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Not sure I would agree with that sentiment. Einstein was considered to be exceptional even by his peers. I've read quite a few biographies of of prominent/famous scientists, including Teller, Bohr, Fermi, Pauli, Landau, Feynman, Bethe, Von Neumann, Abraham Pais, Weisskopf, Wigner, etc.. and almost all revere Einstein and put him on the same pedestal as Isaac Newton (and in Mathematician case -- Karl Gauss). Based on a brief appraisal of his accomplishments, one can objectively come to the conclusion that he was head and shoulders above the rest, such as: 1) Brownian Motion -- showing the existence of atoms. 2) Photoelectric Effect -- demonstrating that light can be thought of as a particle. 3) Special Relativity -- Relating mass with energy. 4) General Relativity -- generalizes the special case and incorporate gravity as well.

Many other contributions including Bose-Einstein effect that he would like consider secondary contributions, but have non the less have gone on to generate enormous research in the field (and lead to not a few noble prizes if that matters to people).

Heisenberg is probably the only one that can be honestly said to have made a profound discovery rivaling Einstein.

Just my two cents here.

Supposedly Landau made a 1-5 scale of physicists productivity. If I recall correctly, Newton and Einstein were the only ones he put in the 1 bracket.

But only because von Neumann was a philosopher.

Before Newton, physics used to be called natural philosophy. Newton made it tractable.

Before von Neumann, strategy was philosophy.

("But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy's? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.")

After von Neumann, strategy became tractable.

(Obviously, this view of history is very simplified.)

Yap, and he made a 1-5 scale for good looking girls as well when he was studying in Germany. Like science, he felt that the best physics development have already been done, and all the best looking girls taken. (Disclaimer: no relation to Lev, even though we share the same name).

Not sure why people are always so interested in cutting down other peoples' heroes.

"Oh, Einstein wasn't special, if he didn't get it, the next guy would have. Check out these folks instead." Somehow not sensing the irony that if we all did then worship the other ones you're talking about, you or someone like you would then just make the same claims on those people.. that they're not special, it was about timing and luck.

It's really not about the achievements for some people. (You.) It's just about having a person who only an elite recognizes. You're part of that elite and you're smarter for it because you see this other person's specialness and the rest of the world doesn't and you're better than them for it.

Einstein was great and original and irreplaceable. Your need to have found something better than what the common man worships doesn't make the other heroes you come up with worth any more, or Einstein any less. You just gotta get over it.

No, sorry. It's not about me at all. If I felt like I was special for having different heroes than everyone else then I wouldn't bother trying to draw attention to their accomplishments. It's about our culture's disproportionate focus on one particular person and their contributions to the exclusion of a much more complicated reality.

You know, whether right or wrong in this case, I think you're on to something. As a culture, we do like to focus on singletons - we like the idea of lone geniuses toiling away and changing the world and skip over the amount of team-work/collaboration that goes into real advances.

So I wonder: is this specific to our culture or is a multi-cultural thing? If it is multi-cultural, then an explanation might be that hyper-focus on individual accomplishment was a more accurate perspective in our hunter-gatherer days; fewer people means that each person has a bigger relative impact.

Well there's a very obvious reason for that: we want to learn from the best. Why would you pick someone which is only good, or anything else but the best, most creative, most inspiring? Surely having an ensemble of good performers is nice, but the 'genius' by consensus is who anyone would wish to learn foremost.

I do have a specific opinion on what it means to learn form someone. People often overreach and obsess with details from the lives of those, when in reality learning from Einstein is as simple as reading what he wrote and the way he described his theories. This goes for many other geniuses -- they are geniuses in their fields, and we shouldn't expect everything they did to be right.

"...learning from Einstein is as simple as reading what he wrote and the way he described his theories."

"If you want to find out anything from the theoretical physicist about the methods they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: don't listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds."

I was thinking something quite similar few hours ago. It seems people like to praise a leader (my shallow tribal interpretation) and not focus on the subtle intricacies of what really happened in details; unless they develop a taste for precision and systems.

People often forget that, in addition to being brilliant, Einstein also had some of the best training available. He was a student to some very big names.

I think you're really underestimating how influential Einstein's work was. I can't think of another physicist besides Newton himself whose impact is comparable to Einstein's. Maxwell might be a close runner up (and Einstein himself said as much). In terms of lasting impact, Einstein clearly deserves the credit he gets.

