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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."
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
From Wikipedia:
This is pretty obvious. While many people were studying physics while Einstein worked, the mathematical methods they used tended to be relatively primitive. A precocious undergraduate can easily understand the state of physics up to Einstein's first few papers. This is not to say that Einstein wasn't insightful. He certainly was. However, we're now studying the fruits of his insights, and it takes a few years of graduate school to become an expert in even a small field. If there is a next Einstein, I foresee people studying him for years after becoming a Ph.D. before they become "experts."
After all, I am strangely colored.
What about Hawking? You can't tell me many lay people with no interest in science don't at least know of him.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
"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."
There were *many* brilliant physicists in Einstein's time as well.
Einstein is also credited with a huge crossover from the theoretical to the applied aspects of physics. As a population, we tend to see the theoretical side of physics as more complex and intimidating, but the applied side as more down to earth and relevant to our day to day lives.
Einstein's work straddled this line within his lifetime, making him a figure of daunting intellectual prowess and yet still accessable (in some small manner) by the average man. Surely this combination of theory and practice has strengthened his legacy.
More over, Einstein lived at the height of the modernist movement in world history - a time when advances in technology could do no wrong. In the minds of many (and they would be wrong) he single-handedly brought about the revolution in the views society holds on technology. While Einstein is not to be entirely credited or blamed for post-modernism, he is often thought of as the turning point by the public at large.
Information technology, more than any other force, has accelerated the theoretical side of physics away from the applied aspects of the same. We are capable of manipulating mathematics with far greater precision and finess than the physical world we inhabit. As a consequence, it would seem unlikely that any physicist will straddle that line between the theoretical and applied worlds in the near future.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Yes, in the past several hundred years, at any given time, there have been brilliant physicists. I've known/worked for some of the best. There are one or two who really stand out in each era of physics, and Einstein overlapped several of these. Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Maxwell, et al are the true greats, and Einstein is in that category.
Its very easy to say today that Einstein's works are simple and obvious. Thats because they are first year teachings for most students today. However, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Someday a lot of things will seem very obvious, and those people who do the hard work of making that so will be worth of comparison with Einstein.
I would argue two points.
First, once you get an iconic person, that's it. The game is up for quite a while. Ever notice how all the caricatures of muscle-types take after Governor Arnold? Or how all psychiatrists take after Freud? This is not because we haven't had people with more muscles (we have) or analysts who have not helped larger numbers of people. When you have an icon, you might as well keep it. It's a reference that everyone already "gets".
Second, I would argue that as time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to dominate a field. Look at da Vinci. He was a brilliant man to be sure. But if he were alive today, he'd never have been able to master so many fields. There is just so much research out there about the most minute aspect of any field that no one would have time to keep up. And why would we idolize the guy worked in one very small subset, when these people of past years could dominate so many fields? In a way, they had it easy. Anything they looked at represented a new area of science much the way that any explorer who sailed from Europe a thousand years ago would have been able to claim a new territory. It's much harder now; I've tried!
Also, for those of you who have read the story, I suppose the article should not have asked "Will there be another Einstein?", but rather "Will there be another ThatGeek?". And no, there won't be as I've already registered the nick.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
It's funny, because I actually spent quite a long time a while back thinking about this issue. In the end, I would say it's really difficult to give a certain 'yes' or 'no' answer.
On one hand, there is the issue that information that humans possess is increasing at exponential rate, if not faster. At one point in history, you could be a painter, a sculptor, a mathematician, a philosopher, a physicist, among other things, and still be useful to the society in all of those areas. Today however, such thing is unrealistic due to the fact of how deep each area goes, and how much must be learned of the works of those who came before you in order for you to get to the level of being able to make personal contributions.
On the other hand, you do have to remember that a century or two ago, physics was thought to be a "finished" science. As in, many physicists around the world believed that the Newtonian model has given them all that is needed, and most viewed physics as a done deal. We understand how it works, nothing more is left to learn, move along. Then came Einstein and turned the whole thing upside down.
