). The book paints a picture of Wilkins not doing much more than management work and training Raymond Gosling (Franklin’s PhD student who did the actual work and probably should have won in her place, if not Chargaff or someone else).

Of course, the book also makes it very clear that John Randall told Wilkins one thing and Franklin something very different about their working relationship that caused their relationship to be very tense and Franklin to largely cut Wilkins out of her work. Why Randall did this and never clarified or why Wilkins or Franklin never sought clarification from him is unclear.

But... what exactly did Rosalind Franklin do in this case, other than collect the raw data (not Nobel-worthy) and notice that it was consistent with a helix (not enough of the elucidation to be useful for molecular biology)? She didn't come up with any of the subtle guesses about nucleic acid pairing, antiparallel strands, or the exact atomic positions (later shown to be mildly erroneous due to the water/alcohol content).

it's clear Franklin was mistreated, but far from clear that there is evidence of Nobel-worthy work by Franklin in this case.

This same reasoning kind of applies to everyone on this list though. If they'd just lived longer a lot of them could have eventually won a prize.

I think the implicit argument this list is making is that it's not fair to exclude people just because they died. We are after all recognizing actual discoveries, which live on following the death of the discoverer. Many other awards are awarded posthumously and there's no good reason this one couldn't be either.

"Poincaré was nominated a record 51 times for the Nobel Prize but never won."

Damn !

I'd add Emmy Noether to this list : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether

I had the same thought. But mathematicians who just help physicists rarely get a nobel. Even if its work is invaluable, such as Emmy's work. You could call her one of the "fathers" if modern theoretical physics, if it wouldn't be too ironic.

Thanksfully they didn't forget to mention Lise Meitner

to be fair, Mietner has an element named after her which is a far, far more exclusive club.

Maybe Vera Rubin belongs on this list as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Rubin

Along with Henrietta Leavitt.

The most glaring omission in my view is Fred Hoyle.

Read https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fred-hoyle-missin... for more.

Interesting list. After all, there is also the opposite case, where it is difficult to understand why a certain prize was awarded. I once attended a lecture by Nobel Laureate Richard Ernst, where he presented a good dozen Nobel Prizes for which there was a corresponding Russian publication, which had been published earlier than the honored work.

Clyde Hutchison. Worked on the wrong type of restriction enzyme (type I) which is devilishly hard because it's cutsite is stochastic (also makes it useless for bioengineering). Missed one Nobel prize there (went to his buddy Ham Smith, who worked on type ii which everybody knows and loves).

Later proposed a theoretical mechanism for site directed mutagenesis (contingent on economical DNA synthesis). When that technology rolled around, he was on the paper - apparently he did the wet experiment himself - but it was Adams that got the prize.

Missed two Nobel prizes. First one was bad luck, second one was all on the committee.

Funny thing about biology, of you ask working biologists who discovered restriction enzymes or who invented site directed mutagenesis, or who discovered gfp, they will typically not be able to tell you.

Stephen Hawking did not have an important theory with an experimentally testable prediction, similar to the current crop of brilliant string theorists (Ed Whitten, for instance). Alan Guth should have the Nobel Prize, in my opinion, for his theory of inflation. It is widely accepted but does not have a specific experimentally verified prediction that can rule out all other scenarios. The Nobel committee does not want to be proven wrong later.

Raymond Damadian.

The Nobel for inventing MRI went to Lauterbur and Mansfield, even though Damadian played a major role and is recognized by many as "an inventor of MRI". Full page ads ran in newspapers at the height of the controversy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Damadian#Nobel_Prize_c...

It's missing Carlos Chagas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#1921

Top greatest writer who never won a Nobel prize: Jorge Luis Borges.

Nabokov, Joyce, Pynchon.

Ibsen, Conrad

Tolstoy, Proust.

People who won both the Nobel and the Oscar:

- George Bernard Shaw - Al Gore - Bob Dylan (also a Pulitzer)

EGOT+N?

gold ENGOT

Early in my life I met a former nuclear physicist who had worked explicitly on nuclear counter-intelligence against the Russians during the cold war immediately post-WW2. The story was that he was being considered for a nomination but declined because publicizing who he was would've created a security issue.

You wouldn't believe how proper, non-racist and balanced this comment was before being seized upon by a mob, half of whom have deleted their messages now.