At the same time, I think you're also underestimating how much credit other physicists get. Anybody who has studied some physics knows how profound and significant Feynman, Maxwell, Dirac, Schrödinger, Landau, Pauli, Fermi, etc., all were. In fact, Feynman might get even more adoration among physics undergraduates than Einstein.

But Feynman's work on renormalizing quantum electrodynamics, while one of the great accomplishments of 20th century physics, still did not have the sheer impact of general relativity, which had such far-reaching and grand predictions about the cosmos that many of them took 50+ years to verify. Kip Thorne doesn't identify the "golden age" of GR as even beginning until 1960, when scientists were finally able to not only understand its implications better but also verify them.

Even today Einstein has some predictions that remain to be completely verified (e.g., gravitational waves).

"there are at least a handful if not a dozen or couple of dozen people who were and are equally as intelligent, brilliant, and more prolific."

This might be hard to prove. They'd have to have something comparable to Einstein's 1905 output, while working at some (dreary?) job to pay the bills. Maybe the Nobel (non-Peace) price isn't the best metric, but there are very few people with more than one and the 1905 work might have generated two that year...

It might be hagiography, but it seemed he had a clarity of thought that enabled asking the right question and no concern about what the answer might be. Most of us are prisoners of our world view, few are blessed with the ability to change it.

Maybe I'm going slightly too far, but I can imagine a world in which we don't know relativity but use quantum mechanical effects daily (e.g. at the microchip level.) Can you not imagine such a world? Granted space exploration would have had to not-happen. It's at the limit of what I can imagine in a world. Can you imagine the above historical scenario today? (2015) One hundred years on from when General Relativity actually was published. How could we have not discovered it for 100 years if Einstein had not thought it up?

One exercise you can do is ask what recent discoveries could have been made 100 years earlier. Off-hand:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-a-Graphene-Supercapacit...

"why wasn't this discovered 100 years earlier"? is very close to "why couldn't GR have been discovered 100 years later."

It was discovered via scotch tape and a block of graphite.

reference following http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene leads to,

"Scientists often find ingenious ways to attain their research objectives, even if that objective is a truly two-dimensional material that many physicists felt could not be grown. In 2003, one ingenious physicist took a block of graphite, some Scotch tape and a lot of patience and persistence and produced a magnificent new wonder material that is a million times thinner than paper, stronger than diamond, more conductive than copper. It is called graphene, and it took the physics community by storm when the first paper appeared the following year".

In point of fact, perhaps it could have happened in 1903. True, Scotch tape was invented in 1930 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch_Tape

But, again, why couldn't it have been invented a bit earlier?

And so forth. The fact is, what we know from the circumstances is that GR is a "great person" contribution to the world at a specific historical time. If it had not happened then, it is not appropriate to say it surely would have happened soon.

graphene was imminent for decades until it was discovered. (Other ideas were imminent for hundreds of years in science. It really doesn't mean anything.)

And why not integrated circuits, the instant photography was invented? Some interesting steampunk science fiction could be written around that.

Quantum Mechanics includes special relativity.

> Like many people, Einstein's life and work has been fascinating to me, but in comparison to other brilliant scientists of the twentieth century, there are at least a handful if not a dozen or couple of dozen people who were and are equally as intelligent, brilliant, and more prolific.

Looking backward, it is pretty clear that there were lots of people coming up with the formulations for quantum mechanics. Even without Einstein, somebody probably would have handled that stuff.

However, general relativity was definitely ahead of its time. It took decades until we could even test it.

Finally, while Einstein "lost" the Bohr-Einstein debate about the nature of quantum mechanics, the problem was actually the experiments of the day. One of the strikes against Einstein was the fact that the field formulation predicts that excited electrons in atoms do not decay which everybody knew was an incorrect prediction. Except that Einstein WASN'T wrong--if you put an excited atom in a photon trap and isolate it from the rest of the universe it's decay time goes way up. See: "Collective Electrodynamics" by Carver Mead http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/collective-electrodynamics

The fact that there was a close grouping among physicists at the time works in Einstein's favor. Poincare could have easily realized E=mc^2, he was right there, but he didn't see it.

