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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."
an interesting editorial by John Horgan that is being run by the New York Times asking "will there ever be another Einstein?"
With all the parents doping up their kids on antidepressants, I'd say not likely. (We're already seeing that Generation Y can barely wipe its own nose in the workplace. )
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Einstein's brilliance stems from his ability to think outside of the box, in a practical way; and before "thinking outside of the box" was a tagline and not an actual concept.
I'm no Einstein, but I do think in a Bergeronian way. I take a concept, invert it entirely, and think - Why has traditional thinking prevented this from working? and Could it actually work (contrary to popular accepted practice)? Ignore the existing reasoning for why it doesn't work. You will either a) confirm that it doesn't work; b) have an epiphany and a resultant breakthrough or c) something else
Traditional thinking dictates that a square peg can't fit into a round hole. Of course traditional thinking doesn't consider that obscure 4th Dimension - which makes it possible to fit a square peg into a round hole.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Hm, I don't think I can agree with that. Newton was unquestionably one of the most brilliant mathematicians of all time. (Most historians will put him in the three-way tie for first with Gauss and Archimedes.) As a scientist, Newton had a sort of mixed track record once you factor out his mathematical breakthroughs. A lot of the things he did were sitting around waiting to be connected up by the math, once the Calculus arrived on the scene. (For example, the inverse-square law of gravity was generally suspected to apply to gravity by many scientists of the day, include Hooke, Wren, and Halley. But none of them could actually prove that it gave the right behaviors for orbits without Newton's mathematical skills.) If you read the works of Galileo, a generation before Newton (and who Newton almost certainly must have read, although I don't have a source on that), you can see that the man was so close with his physical principles, but lacked the mathematical tools to put it all together. (And he lacked the mathematical genius to create the tools.)
Einstein, on the other hand, was NOT mathematically gifted by any stretch (although he wasn't stupid, either), but had an amazing ability to understand the physical principles and their general consequences. Plus, he was far more loveable than the cold, often caustic Newton.
Really, I thought Euler had already deduced that space might be curved due to the properties of the universe, but was unable to find corroborating evidence and failed to publish his theories after decades of searching. At one time, he chose to try and determine the angles between three mountain peaks using techniques he developed for measurement, but was unable to establish that space was curved because the difference was within acceptable error for his equipment. Laser inferometry showed that he would have had to be accurate between 1-10 and 1-20 degrees in order to show that space was curved. The fact that he deduced this and sought evidence for it without any prodding or any recorded reason make Euler clearly the intellectual superior. Nevertheless, I must agree with earlier posters, Einstein's personality are what made him a household name.
What about his groundbreaking work on Black Holes? (Hawkings Radiation, anyone?) Stephen Hawkings is as close as we have to a modern Einstein, IMHO.
It's poetry with a beat behind it! And guns! They're like beatniks with automatic weapons.
Newton was a prodigious asshole, but he was also the most profound physicist, and among the best mathematicians, of all time.
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On what grounds?
This is completely false. There are many tests that could confirm string theory. Whether there are any (below the Planck scale an accessible to human experiments) that can falsify it is another matter.
This is also far from true. The foundations are speculative but there are many physical reasons why those foundations were postulated. Polchinski gives a good overview.
I did get past graduate QM, and graduate quantum field theory, general relativity, and string theory as well, and I would respectfully suggest that you do some reading about its motivations and accomplishments before you dismiss it. You will note that Glashow doesn't even call it rubbish, let alone "patent" rubbish (implying that it is obviously wrong). He merely says that it has not yet suceeded in making any new predictions that have been confirmed by experiment — which is true, but does not make a theory "rubbish".
Personally, I think it is rather overhyped relative to its accomplishments, but the fact remains that it is the best candidate we have for either a "theory of everything" or even just for a theory of quantum gravity (and I am saying this from the perspective of someone who has worked on a competing theory).
Therefor i imagine that finding a real Einstein among 6 billion people can happen more often than you think.
However i'm not sure that many of them Einsteins ever discovered that they are so brilliant at all...