Lesson to fellow Europeans: Don't ever comment on anything that involves race. The Americans are going through something special at the moment and they're lashing out at pretty much anything.

I wish I could delete this comment, but alas I can not.

My comment no longer seems to have any relevance to the parent, which was edited. I do like to point out this (in)famous case though:

Nate Lewis was denied the prize in Chemistry by being the most junior in a group of four (the prize can be shared at most three ways).

I think you're going to want to edit/remove that; it was tainted.

> this Indian-run website says...

It looks like Vedang Sati is just a regular guy on the internet who happens to be of Indian origin and his pick of his favorite people don't show any obvious bias[0].

On the other hand, I shouldn't even be defending him. The implied bias/nationalism here is in poor taste. This is no different from saying

> this Jew-run website says...

[0] https://www.vedangsati.com/p/about-me.html

You should be ashamed for your cherrypicking and barely masked accusations of racism and for (sort of) causing Godwin's law to be invoked. Did you learn the technique at your workplace, btw? I can very easily imagine that.

Einstein. Yes, he won one - but as this discussion has expanded a bit from the original article it could be argued he was underserved...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/einstein-fantasy-physics_b_49...

Personally, I think his work on the Photo-Electric Effect deserved the recognition that it received. But Albert Einstein is far more myth than man. Everyone idolizes Einstein, he was the quintessential mad scientist. And it is difficult to challenge the notion of this myth without being accused of anti-semetism. But I risk doing so...

When one actually studies the History of Science, one discovers shocking things. None of the ideas attributed to Einstein were actually Einstein's. I don't want to bash Einstein. He was truly brilliant. So another way to put it is Einstein stood on the shoulders of giants. Though I can and will bash the notion that Einstein was so innovative that all the ideas were his. None of them were. Let's examine all the original insights traditionally attributed to Albert Einstein. Comment too long, I will reply to my own comment and continue...

Empedocles (c. 490–430 BC) was the first to propose a theory of light, and claimed that light has a finite speed. In 1021, Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) published his Book of Optics, in which he presented a series of arguments dismissing Empedocles emission theory of vision in favour of the now accepted intromission theory, in which light moves from an object into the eye. This led Alhazen to propose that light must have a finite speed. Also in the 11th century, Ab Rayhn al-Brn agreed that light has a finite speed, and observed that the speed of light is much faster than the speed of sound. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon argued that the speed of light in air was not infinite, using philosophical arguments backed by the writing of Alhazen and Aristotle. In the 17 century, Pierre de Fermat also argued in support of a finite speed of light. In 1629, Isaac Beeckman proposed an experiment in which a person observes the flash of a cannon reflecting off a mirror about one mile (1.6 km) away. In 1638, Galileo Galilei proposed an experiment, with an apparent claim to having performed it some years earlier, to measure the speed of light by observing the delay between uncovering a lantern and its perception some distance away. He was unable to distinguish whether light travel was instantaneous or not, but concluded that if it were not, it must nevertheless be extraordinarily rapid. The first quantitative estimate of the speed of light was made in 1676 by Rømer. From the observation that the periods of Jupiter's innermost moon Io appeared to be shorter when the Earth was approaching Jupiter than when receding from it, Rømer concluded that light travels at a finite speed, and estimated that it takes light 22 minutes to cross the diameter of Earth's orbit. Christiaan Huygens combined this estimate with an estimate for the diameter of the Earth's orbit to obtain an estimate of speed of light of 220000 km/s, 26% lower than the actual value. In his 1704 book Opticks, Isaac Newton reported Rømer's calculations of the finite speed of light and gave a value of "seven or eight minutes" for the time taken for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth (the modern value is 8 minutes 19 seconds). Newton queried whether Rømer's eclipse shadows were coloured; hearing that they were not, he concluded the different colours travelled at the same speed. In 1729, James Bradley discovered stellar aberration, and from this effect he determined that light must travel 10210 times faster than the Earth in its orbit (the modern figure is 10066 times faster) or, equivalently, that it would take light 8 minutes 12 seconds to travel from the Sun to the Earth. In the 19th century Hippolyte Fizeau developed a method to determine the speed of light based on time-of-flight measurements on Earth and reported a value of 315000 km/s. His method was improved upon by Léon Foucault who obtained a value of 298000 km/s in 1862. In the year 1856, Wilhelm Eduard Weber and Rudolf Kohlrausch measured the ratio of the electromagnetic and electrostatic units of charge, 1/00, by discharging a Leyden jar, and found that its numerical value was very close to the speed of light as measured directly by Fizeau. The following year Gustav Kirchhoff calculated that an electric signal in a resistanceless wire travels along the wire at this speed. In the early 1860s, Maxwell showed that, according to the theory of electromagnetism he was working on, electromagnetic waves propagate in empty space at a speed equal to the above Weber/Kohlrausch ratio, and drawing attention to the numerical proximity of this value to the speed of light as measured by Fizeau, he proposed that light is in fact an electromagnetic wave. In 1865, James Clerk Maxwell had proposed that light was an electromagnetic wave, and therefore travelled at the speed c appearing in his theory of electromagnetism. The well-designed experiment performed by Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley in 1887 failed to detect a luminiferous aether medium through which electromagnetic waves travelled. Essential to Einstein's theories, irregardless of still clinging to the notion of aether, and really because of the Michelson-Morley experiment, Hendrik Lorentz proposed that the motion of the apparatus through the aether may cause the apparatus to contract along its length in the direction of motion, and he further assumed, that the time variable for moving systems must also be changed accordingly ("local time"), which led to the formulation of the Lorentz transformation. Based on Lorentz's aether theory, Henri Poincaré (1900) showed that this local time (to first order in v/c) is indicated by clocks moving in the aether, which are synchronized under the assumption of constant light speed. In 1904, Poincaré speculated that the speed of light could be a limiting velocity in dynamics, provided that the assumptions of Lorentz's theory are all confirmed. In 1905, Poincaré brought Lorentz's aether theory into full observational agreement with the principle of relativity. To be clear, the modern origin of Relativity is rooted in Poincaré's work, and it's deeper origins first appears nearly 300 years earlier in the 1632 Galilean Invariance, aka Galileo's Theory of Relativity.

