Nice little summary. I fully agree. There are geniuses, and there are scientific revolutions, but they rarely (if ever) come from a single "lone wolf". They're born in at least equal measure by the slow, methodical, tedious work of legions of mostly forgotten researchers.
What would have happened if Einstein fell under a tram in 1900? What difference would it have made, for how long? Not a lot, Poincaré was almost there and others were working on the various problems. I’d guess at most a ten-year delay. So are there any true examples of ‘great men’ or is science all over-determined?
...Without going into a lot of detail it should be clear that Einstein is solving problems on which a number of other people are working and making important contributions. He is not pulling new physics out of a hat but solving problems over-determined by the field of physics itself.
So what about Newton?As should be well known Leibnitz and Newton both developed calculus roughly contemporaneously, even more important, as I explained here, they were both building on foundations laid down by other leading seventeenth-century mathematicians. Newton was anticipated in his colour theory of white light by the Bohemian scholar Jan Marek Marci. Newton was only one of three people who developed a reflecting telescope in the 1660s. Robert Hooke anticipated and probably motivated Newton on the theory of universal gravity and Newton’s work on dynamics built on the work of many others beginning with Tartaglia and Benedetti in the sixteenth century. His first law of motion was from Isaac Beeckman via Descartes and the second from Christiaan Huygens from whose work he also derived the law of gravity. Once again we have a physicist working on problem of his time that were being worked actively on by other competent scholars.
[I should add that in Timaeus, Plato describes the First Law of motion perfectly :
For it is difficult, or rather impossible, for something to be moved without something to set it in motion, or something to set a thing in motion without something to be moved by it. When either is absent, there is no motion, but [when they are present] it is quite impossible for them to be uniform.
This also hints at the Second Law, that applying a force changes uniform motion, though of course only qualitatively.]
Put simply it is not the originality or uniqueness of their work but the quality and depth of it that makes these researchers great men.
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2017/09/07/the-great-man-paradox/
Famous Scientists and Mathematicians are seldom as deeply admired by their peers as by the Great Unwashed. Everyone seems to know of Einstein and Newton. You could select five thousand of the Great Unwashed at random, shoot every one of them in the forehead with a .45 pistol and not kill one who could tell you who was Arthur Eddington.
ReplyDeleteEinstein became famous on the basis of exactly one headline in The Times (of London), on 7 November 1919: Eddington had confirmed Einstein's prediction using the eclipse of 29 May 1919. Brilliant as he was, a good deal of Einstein's later career was wasted: "God does not throw dice" - to which Hawking would grimly reply, years later "Not only does God thrown dice, he throws them where even He cannot see them."
Newton used his position as a Fellow of the Royal Society to torment Leibniz. Isaac Newton would go on to produce vast trunks full of apocalyptic tracts and calculating the Day of Judgement - yet another life wasted on nonsense.
Fame is the worst thing which might ever befall a scientist. Fortune seldom follows along for the ride. But there is one measure of greatness I rather like, the Erdös Number. A good friend of mine has an Erdös Number of 1.
oakland.edu - Erdös Number Project - The Erdös Number Project- Oakland University
Dan Weese
ReplyDeleteYou could select five thousand of the Great Unwashed at random, shoot every one of them in the forehead...
Time for a holiday. Somewhere warm with big drinks and little umbrellas.
Rhys Taylor Been there, done that, got the little bag of ganja and fixings from the oh-so-helpful concierge's friend. Then spent thirty years, off and on, in sunny Guatemala and Belize, amongst the tourists.
ReplyDeleteThe Big Drinks I leave to the Guatemalans. The little paper umbrellas I leave for the Europeans.
There's a brand of popskull named "El Venado", the hunter. I call it "Veneno", snake venom. The Guatemalans must hate to drink: they fill themselves with Venado and for about fifteen minutes, they are extremely animated and no woman within sight is safe from their amorous intentions. Then the candle which burned so brightly from both ends gives out suddenly and they fall down in the street, caxak, paralysed drunk. You'll see the wives, dragging their insensate husbands home by the heels, with little children trying to help.
There's a road from Los Encuentros to Panajachel where the drunks litter the road, to the point where they've commissioned a pickup truck to patrol the road, loading up the drunks into the back. Early Sunday morning, it comes bumping into Pana, loaded up with what looks like the Seven Dwarves in the back, very much the worse for wear, groaning horribly.
Vacations. At the risk of obtuse edgelordism, after my perverse existence, vacations have lost their charm. The Devil finds work for idle hands to do...
photos.google.com - New photo by Dan Weese
I disagree about a 10 year delay. I think it would have been much longer.
ReplyDeleteWhat people often fail to recognize about people like Einstein and Newton before him was that these men made extremely significant contributions in a number of different, perhaps related, areas.
Einstein's contributions to Quantum Mechanics (the photo-electric effect), atomic theory (Brownian motion) and, of course Relativity all worked together to get all of his contributions taken more seriously.
Do many people realize today that even an admirer of Einstein like the influential Max Planck long resisted many of Einstein's contributions? Did Planck ever accept the Atomic Theory other than as a useful abstraction?
Do people remember that it took Einstein many years to land even a modest job in Academics even after his 'miracle year'?
There was tremendous resistance to a lot of Einstein's work, inside of the Academy and out.
Einstein himself believed that he never would have had his 'miracle year' had he gained a job as a professor earlier, because he would have been shunted off into some insignificant silo of research.
Same with Newton. Contributions in optics, physics and math were all indepently important, but we're all taken more seriously separately because they came from one great respected mind.
Of course there was resistance. If there wasn't, a wealth of competing crackpot theories would have been given equal weight and science would have stalled utterly. Few people outside academia seem to appreciate how many alternative "fringe" (read : loopy) ideas are proposed by every nutter under the Sun hell-bent on provin' 'em all wrong, they said I was maaaaad, but I'll show 'em...
ReplyDeleteThat there was resistance is in no way any indication whatsoever that other people wouldn't have proposed the same ideas in short order. The system is designed to do exactly this : get people/groups to propose radical new ideas (in search of that breakthrough discovery that brings fame, fortune, and maybe even useful things) whilst simultaneously encouraging other people/groups to test them very rigorously and with due resistance (i.e. if there isn't any evidence, then it gets ignored unless it can be tested - in which case it is tested, as with the 1919 eclipse experiment).
Rhys Taylor the point I'm trying to make is that resistance is overcome more easily by the wide recognition of great minds. Minds that make important contributions in multiple areas are difficult to ignore.
ReplyDeleteThose kinds of thinkers are rare.