> A-bomb architect “was no Einstein,” historian says, but he did Nobel-level work on black holes
As a layman I find it hard to parse the difference from “no Einstein” but still doing “Nobel-level” work.
The interview didn’t really help explain it.
As a layman I find it hard to parse the difference from “no Einstein” but still doing “Nobel-level” work.
The interview didn’t really help explain it.
It goes really deep in terms of what it affects in physics.
No, he didn't. There's a reason we are talking about the Lorentz transformation, not the Einstein transformation.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Lorentz_transformat...
> In physics, analogous transformations have been introduced by Voigt (1887) related to an incompressible medium, and by Heaviside (1888), Thomson (1889), Searle (1896) and Lorentz (1892, 1895) who analyzed Maxwell's equations. They were completed by Larmor (1897, 1900) and Lorentz (1899, 1904), and brought into their modern form by Poincaré (1905) who gave the transformation the name of Lorentz.[3] Eventually, Einstein (1905) showed in his development of special relativity that the transformations follow from the principle of relativity and constant light speed alone by modifying the traditional concepts of space and time, without requiring a mechanical aether in contradistinction to Lorentz and Poincaré.[4] Minkowski (1907–1908) used them to argue that space and time are inseparably connected as spacetime.
Einstein did great work, no doubt. But his work was still a product of his time, and was 'in the air'. If it hadn't been for Einstein, other people would have made similar discoveries soon. They were already in the process, after all.
However I suspect, it would have probably taken several great scientists and a few more years.
Thanks for the rabbit hole!
But that for me is really the point. Even if Lorentz had the math right, he didn't have the explanation, which Einstein delivered. And that's the valuable part in science. Having a model that explains the world better than previous models.
Special relativity was being worked on by several people contemporaneously. The fact that it is called "Lorentz Contraction" should tell you that other people were working on it.
I wouldn't quite say 'anyone else'. There's always John von Neumann.
Wigner may have said it best: "Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement."
I guess which one you want to put on a higher pedestal depends on various judgement calls.
For me there are only three Scientists who could be called as truly "tectonic inducing" in the history of Modern Science. In order of ranking;
1) Isaac Newton.
2) James Clerk Maxwell.
3) Albert Einstein.
I want to be careful though. As some sibling comments mention, these discoveries of these great people were indeed "in the air" of their time. They will have happened. But it would have taken many more great scientists and more time.
For instance, I believe there are incredibly deep insights today derived from the mixture of quantum mechanics and information science. More deep insights are imminent and inevitable. But there is hardly one towering figure to do them all in one sweeping motion the way Einstein or Newton or Euclid did (to name a few easy examples).
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Both Leibniz and Newton did a lot of interesting things, with only some (but very notable!) overlap.
I particularly like Leibniz's calculator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepped_reckoner and Newton's telescope.
And then there are people like Gauss and Euler, who lie so far beyond all comparison, it boggles the mind.
> Well, he was no Einstein. And he’s not even up to the level of Heisenberg, Pauli, Schrödinger, Dirac, the leaders of the quantum revolution of the 1920s. One of the reasons for this was his birth date. He was born in 1904, so he was 3 years younger than Heisenberg, 4 years younger than Pauli. Those few years were enough to place him in the second wave of the quantum revolution and behind the main wave of discovery, in what [philosopher of science] Thomas Kuhn called the “mopping-up operation,” applications of the new theory.
Edit: not saying I agree or not
Special + general relativity
Microscopic definition of Brownian motion
Photoelectric effect
Mass-energy equivalence
Another bit: at the time Einstein worked on Brownian motion the theory of atoms was still not entirely accepted by everyone. His worked helped settle the matter.
The matter of the existence of the atoms has become pretty much settled in 1865, when Johann Josef Loschmidt was the first who determined the size and mass of the atoms, and then his results were well used by others, like Maxwell and Stoney (who determined the electric charge of the atoms).
Nevertheless, the improved theory due to Einstein has lead to more precise results about the atom properties.
This is also one of few of his works, together with the general relativity theory that he published around the same time during WWI, where he introduced new mathematical relationships between physical quantities, instead of just giving new interpretations to relationships already found by others.
The world is run by smart people, built on a foundation of knowledge creating by generations of the greatest minds that make smart people look normal.
Some smart people are involved in running the world. But we also have plenty of less gifted people in charge.
There are smart people working at SpaceX today. But they are walking on the shoulders of giants like Aryabhata, Newton or Einstein.
There is only one physicist who moreorless created half of our contemporary understanding of physics