continues in reply to my own comment...

It is well-known that Einstein was notoriously bad at mathematics. The sole reason for the decade of delay between his 1905 Special Theory of Relativity and his 1915 General Theory of Relativity is that Einstein did not have the mathematics to calculate the formulas. He needed some of the work done by Hermann Minkowski. By 1908 Minkowski realized that the special theory of relativity, introduced by his former student Albert Einstein in 1905 and based on the previous work of Lorentz and Poincaré, could best be understood in a four-dimensional space, since known as the "Minkowski spacetime," in which time and space are not separated entities but intermingled in a four-dimensional space–time, and in which the Lorentz geometry of special relativity can be effectively represented using the invariant interval x^2 + y^2 + z^2 -c^2*t^2. So even the notion of space-time was not Einstein's idea. Although Einstein is credited with finding the field equations for General Relativity, the German mathematician David Hilbert published them in an article before Einstein's article. This has resulted in accusations of plagiarism against Einstein, although not from Hilbert, and assertions that the field equations should be called the "Einstein–Hilbert field equations". However, Hilbert did not press his claim for priority.

Albert Einstein's friendship with Marcel Grossmann began with their school days in Zurich. Grossmann's careful and complete lecture notes at the Federal Polytechnic School proved to be a salvation for Einstein, who missed many lectures. Grossmann's father helped Einstein get his job at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, and it was Grossmann who helped to conduct the negotiations to bring Einstein back from Prague as a professor of physics at the Zurich Polytechnic. Grossmann was an expert in differential geometry and tensor calculus; just the mathematical tools providing a proper mathematical framework for Einstein's work on gravity. Thus, it was natural that Einstein would enter into a scientific collaboration with Grossmann.

It was mathemetician Marcel Grossmann who emphasized the importance of a non-Euclidean geometry called Riemannian geometry (also elliptic geometry) to Einstein, which was a necessary step in the development of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Abraham Pais's book on Einstein suggests that Grossmann mentored Einstein in tensor theory as well. Grossmann introduced Einstein to the absolute differential calculus, started by Christoffel and fully developed by Ricci-Curbastro and Levi-Civita. Grossmann facilitated Einstein's unique synthesis of mathematical and theoretical physics in what is still today considered the most elegant and powerful theory of gravity: the general theory of relativity. The collaboration of Einstein and Grossmann led to a ground-breaking paper: "Outline of a Generalized Theory of Relativity and of a Theory of Gravitation," which was published in 1913 and was one of the two fundamental papers which established Einstein's theory of gravity.

continues in reply to my own comment...

