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Einstein Has Left the Building
Ant writes to tell us of an interesting editorial by John Horgan that is being run by the New York Times asking "will there ever be another Einstein?". The author looks at why Einstein holds such a hallowed position in public opinion and why it will be so hard for any one physicist to attain the same level of fame today. From the article: "The paradoxical answer, Gleick suggested, is that there are so many brilliant physicists alive today that it has become harder for any individual to stand apart from the pack. In other words, our perception of Einstein as a towering figure is, well, relative."
Show me the "brilliant physicists" that have published four papers in one year, each individually deserving of a Nobel Prize.
Actually, not one of them is considered to be in Einstein's class of intellect. The 'smartest' man in physics is supposedly Edward Witten, founder of M-theory. If you listen to the top theoretical physicists talk about him, he seems to be in the running for most brilliant physicist of all time.
Einstein put Relativity on the table, which was previously unknown except to a few as something funky going on with Maxwell's equations under a Galilean transformation. This was an entirely new field. And, when extended into General Relativity, is a huge deal. Not many people get to discover a whole new field of physics like that. Newton did with mechanics. But with E&M, it was several people making discoveries, such as Ampere and Faraday and some others. And the full theory wasn't really collected nicely until Maxwell, who also corrected Ampere's Law. And that's only the classical theory, Quantum Electro-Dynamics is another huge thing. But within classical E&M, you can say Maxwell fully documented it, but it was already an explored field (no pun intended, seriously).
Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics had many people make major contributions, specifically when thermodynamics was found to be described entirely within statistical mechanical formalism. Boltzmann made major contributions, eg coming up with entropy and statistical ensembles, but his work wasn't accepted by the community and he ultimately wound up killing himself.
One physicist that may have come close to Einstein in breadth is my favorite, Lev Davidovic Landau. Any graduate student of physics should be familiar with at least some of his ten-volume "Course of Theoretical Physics", otherwise known as Landau-Lifshitz. Landau's grad students were known to be confused during meetings where he would shift topics from superconductivity to hadron interactions, etc. Landau made many amazing contributions, and also won a Nobel Prize, but he wasn't able to open up any entirely new fields of study like Einstein was able to. He made contributions to other fields, such as 2nd-order phase transitions, superconductivity and superfluidity, etc, but no entirely new fields.
Finally, Einstein was also rather active politically and socially, he didn't confine his efforts to the laboratory (well, really his desk since he was a theorist). He also had quite a unique physical appearance, which also contributed to his popularity. But I think, from a popular point of view, his contribution of relativity, which is probably one of the biggest scientific blowbacks to something that was previously accepted as scientifically true and complete, was the dominant factor. Of course scientifically he made many other major contributions, but for the newspapers, trumping over Newton is a rather 'hot' story.
make world, not war
His credo and that fact that his humanity was revealed in the way he tried to live by it. This is what people loved and respected. Newton was at least an equally great genius but unfortunately he was also an arsehole, his work (like Einstein's), is simply admired as an acedemic artifact.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
There was a world war going on in 1905 when he published his papers? Really? Which one?
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I'll agree that if you're using physical laws to do calculations and you use Einstein instead of Newton to calculate the flight of a baseball, you're doing way too much work.
But that doesn't make Newton right.
I'm gonna quote Feynman because he expresses my feelings very well. This is from Six Easy Pieces (p3 in my copy; you can also find it in the "atoms in motion" chapter of Lectures), but I should say that this is a thought I've had long before reading this: