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Comment by hirvi74 | Hacker News Reader

> when Einstein claimed ""There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable."

Not to be pedantic, but was Einstein incorrect at that time/in the future? Were there any actual indications that nuclear energy would be obtainable at that time?

Einstein didn't seem to say, "Obtaining nuclear energy is absolutely impossible, and can never be achieved." All he said was that there is not the _slightest indication_.

I am sorry if this comes off as being semantical, but I just want to make sure I am not misinterpreting you or what Einstein said.

As for the other points, yes. Those were great examples.

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Ok, so libquote says this was stated at 1934, what is after the discovery of Uranium fission and that it emits neutrons that could start further fissions.

The quote is of course completely out of context, and looks a lot like something one throws at annoyingly overeagle people. Also, I imagine the context for saying it only existed because nuclear fission seemed perfectly plausible and just over the horizon. It was technically correct, nobody could imagine a Manhattan Project at that time, and it wasn't obvious that it was even possible, but there was a clear possibility.

>nobody could imagine a Manhattan Project at that time, and it wasn't obvious that it was even possible, but there was a clear possibility.

That’s exactly the point. And yet the Manhattan project was less than a decade away.

Lord Kelvin said his quote in 1895. Deforest said his in 1926. In the myopic timeframe they were all technically correct.*

The GP stated that all those other problems were “obviously” intractable, but whose to say they won’t be solved under some ambitious effort in the next 20 years?

*Aside: All three examples come from the same place in terms of being plausible in the timeframe they were made yet wrong in hindsight. I wonder if people are more fiercely defending the Einstein quote because he’s more revered in popular culture. It’s interesting that his quote is the only one being defended.

Oh, your comment is spot on.

I guess my point is only that all those famous quotes probably just meant "shut-up and give me some space, journalist, I have some immediately pressing problems to solve", and probably nobody undesrtood them as anything else at the time too.

Anyway, my favorite of those is the Michelson's famous "physics is complete" one, that basically meant "let me do the experiment first, then we can talk about the results", but is excellent out of context.

I assume this statement was made not long after Einstein discovered the equivalence between mass and energy, so it's understandable it may not have been obvious at the time that we could generate power that way.

I guess it's hard to tell without over-parsing his words, but you bring up an important distinction.

It may be fair to read it as a scientist essentially saying "we have no evidence it's possible." But as I read it, the addition of "ever" came across as saying he thought it was an unsolvable problem rather than one that had yet to come upon a solution.

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