>It is well-known that Einstein was notoriously bad at mathematics.

That's pop nonsense. The quote people take out of context was not applicable to what you're implying. Simple googling shows this claim to be a misconception.

> the German mathematician David Hilbert published them in an article before Einstein's article.

Not correct. Hilbert submitted a paper before Einstein, but the paper did not contain the field equations. After seeing Einstein's field equations, Poincare added them to his paper.

Also, Hilbert's paper didn't get published until 1916, after Einstein's.

I heard Kip Thorne say, "Einstein was a mediocre mathematician. Now don't get me wrong; he was a vastly better mathematician than I'll ever be, but Hilbert was a great mathematician." We undergrads are sitting around thinking "great: Hilbert > Einsten > Thorne >>>> us. We're doomed"

Fair enough, though I was comparing him to his peers and friends.

What about Black Holes? Not so much, no. Einstein himself was pleasantly surprised to learn that the field equations, developed by Grossmann, admitted exact solutions, because of their prima facie complexity, and because he himself had only produced an approximate solution. Einstein's approximate solution was given in his famous 1915 article on the advance of the perihelion of Mercury. There, Einstein used rectangular coordinates to approximate the gravitational field around a spherically symmetric, non-rotating, non-charged mass. Karl Schwarzschild, in contrast, chose a more elegant "polar-like" coordinate system and was able to produce an exact solution which he first set down in a letter to Einstein of 22 December 1915, written while Schwarzschild was serving in the war stationed on the Russian front. Schwarzschild concluded the letter by writing: "As you see, the war treated me kindly enough, in spite of the heavy gunfire, to allow me to get away from it all and take this walk in the land of your ideas." In 1916, Einstein wrote to Schwarzschild on this result:

>I have read your paper with the utmost interest. I had not expected that one could formulate the exact solution of the problem in such a simple way. I liked very much your mathematical treatment of the subject. Next Thursday I shall present the work to the Academy with a few words of explanation.—Albert Einstein

Schwarzschild's struggle with pemphigus eventually led to his death on 11 May 1916. He was only 42 years of age and at the height of his achievements when he died. Schwarzschild's work encompassed a wide range of scientific topics: he not only studied observational astronomy, but also furthered the development of astronomical instrumentation, and he was the first to give an exact solution to Einstein's (ahem, Grossmann's) field equations, which is now known as the “Schwarzschild solution."

In 1905, Albert Einstein postulated that the speed of light c with respect to any inertial frame is a constant and is independent of the motion of the light source. But he didn't just pull this rabbit out of his hat. There is a long history of science of at least the notion of the finite speed of light, and Einstein is standing on the shoulders of giants when he publishes his Special Theory of Relativity, and heavily relied on the work of three mathematicians to develop General Relativity, and a forth for his work on Black Holes. But neither Relativity nor the constancy of the speed of light were Einstein's ideas, and not remotely so. History just gave him all the credit.

He became a rock star, world renowned, and for some reason Niels Bohr gave him a lot of attention (Bohr was a the real hero scientist, sort of a manly man scientist for all seasons), but all of Einstein's decades of thought towards a GUT produced no results. After 1915, other than his plagiarism of Schwarzschild's work (following his plagiarism of David Hilbert's work), Albert Einstein did not again contribute anything to the annals of Physics or Cosmology. He became somewhat of a unfaithful husband and womanizer of his own young female students at Princeton. No judgements here. Who wouldn't have done similarly given the same opportunity? Coeds, right? They were randy for him. He had no ability to resist it.

None of these ideas are mine.

If there is one brilliant insight Einstein derived, it is that light travels at the same speed from all frames of reference. But everything else, great work was done before him, and Einstein was likely aware of it, but we forget what came before and attribute everything to Einstein.

>the modern origin of Relativity is rooted in Poincaré's work,

And Poincare never developed it from first principles, elevating the speed of light being fixed in all frames. Poincare only noted that this was a solution to Lorentz invariance.