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
"I don't think that Churchill or FDR spent much time worrying about legacy, yet history counts them as great men."
Churchill cared so much about his legacy that he wrote a 6 volume memoir of his actions during the war, modestly entitled "The Second World War." It's good reading, but make no mistake about its purpose. From start to finish it's an apologia for his every action during that time.
And when talking about Roosevelts, I'm more prone to remember Eleanor Roosevelt as the modest one. This is a woman who, in the dark days of segregation, drove through southern towns with a pistol on the seat beside her, to address groups like the NAACP. When a bunch of up uptight matrons refused to allow a black soprano to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington, she arranged to have the concert at the Lincoln Memorial. 70,000 people attended.
Eleanor Roosevelt was also the driving force behind one of the most important documents since Hammurabi - the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Churchill and Roosevelt were both extremely dynamic personalities who knew exactly how to present themselves to the public, and whose private faces were sometimes strikingly different from their public ones. That said, they both made important - critical, even - contributions to world history.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
The problem is all these nifty unification-type theories only have observable, testable consequences at energy levels far, far beyond that we can produce in any earth-bound laboratory, and we haven't figured out any ways to observe cosmological effects that they might predict either (probably because those energy levels only happen in the early nanoseconds of the universe).
Unless and until somebody can work around that rather fundamental set of issues, it seems like these more aesthetically pleasing models of the universe that produce the same observable effects as the rather ugly hodge-podge we call the Standard Model are likely to remain in the realm of mental masturbation.
As soon as you realize all of this, pursuing further study in physics becomes rather unappealing, or at least it did to me. I look at most modern physics research and I am beyond underwhelmed by it. The only people reaching for the big questions are basically mathematicians and nobody really cares which flavor-of-the-day theory they generate next week because it has no meaningful consequences for the real world.
There are some unsolved physics problems but only a few of them have the potential (in my judgment) to change the way we view the universe, and those that do will require incredible intuitive leaps from what science currently offers in the way of explanatory tools. Oh, and few people seem to work on these hard questions and if you express an interest in working on them, expect to be treated like a quack.
In most cases, the major advances in physics were preceded by the discovery and measurement of new phenomena, or old phenomena to a new & unprecedented level of accuracy. A great deal of Galileo's insights were inspired by the telescope, which allowed him to see, in great detail, that the old "imperfect earth/perfect heavens" dichotomy of Aristotle and Official Church Dogma were patiently not so. This led to rapid-fire advances in astronomy, which in turn gave Newton the crucial data to test his theory of gravitation; it's easy to assume big things attract other big things - it is the exact AMOUNT that was crucial, and when he first compared the acceleration at the Earth's surface vs. the acceleration the Moon was undergoing to keep in orbit around the Earth, he found that his inverse square force assumption was way off. He stayed quiet for a decade, when new and much more accurate data came in, correcting the previous estimates of the size, and therefore the distance of the moon. And then the acceleration of the moon towards the earth was exactly right to fit the acceleration of objects near the earth's surface and the assumption of fall off of force by the square. Then he started talking about Universal Gravitation a bit more.
Einstein, and the rest of the quantum physicists, were following up on the recent discovery of both radioactivity and the unification of electricity and magnetism by Maxwell.
The point I am (longwindedly) making is that ultimately new data drove the physics. We are at a point right now where it is so expensive to probe in areas we have not looked that we have an embarrassing richness of theories to match a paucity of data. The only clear-cut result that I know of that is outside the bounds of the Standard Model of particle physics is the recent revelation that neutrinos seem to change their type (electron, mu, and tau) as time passes, based on the distribution of neutrinos received on opposite sides of the Earth from the Sun (Sci-Am, I think about a year or two ago). In biology, OTOH, we have just recently been able (due to computer horsepower) to sequence massive numbers of genes, as well as make crude computer simulations of what kind of proteins these genes would construct. It is a new tool, the computer, that is allowing biology to seize the spotlight.
There will be more Einsteins, but perhaps in biology rather than physics for a while....