Looking at the same questions and reading same papers as his peers Einstein simply went further.

> there are at least a handful if not a dozen or couple of dozen people who were and are equally as intelligent, brilliant, and more prolific.

I can guess at least one: Nikola Tesla. May I ask you what other names do you have in mind?

John Von Neumann, Grace Hopper, Turing. Bernoulli, Euler, Riemann.

Don't forget Emmy Noether: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether

"In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began. In the realm of algebra, in which the most gifted mathematicians have been busy for centuries, she discovered methods which have proved of enormous importance in the development of the present-day younger generation of mathematicians."

- Albert Einstein

She was brilliant, but lets not go overboard. She's not even the biggest name in the fields of math she contributed to.

I don't know what she did for math but Noether's Theorem in physics, that symmetries in nature are connected to conservation laws, is impressive.

No idea how far up the totem pole that puts her.

she was involved in commutative algebra. she had a nice little section in my undergrad abstract algebra book. i'm not saying anything negative about her, just that if you are going to list the most brilliant/productive scientists of all time then shes not going to be on the list. she was brilliant of course.

She's certainly far less well known than many of her contemporaries, but Noether's theorem is an incredibly important tool in theoretical physics, and has been described as "certainly one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics, possibly on a par with the Pythagorean theorem". [1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether#cite_note-FOOTNOTE...

Exactly what has G. Hopper done that warrants her inclusion in this list?

She's not Einstein, and she's not well known outside of computer scientis. Seems to line up perfectly with ok_craig's comment.

Of course she was brilliant, and influential, but putting her in the same list as Newton or Einstein feels like intellectual hipsterdom.

She's also not well-known inside computer science. I certainly don't know her. Wikipedia isn't a reliable source, so I am not sure what she has done. It appears that she was part of a team that might have developed one of the early loaders/linkers.

Why is grace hopper on here? She was brilliant, but the gap between her and euler is immense. There were a ton of brilliant minds, but it doesn't make a ton of sense to throw her in.

I can name: hilbert, marcel grossmann, Tullio Levi‑Civita (all at least on-par with Einstein). They all helped develop GR

Maxwell

and though obvious, Newton is not to be sneezed at.

Asimov wrote on Newton in particular, as the greatest scientist of all time. All others compete for 2nd place. Optics, Physics, Calculus. Nobody holds a candle to that accomplishment. Also, he invented the doggy door, and milled edges on coins (to discourage filing, a common 18th-century way to steal precious metal)

Do you recall if Asimov had anything to say about Newton's disastrous investments?

BTW: I saw Asimov speak way back when I was in high school, circa 1981. He was great in person.

ed witten and stephen hawking come to mind as current-day scientists on par with einstein

Gauss.

Von Neumann.

Erdős.

Euler.

yeah, same here. Einstein, through a combination of skill, connections and luck, rose to prominence at a pivotal time in science coinciding with the discoveries of both quantum and macro physics theory, as well as the advanced mathematics needed to describe it. No doubt Einstein was talented and a genius no doubt, but he was by far not the only one, and I'm sure he knew this. Pr ogres in physics has now become so incremental and slow; all the low hanging fruit has long been picked. Einstein seems smarter because he made more progress, but the field was in its infancy compared to today where it's very saturated and difficult.,

I'm not sure I'd describe GR and the foundations of QM as 'low hanging fruit.'

Einstein seems smarter because he was smarter. He didn't transform one small area of physics, he solved a lot of problems that were out at the edges and introduced new ideas that made them tractable.

Of course other people helped, and some of those other people might have created GR eventually.

But he was the only one to pull it all together.

In physics now there are plenty of people with world-class math talent, but no one with Einstein's intuition, insight, and creativity.

Which is why I think progress on the really hard problems has become glacial. Those problems always need deep creative insight, and math alone isn't enough.

> In physics now there are plenty of people with world-class math talent, but no one with Einstein's intuition, insight, and creativity.

I think because physics is now an industry in which deep creative insight is pretty worthless. For example, someone who could convince the gov't to award a $10 million grant to seek physical evidence of dark energy is likely going to have more success than a theorist who can show that dark energy is superfluous.

In Einstein's time physics was more like a hobby. An Einstein today, if they started as a patent clerk they'd more likely progress to IT than physics. At least in IT their creativity can be employed.