Einstein did take this as a first principle, and demonstrated what follows: time dilation (something completely alien to all before him, including Galileo). He then derived E=mc^2 from relativisitic momemtum (another completely alien concept to those before him).

> and it's deeper origins first appears nearly 300 years earlier in the 1632 Galilean Invariance, aka Galileo's Theory of Relativity

Galieo's view of the word is that velocities add, which Special Relativity shows to be incorrect. Galileo's theory of relativity is that the laws of physics are the same for all observers, which no one claims Einstein created.

Galileo had zero idea that velocities are sub-additive.

time dialation (something completely alien to all before him

No, not so much.

You missed this in my GP comment: "Hendrik Lorentz proposed that the motion of the apparatus through the aether may cause the apparatus to contract along its length in the direction of motion, and he further assumed, that the time variable for moving systems must also be changed accordingly ("local time"), which led to the formulation of the Lorentz transformation."

>>time dialation (something completely alien to all before him

>Hendrik Lorentz prop

Lorentz did not think that time actually dilated; his notion of "local time" he considered purely a mathematical trick, unrelated to actual physics, in the same manner that renormalization sweeps away infinities in a clever manner.

Here's the quote: "While for Lorentz length contraction was a real physical effect, he considered the time transformation only as a heuristic working hypothesis and a mathematical stipulation to simplify the calculation from the resting to a "fictitious" moving system. " [1]

So no, Lorentz absolutely did not think physical time actually dilated. Stop repeating this nonsense.

Also, Lorentz was not the first to publish the time dilation formula. And, like Lorentz, all before him thought it a neat mathematical trick, devoid of actual physics.

Poincare did think it may be actual time dilation, but he too lacked the insights that Einstein had that put these dilation and stretching concepts not as ad-hoc after effects, but that they come from a simple, single physical principle. What's more, Einstein's way of looking at it all was the one that turned out to match reality the best.

For example, in 1905 Poincare introduced "Poincare stresses", another fictitious set of forces, to reconcile the math they didn't like from what they thought of as reality.

Lorentz and Poincare used the now-disproven aether as the basis for their theories. Einstein did not.

Spend a moment reading that wiki page, replete with sources, and especially the section on "The shift to relativity." It's abundantly clear that Einstein was the first to publish the correct interpretation, devoid of all the ad hoc (and physically incorrect) assumptions that Lorentz, Poincare, and others, used to reconcile their belief with the evidence. Einstein, in one simple argument, showed that one simple physical idea - light has the same speed regardless of observer - leads to the correct equations that model reality, needs no other ad hoc forces or aether or any other items.

Here's [2] notes from a talk I gave (and still give from time to time) on a simple derivation of all these things from the one principle.

You spend an incredible amount of time misrepresenting and discounting the work of Einstein, so much so that you're posting many, many wrong items. I gave up listing them since the sheer amount of it baffling. Why?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_ether_theory

[2] https://lomont.org/papers/2011/SpaceTimeTalk.pdf

It is in the ballpark. The point is that Einstein did not pull a rabbit out of his hat, others had thought similar weirdness, and Einstein was aware of it.

Claiming as factual all the things you did is not "in the ballpark." It's simply wrong, and oddly skewed to paint the worst possible light with ad hominem, misconceptions, and lies.

Yes, plenty of people were working on similar stuff - this is true for every single case I've ever dug into (Newton, Gauss, Tesla, Einstein, Witten, Feynman, Wright Brothers, Marconi, transistor, laser, fission, fusion, ...), but to claim (as you did) that the person who actually make the breakthrough did not do it (and backing it by lies, as I sourced), is deceitful.

I've yet to see someone create something so vastly improved from the world around them that it would not have been made by another person or group immediately. But that does not mean it's fine to discount the work of the person who did it first, especially if that requires falsehoods.

No, I was correct. Ad hominem is an attack. I have not attacked you, and I do not see how you could find ad hominem in my replies. Unfounded paranoia is probably not something you should ignore.

My point was very simply was that Einstein did not walk on water nor did he operate in a vacuum. I am not sure why this is so difficult to believe.

>Ad hominem is an attack.

Ad hominem is not simply an attack; it's disparaging someone to undermine their argument.

>I have not attacked you, and I do not see how you could find ad hominem in my replies.