(DISCLAIMER: IANA scientist, but sometimes wish I was....)
At the start of the 20th century there was an explosion of new observations about things large and small.
And now with databases and networking we can aggregate data across disciplines like never before. Fertile ground for a new Einstein, I would have thought.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
So then would it be wrong of me to point out that you spelled Richard Feynman's name incorrectly for a second time, even after I oh so subtly pointed out that fact in my last response? Or perhaps you were speaking of an alternate reality in which a low level government official inadvertently dropped the "n" when transcribing Feynman's last name on his birth certificate? :-)
Quick ask someone to name as many scientists as they can.
I really doubt that your average Joe could come up with these guys. You'd be more likely to hear Bill Nye, or Dr. Jekyll, or that dude who created Frankenstein. Seriously, when we live in an era when fewer than 1/2 the people in this country can name the sitting VP, do you really expect them to come up with either of these guys? I'd be really surprised if 1 in 10 could even name a real scientist. In my unscientific poll of our household, everyone came up with Einstein. For a second scientist, I got Edison, Galileo, and Bill Nye.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
Throughout centuries numerous scientists have argued that the simple questions have all been answered, that only the niche, complex and esoteric aspects will be studied from here on out. In fact many physicists felt that way shortly before the end of the 19th century.
Today I'm betting that, like then, there are still plenty of fundamental questions left to answer (although we might not know how to ask them yet). And the funny thing about truly fundamental questions is that they usually have pretty simple answers. But getting there through established theories and avenues of experimentation is often impossible; it takes a major shift in thought.
But the results can still be simple. While the mathematics that Einstein ultimately employed to describe the theory are complex, the general relativity theory itself is so simple in concept that high school kids can grasp it by simple analogy--the rubber mat with heavy objects on it.
And in fact Einstein himself struggled with the math--but that did not prevent him from formulating the theory. The theory came first, then with help he found the math that could describe it. Einstein's problems with advanced math did not keep him from making major breakthroughs, and I doubt it will stop the "next Einstein" either.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I dunno. One of the things that made Einstein great, from the scientific point of view, is that he cleared away a great deal of 19th-century complexity in optics and mechanics and replaced it with a theoretical framework of such dazzling simplicity that anyone could grasp its basic principles, but of such power that understanding its full implications demands high intelligence and decades of sustained study.
It's like the way Copernicus swept away the huge complexity of the Ptolemaic astronomer's theory of planetary orbits, all those cycles and epicycles, with the simple and powerful idea of the elliptical orbit. Or how Mendeleev replaced the 18th century's bewildering lists of correlations between chemical properties of substances with the simple and powerful organizational principles of the Periodic Table.
Even in my own experience as a theoretician I find the truly brilliant ideas are not complex. They're insights that drastically simplify and clarify. They're the kind of things that, when you understand them, make you slap your head in awe and envy.
So, from this point of view, the hideous complexity of modern high-energy physics theories could well be a sign that they lack brilliance, that another Einstein is needed to clear away all the baroque epicycles, so to speak, and replace it all with something beautifully simple and far more powerful.
Of course, this might not be true -- it might instead be the case that the basic structure of the universe is simply too complex for ordinary humans to understand even its principles. But I find this hard to believe (for no logical reason, I admit).
So I personally disagree with Mr. Horgan. I think he's just channeling Albert Michelson in 1896 ("The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered....Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.") Like Michelson, Horgan thinks that because no revolution has happened in 50 years one will never happen. But it was almost 300 years between Newton and Einstein. So I'd give it another century or two before giving up.
I sort of disagree here. I think what is most important is that we are on the outside of a black box trying to control what is within by sending in effectors and observing changes. Using this method, no matter how precise, we will never know what is in the box, and so will never know of all the possibilities that we are missing.
recognized. Some scientists from this generation will stand out in retrospect, just as some from previous generations did. The fact that the general american public no longer knows who is at the forefront of scientific innovation merely speaks to the sad state of scientific education in the United States. If the situation does not change, we will all suffer the consequences.
