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Comment by gdsimoes | Hacker News Reader

I read two Einstein's biographies and I have come to the conclusion that if he was born today he would probably be a college drop out. Some people say that geniuses always survives life hardships, but the fact that there are no new Einsteins (or Maxwells, Plancks...) seems to show this isn't true.

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Yeah. I've never heard of Feynman or Hawking or anyone either.

I'm pretty sure both of them are anti-authoritarian.

> Some people say that geniuses always survives life hardships, but the fact that there are no new Einsteins (or Maxwells, Plancks...) seems to show this isn't true.

No new Einsteins, Maxwells, and Plancks?

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

A Nobel doth not a genius make.

But a Nobel is granted to a genius already made.

Not necessarily. Robert Lucas, for instance.

Every year someone will win the Nobel prize and that doesn't mean they are great like most of the early winners. And I'm not the only one who thinks like that. I remember Freeman Dyson saying something like that in article.

Einstein was lucky as well as smart. He was a curious kid while the cracks in the foundations that Newton laid were growing too wide to ignore; he graduated just as the whole structure collapsed. The things he and his contemporaries built in its place still stand, and they didn't leave room to build beside them. By mid century, not even Einstein could do what Einstein did.

Look at how fast and wide the field of physics has grown in the past 70 years. The proliferation of new theories, discoveries, inventions, and solutions, across such vast practical and theoretical disciplines in physics, almost makes me think the "Einsteins" of our generation are not individuals, but groups of people working together. With the ability to share data quickly and effectively, we have become able to have multiple persons working on the same problems at the same time, which has allowed us to accomplish some unbelievable things. We've built particle detectors to observe elementary particles that are fundamental to the Standard Model. We've discovered carbon nanotubes and graphene. We've potentially discovered dark matter. We have our geniuses too, and some are famous (e.g., Hawking), but maybe they are not as famous as their predecessors because their contributions seem to blend with the overall march of science and our expectation of radical advance (jetpacks and all)?

There was a Feynman, but not much since then.

"I have come to the conclusion that if he was born today he would probably be a college drop out."

And without mentors, his gift to the world then might have been squandered.

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