I didn't say tou attacked me. You threw in Einstein being a womanizer in a discussion about people worthy of Nobel Prizes. I don't think the Nobel comittee takes that into consideration.

>Unfounded paranoia is probably not something you should ignore.

Agreed. Since you brought up unfounded paranoia, and since you thought the ad hominem was about you attacking me when that is not what I wrote, you should get that paranoia checked :)

>My point was very simply was that Einstein did not walk on water nor did he operate in a vacuum. I am not sure why this is so difficult to believe.

I never claimed anything like that. Strawman?

I agree he didn't operate in a vacuum, which is why I think there's ample evidence his work would have been done by others soon after he did it if he did not exist. This is true for just about every person and discovery.

You're the one arguing that all of mankind could not have developed General Relativity for decades without Einstein.

Which is it? Was his work able to be done by others around the same time (i.e., not in a vacuum), or was his work so spectacular and impossible for all of mankind to not be able to produce it for decades (i.e., the walks on water argument)?

Ad hominem is not simply an attack; it's disparaging someone to undermine their argument.

Which is why it is also fallacy. Attacking the man does not undermine the argument, so the argument stands unassailed. Anytime we say "you..." it is the beginning of an ad hominem fallacy. Informal fallacy is invalid argument.

The rest of your last comment is all ad hominem fallacy. It's all you you you with you.

I'd also like to point out that Einstein was humble, and the myth of Einstein that developed was not his doing. It was the common man, the everyday people and the press of the time that said, incorrectly, "wow! He is so smart, no one can understand what he is doing!" Which is patently false. Non-physicists could not be expected to understand Relativity. But the physicist peers of Einstein didn't have much trouble with it, contrary to Arthur Eddington's famous quote in response to the statement that only 3 people in the world understood Einstein, "I am trying to think who the third would be." False. Physicists of the day that looked at his work understood his work.

To Einstein's credit, one of the hallmarks of his genius, he had an ability to take complex ideas and describe them very simply, so that any might understand.

It is General Relativity that is Einstein's really only major contribution worth noting. And that is enough! Though he was first to describe Special Relativity, had he not, someone else would have within a few years of his publication. But had Einstein not given us General Relativity, it might have taken another 50 or 75 years for that to appear. But it also absolutely would have come from someone else had Einstein never existed.

Einstein is amazing, he is just not at all the myth that everyone thinks he was. He was just a humble theoretical physicist.

>It is General Relativity that is Einstein's really only major contribution worth noting.

Special relativity was a leap no one else was making, despite 20+ years of people knowing enough to make the leap. He also postulated light was made of photons (which was correct) to explain the photoelectric effect, which is another amazingly important thing. That one a Nobel Prize, but according to you, this is not a major contribution?

He developed the quantum theory of heat, also correct.

He gave solid empirical evidence for atomic theory using statistical physics.

He showed energy and mass are interchangeable (E=mc^2).

He predicted gravitational waves, just recently demonstrated, giving Thorne and other a Nobel. Had this demonstration been during Einstein's life, he would have gotten another Nobel prize.

He discovered the field equations predicted a dynamic, changing universe, something so far from thought at the time he tried to fight it by adding a cosmological constant, but he published the dynamic possibility anyways.

He (with Rosen) created a model of wormholes in 1935.

He invented Bose-Einstein condensates (Bose published statistics on photons, Einstein modified that to apply more widely and demosnteated completely new states of matter).

I could go on and on.

It's baffling you consider all this, especially one Nobel prize and enough for a second, to not be major contributions to physics.

>had Einstein not given us General Relativity, it might have taken another 50 or 75 years for that to appear

Also not true. As you yourself pointed out, Hilbert was right there, and if Einstein had not published, it would not have been more than a year until Hilbert (or a host of others) would have made the same discovery.

This "50 or 75 year" claim is just pulled from nowhere, like a lot of your other claims.

Rereading your posts on this, you clearly have selected at every possible point an anti-Einstein view, far more than is reasonable from the evidence. I could go on to post a ton more sourced items you get wrong.

Oh well, hopefully anyone reading this deep doesn't just believe the things you wrote, but takes some time to check them. I've provided enough places for them to start.

I disagree as to your opinions, which seem to just disagree for the sake of disagreement. The elements of Special Relativity were around. I stand by the assertion that someone else would have developed that theory within a few short years had Einstein not. And I stand by the assertion that General Relativity, had Einstein not existed, would have taken several decades before anyone would have fully put it together.

For anything Einstein is given credit for after about 1918, it was just the momentum of his popularity. Anytime another name is on anything, it is that other name that did most of the work, and because it was based on Einstein's earlier work, his name went on it also. And this is absolutely normal and expected in academia. Nearly all physicists do their life's work before they are 30, usually by the time they are 23. Einstein was nearly 40 when he published his Theory of General Relativity, and that is extremely out of the ordinary. You are seeing things, perpetuating the myth, when you place Einstein, the man, central to any breakthroughs after about 1918.

> Einstein was nearly 40 ... extremely out of the ordinary.

Over all Nobel Prizes, it happened around 1/3 of the time. In Physics since 2000, it happened 80% of the time [1]. Care to rethink this claim?

Have you read the original papers? I have. Do you understand the math, and can do calculations related to relativity? I can.

Again the claim General Relativity was not being solved by others? I just demonstrated Hilbert was right on Einstein’s heels, with a paper published right after Einstein, with the same results.

Why stick to that gun when I just cited the evidence, that you can check yourself? The original papers are both online for you to read.

Einstein and Hilbert even worked quite a bit together on it. Of course Hilbert was interested and working on it too.

By several decades do you mean a few months? Is this time dilation?

I get the feeling you do not know either.

[1] https://www.livescience.com/16911-scientific-breakthroughs-g...

The specific fallacies you have chosen to employ to attempt support your frail argument are interesting. I have read Special Relativity in translation, it is short enough and there is little math. My German is not even pedestrian, so no, I have not read Einstein's original article on General Relativity.

No, I meant what I said. Special Relativity would have appeared within a few years of Einstein's publication had it not occurred, but for General Relativity derived elsewhere would have taken decades at least. Hilbert didn't have it and wasn't on anyone's heels.

>General Relativity derived elsewhere would have taken decades at least

Is this based on the quality of evidence you used when you claimed people over 40 don't do much science? That turned out to be wildly incorrect.

What do you base the "decades" claim on? There was no new math needing invented, no new empirical evidence needed, no new physics needed, and many people were close at the time, and certainly more and more physicists were heading down the same paths.

BTW, Einstein's most cited paper, by far, is from 1935, written when he was 56. I suspect that's some evidence he did good work after general relativity.

So in one breath you're saying GR would have appeared quickly if Einstein had not described it, and in the other you're saying he was the legend of his myth and productive his entire career.

It is simply my opinion that GR was so amazing, insightful, and non-obvious that it would have taken a similar miracle as Einstein himself for someone else to have intuited it and worked it out, but given enough time, eventually it would have appeared.

BTW, Einstein's most cited paper, by far, is from 1935, written when he was 56. I suspect that's some evidence he did good work after general relativity.

OR it is evidence that he had decent research assistants.

Fabulous! I love this rundown. Is there a source or citation for this writing? Or is it an original synthesis?

If I only got one cite, id be interested in the empedocles...

Shamefully, everything is from Wikipedia, so the citations are there.

Interesting Historical detail.

For me, the most notable absence is Gandhi for Nobel for peace.

Technically this is a list of top greatest scientists who never won a Nobel Prize.

He effectively won in 1948. They don't do posthumous awards, so they abstained from giving out the prize that year, stating directly that: "there was no suitable living candidate".

And he didn't get one a decade prior because he was reportedly a tad racist, giving other candidates the edge.

and Kissinger won.. go figure..

But I digress..

George Sudarshan

Fred Hoyle

Tesla is one of the most overrated persons in history. Edison is better in every regard, except for killing an elephant

It's doubly annoying because Tesla had some real achievements and deserved the recognition he got for them. He's overrated now for the stupid Tesla vs. Edison myth that claims he was underrated and suppressed.

except for killing an elephant

Let that stand as a symbol for all the other horrible things Edison did, like electrocuting a number of dogs and cats, and killing his assistant.

Tesla is not exactly overrated, but at least he never stole credit for inventions, and he never killed anyone, unlike Edison (his assistant, glassblower Clarence Madison Dally, who died a rather horrible death).