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The article misses out on a couple of things, perhaps. Einstein also stands out because he was an intensely moral man who had interesting and brave things to say on the sheer mystery of life. He was a highly gifted communicator who wrote well on a wide range of subjects far beyond his own field.
Even if you don't subscribe to the "myth of genius", men of such rounded accomplishment are very rare. Knowledge has expanded so rapidly that it is hard enough to know your own field, let alone know enough worth saying about other fields. Perhaps Einstein's was the last generation that could span, if not all knowledge, then a substantial part of it. We are all specialists these days.
Besides, we now live in a world in which enterprise and individuality of the Einsteinian kind are less appreciated. Since his heyday, so much has been subordinated to the dismal science of economics, the realm where the beancounter is king and inspiration is seen as a shocking waste of tax dollars or corporate profits. Arguably, the closest equivalent to Einstein today is not a scientist but the Dalai Lama, another gifted communicator who understands that knowledge alone is not enough.
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The wheelchair and speaking device is the tradeoff for sacrificing all that DEX and CHA for the high INT.
The intelligence he probably had, but there are a lot of brilliant people who never get that far. One of the reasons he's come so far is because he's had a lot of time to work on it sitting in his wheelchair. Most discoveries are made by relatively young people, often single and often without children. Cue the "geeks can't get laid" jokes, but it is much simpler than that.
If you got up early to get the kids to kindergarten, and well Tommy wasn't feeling very well so you're considering taking him to the doctor, and they were yelling and now you have a headache, and you're wondering what you should get your wife for the upcoming anniversary, and today you have to drive Billy to soccer practise, and your wife wanted to buy some new curtains for the kitchen that you had to see, but then again she promised she'd make it up to you later tonight and...
Chances are pretty slim you'll do any late studying with your physics book. That interesting experiment you didn't finish in the lab will just have to wait. And you haven't exactly done any deep insight on theoretical physics today either. Which is not to say all it takes is time - most people could spend lifetimes and not connect the dots, but that of the few that could, it requires more of you than just the intelligence.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
1. Einstein became famous and a household name in the year 1919, when during a solar eclipse, it was found and experimentaly proved, how gravity of the Sun bends light (which was predicted and measured by Einstein about 15 years back (1905))
2. Einstein became famous when he redefined Newton's definition of gravity, proving that "action of a distance" is wrong.
3. From Einstein's theory of gravity we know (and in fact we are now trying to measure it now a days) why a distant supernova changes the height of Empire State building.
4) Einstein's is famous because of the nature of his invention, we have been living in a Universe which is defined by him; for example: the concept of relativity, which is highly unintuitive concept, but the moment we understand it, we say "how the hell he understood/guess it".
5) Einstein is famous because of his definition of time-space relationship is more than a science fiction.
5) Einstein is famous for his look; he just looks like a genius; and on the top of that he is humble.
Now question is would there be another Einstein? Yes, of course, but not in our lifetime.
However, there are lots of inventions in the area of particle physics, as Richard Feynman once said, "Now I can say nobody understand particle physics", it's a extremely complicated area to understand any behaviors of those sub atomic particles; so it has little meaning to ordinary people.
Anyone can get Einstein like fame, by answering and proving one of the following questions,1. What is gravity?
2. Why is the Universe so large and so old?
3. (How) did the universe begin?
4. (How) will the universe end?
We will know at least one answer of the above within next 500 years. A new Einstein will born.
"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."
-- Winston Churchill
Currently, we have:
"To those of you who received honours, awards and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say you, too, can be president of the United States."
-- George W. Bush, speaking at Yale University's 300th commencement ceremony
Sorry, I don't know of any quotes that reveal much character from a US president in the last 40 years.
Here are some others though from before then:
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
-- Theodore Roosevelt
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
--Abraham Lincoln
Check out this progression:
"Government is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force. And, like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
-- George Washington
to:
"The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing."
-- Ronald Reagan, October 27, 1964
Every time I read that, the content changes into an unpredictiable state.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)