Hacker News Reader

Comment by zohebv | Hacker News Reader

I should have said most people, rather than noone. Bill Gates helped make the PC cheap by building a hardware independent OS that commoditized hardware. Edison has a fairly colorful commercial history. But the PC/electricity revolution would have happened with or without these individuals, there were enough competitors. The same cannot be said about Einstein. When Einstein published the General Theory only 2 other people were able to understand it. Virtually, all peaceful civil disobedience protests that we see all over the world from American Civil rights to the Tunisian revolution follow a template set up by Gandhi. Peaceful civil resistance is an action that was never really thought of as practical/possible before. Bill Gates is making substantial social difference via vaccines now, but I would not count his work at Microsoft in the same league as Einstein/Gandhi.

View on HN

The physics community was already converging on the special theory of relativity when Einstein published it. All the signs were there --and had been for quite a while--, but someone needed to add 1 + 1 together and accept the implications. Einstein did that and his explication was very clear, making it immediately undeniable (which doesn't mean that it didn't take some time for people to acknowledge that). However, if he hadn't, one of dozens of others would have. The time was ripe and the evidence was clear.

  When Einstein published the General Theory only 2 other 
  people were able to understand it.

This is an urban legend. There were dozens of people that immediately understood it and hundreds that understood it after some additional explanation. That doesn't mean they accepted it in the absence of experimental confirmation.

However, the General theory was a far greater achievement than the Special theory, because the idea of mass influencing the geometry of space-time was far less obvious and it may have been a decade before anyone else would have investigated that possibility. Nevertheless: someone else would have come up with it. Einstein was no greater than any of the other great physicists of the time, who each had brilliant idea. Einstein just happened to have one that became widely known.

> This is an urban legend

This is true, I stand corrected. However outside of Hilbert and Einstein no one was looking at Reimannian Geometry for answers.

> The physics community was already converging on the special theory of relativity

They had the Lorentz equations for decades but were not getting anywhere close to the final result apart from Poincare. And even Poincare inspite of getting almost all equations lined up, seemed to miss the fact that there is no absolute time and that time is only partially and not totally ordered. Einstein hit the nail on the head inspite of the fact that Lorentz/Poincare had been working on the problem for possibly decades. It still seems likely that Poincare could have arrived at the result.

This is the reason I cited GR. As far as I know, no one apart from Einstein/Hilbert seemed to ave been working on it.

In hindsight special relativity was "obvious", but Maxwell's equations had been around for decades and the Lorentz transforms emerged in 1887 and yet no one was able to make the mental leap required to re-interpret the nature of Time. SR could have ended up taking decades more to sort out. Einstein hit the ball out of the park in his 20s when the scientists working on the problem had spent decades on it. And GR could have only followed after SR.

Well, Einstein had a few great ideas, not one. Special relativity, general relativity, statistical mechanics, and energy = mass. He only really missed quantum mechanics. Newton and Leibniz come close, but none of his contemporaries.

But it is really off topic. Let's say Einstein and his contemporaries are more important than Bill, the guy who really made DOS, and the first few MS employees, but obviously the later group is a lot wealthier.

You are severely overestimating Einstein and Gandhi. If you look at the history of general relativity* you notice that while Einstein was at the center he developed his theory with much help from others such as Hilbert and Levi-Civita. As for Gandhi, he himself was inspired by others such as the March 1st Movement in Korea; his greater fame could be perhaps linked more to the fact that India is huge. Not to take anything away from those two, except perhaps the world's almost deific portrayal of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1st_Movement

I do know about Hilbert, however Einstein and Hilbert were in heavy correspondence in the preceding few months and Hilbert never claimed primacy over Einstein. My conclusion, after seeing many accounts appears to be that Einstein would have arrived at the equations irrespective of Hilbert's inputs but not vice-versa. "Hilbert's treatise was exceedingly involved, or indeed confused—according to Felix Klein."

Also it should be noted that Satyagraha and Gandhi's civil resistance predates the March 1st movement.

That's difficult to compare. For my own life, the PC and then internet were a lot more disruptive than anything directly related to relativity theory, although there may be indirect connections that I don't understand.

And it's very much a matter of timing. If IBM had been able to delay the broad commercial success of PCs by 15 years, which is not inconceivable, it would have been too late for me to choose a career in this field.

I think the great commercializers like Bill Gates or Edison have made tremendous contributions to society. You need business model disruption in order to make new technologies broadly accessible.

However, I do understand what you're saying. If the discoveries of Einstein or Gandhi had simply never been made, that would be a tragedy for the world, not just a delay affecting my own life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com