While on my commutes to and from university last semester, I downloaded audio lectures on particle physics. One of the very first things the professor said was "today, most particle physicists believe that we have a solid understanding of what the world is made up of, and that, unlike a few decades ago, we really have gotten to the bottom layer of the universe." He ended the lectures (which were extremely interesting btw) by saying that as good as the standard model of physics is, we still have 23 quantum numbers that are unattainable through mathematics, ideas which defy logic, and a bunch of other theories like string which may also be onto something.
Overall, I think that if any conclusion is to be made about the state of physics today, I would say that no, Einstein hasn't left the building. In my opinion, we are still missing something crucial about the way the world operates, but we may not realize this until advances in other technology areas such as space travel. Individuals still can make great breakthroughs, but because of issues such as the amount of foundational knowledge, the number of people working on the same things, and the money needed for some of the research, it may be more likely that future discoveries will need to be left to teams of scientists, rather than individuals.
I can't say much in regards to Einstein, but I know that it is getting harder to point out musical geniuses, because the bar is constantly being raised. There are thousands of violinists, who are perfectly happy to practice all day to produce perfect performances. Anything less and they simply won't be noticed. I heard a professional musician comment, some years ago, that nobody stands out any more, because so many are at the level of Heifitz.
:)
I played the violin for about 15 years, and had to stop, because for me the strain of a performance + the need for constant practice overshadows the joy received from playing. I now play quite happily at the back of the second violins in an orchestra - room for fun, and mistakes are rarely heard
Anyway, my point is, perhaps something similar is happening in the field of science.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
I'm having trouble parsing this one; if it's radical, it can hardly be common place, no?
XML causes global warming.
That's right, it's not like governments ever funded people to use physics to predict the trajectory of a bullet from a large gun before the atomic bomb. And moreso, it's not like they ever decided that for large distances the Coriolis force and air resistance need to be properly accounted for and thus they never needed to fund the development of electric computers.
Nor did they ever need to understand physics to figure out the design of aerofoil wings, or the best shape to make ship hulls, before the atom bomb.
make world, not war
Show me modern physics papers that contain math that most people with any scientific or engineering background can understand, and that are just a few pages long.
The unsolved problems that people are working on today are much more complex, so comparing the rates at which they are solved is meaningless.
When I was slogging through my 250 page PhD dissertation, I came across an article about disserations of such famous people as Schroedinger and other physicists of the 1920's - whose entire dissertations were about as long as Section 1.1 of my introduction.
Trying to compare now and then is all but irrelevant.
Not to denigrate Einstein's prodigious achievements but general relativity would have been impossible were it not for Riemann's (and Gauss before him) work setting up differential geometry. Not to mention, the contributions by Lorentz, Minkowski and other contemporaries who we forget in our quest to annoint a scientific messiah. It seems that the public *needs* a quaint ubermensch to worship with rather than accepting the more mundane truth that scientific advances occur from the concerted work of many very bright people.
On a scientific level, had Einstein not existed, someone else would have done the work eventually - the tools and conditions were in place for these discoveries to be made. But on a societal level, it probably would have been necessary to invent him...
I think general relativity is a very different story. Without Einstein, it might have taken decades to work it out. I mean, really, it's just an amazing piece of work, and something that's hard to work up to incrementally.
So you're right about E=mc^2 being easy for people to remember, but in a way that's a shame, because it shouldn't be taken as anything like his greatest work.
Now you (usually) need huge accelerators and expensive satellites to collect fundamental data... and when those things produce readings, many people find out about them simultaneously, and the race is on. We just don't build many of these in a year, and we don't build the stuff that would really show us something exciting, since it would cost too much. So fundamental physicists may be somewhat starved for data, which is why they to off on adventures into this purely abstract mathematical string theory wonderland. Of course, they're a clever lot, and if we let them work on it longer, maybe the will find a way to test it.
Second, why should we expect another Einstein, or Newton? Given that anyone's accomplishments must be measured relative to the common populace, we would expect people of such stature to be rare.
There are many factors that go into what makes someone great. Part of it is certainly being in the right time and place. Another is the social climate. Is Einstein the equal of Newton, or vice versa? That is difficult to say. They lived in completely different times. Could one do the same accomplishments as the other? One common element that appears between the two is that they were both fairly prolific (Newton did calculus, physics, and ironically enough, why light is a wave). I'd be curious if other people could come up with other historical science figure that also had several major findings. Feynman? Turing?