"Relatively unknown," is a better description for Tesla. Edison invented a few things, the telegraph... no that was David Alter. Edison invented something to copy telegraphs, and he invented the phonograph, which was truly revolutionary, a way to record sound... but he did not invent the record player... he made lightbulbs practical... but he did not invent the electric lightbulb, of course. Edison did not invent the kinetoscope, or movie camera (that was Edward Muybridge) and he knew very little about it, but he took credit for it anyway. Edison took credit for wax paper, but he had absolutely nothing to do with that invention (invented by Gustav Le Gray). He did not invent storage batteries, but he made a lot of money with them. Edison did not invent the power generator, though he is credited for it (his assistants, Charles Batchelor and Francis Upton, were the true inventors of this).

Nearly all the other great achievements attributed to Edison were actually invented by his rival inventors or unknown (to the masses) employees, the researchers he hired, (such as the electric chair, invented by Harold P. Brown).

Tesla was a lot smarter than Edison. He never wrote anything down, and was able to keep his designs in his head. He invented the Tesla coil, the Tesla Turbine, The Shadowgraph, the Neon Lamp, The Niagra Falls Transformer House, the Induction Motor, the RC boat, Alternating Current, and Radio. Tesla held over 300 patents across 5 continents, and all of then were his innovations. God knows how many of Edison's 1000-some patents were actually his.

I don't understand how you or anyone can believe what you wrote. Edison was a major douche bag, an obvious sociopath, which sort of overshadows what he actually invented, which actually number in the low double digits. Tesla's inventions number in the low-mid triple digits

Tesla is not overrated, quite the opposite, apparently, and Edison certainly is not better in any regard than Tesla.

But Tesla was weird, and not all that popular. Edison, like all successful sociopaths throughout history, was hugely popular.

> Edison was a major douche bag, an obvious sociopath, which sort of overshadows what he actually invented, which actually number in the low double digits

This is some sort of urban legend/myth that came about sometime in the early 2000s. Probably due to the Oatmeal.

Edison was not a sociopath. Specifically with respect to Dally, Edison kept Dally on the payroll even when he was too sick to work, and IIRC personally paid out Dally's immediate family a coninuing pension after Dally's death. For the era around 1900 that was unheard of, and at the very least, evidence of humanity that you don't seem to be willing to admit.

Keeping Dally on the payroll doesn't negate that he initially showed no regard for Dally's nor his own safety, which is a sociopathic trait. It does not make up for Edison's ruthless practices, nor his unbridled ambition and greed. Edison had no respect for Tesla, even cruelly mocking him, behavior you'll find in sociopaths. Edison had a disregard for right and wrong, was consistently dishonest, a compulsive liar, even taking credit for the Fluoroscope which killed Dally, though Tesla had been working on it before Edison irresponsibly began messing around with it. Dishonesty is a sociopathic trait. Edison stiffed Tesla a significant amount of money he owed him for fixing his DC motor, and in fact, Edison would not share any of his wealth. Edison relished being the center of attention, another sociopathic trait. I could compromise with you and say we can't know for certain that he was a sociopath. He may have merely been a narcissist, as there are a number of overlapping symptoms.

Have you read 1893 "THE INVENTIONS, RESEARCHES AND WRITINGS OF NIKOLA TESLA" by Martin?

It's fantastic and a dollar on kindle. Within 30 years of Maxwell's equations.

It is easy to look at this list and say gender and ethnicity played a role (which wouldn't be surprising particularly in that era). But five people on the list are white men. Physicists were more likely to be white men (at least in those times). So no matter what list you make of physicists, they will end up on that list. My point is, it is not possible to deduce any bias from such a list. For any coveted prize there are many well deserving people that don't get it simply because there's only one prize to be awarded per year and there's no sure and objective way to know if one who got it was indeed more deserving than the others who didn't.

> My point is, it is not possible to deduce any bias from such a list.

Is it? In at least two (three?) of those cases the male colleagues were recognized with the Nobel prize and their female colleagues were not.

That's a good point.

Scientists in the 20th century were overwhelmingly white and male. Therefore if biases were not at work, you'd expect the list of people who didn't get a Nobel and arguably should have to likewise be overwhelmingly white and male.

That it is only half white and male suggests that top quality research by non-whites and non-males was systemically not rewarded.

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