Slashdot Mirror
Albert Einstein - Person of the Century
fat_mike writes "Seems that Time Magazine has picked Albert Einstein as Person of the Century. You can check out the scoop here at Drudge Report. " I think I could agree with this, but it's really almost impossible to qualify something like this, although it does give me pleasure to have the icon *really* match the story.
Although we were not able to prove relativity or show it's true capabilities in this century, I think Einstein deserves the credit.
i prefer gandhi after all einstein himself was fan of gandhi
Hrmm?? Pretty tough one to pick isn't it? I cannot even think of a person of the year, let alone the century, milleneum, or whatever. One would at least need to categorize the choice. How could one compare, for example, Einstein with, say, Crick and Watson (sp?).
[what?]
Gandhi affected waaaay more people on a personal,
emotional and spiritual level than Einstein did.
I think if Einstien were alive, he'd laugh at Time
Rag-o-zine.
But what do you expect from an organization that
REALLY thinks Jeff Bezos is the "Man of the Year".
I stopped reading Time long ago, anyway. It's
McNews.
In all sense of fairness, we all dont' directly know him except for his theories and what history books tell us. And who is person of the century is not very subjective. Saying who contributed most to physics might be more appropriate. IMHO, I would think Mark Twain, Erickson (psychologist of Social Psych), Piaget, Pavlov and others were more important. But then again, that's my subjective view for man of the century.
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Excellent choice on the part of Time Magazine for Person of the Century. Although it probably isn't very politically correct. Soon, the Weekly World News will run the story: "Time Magazine Says Some People Better Than Others!" Also, shouldn't this be in the News section instead of Science? ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
drink his own piss?
Heh, it is pretty cool that the icon matches the story. And Einstein is pretty deserving of the honor...
AL Gore. If he hadn't invented the Internet and electricity, none of this would be possible.
You are a sad little person. Please stick to masturbating and leave /. to educated people.
The person of the century: Couldn't tie his shoelaces Couldn't find his own house, even if he were right in front of it, (he'd knock on a neighbor's door and ask which house was his) Was considered retarded through most of his childhood I on the other hand: Can tie my shoelaces Can find my house so long as I'm on the right street and block Was considered "gifted" through most of my childhood. Strange how things turn out isn't it?
Little Brother, watching the watchers
My take on this - if it is true - is that it is a reflection of the .com/geek mainia that is flooding the mainstream. Time is a political rag. If they stuck to their guns they would have chosen FDR or Ghandi. Einstien would be a rational choice for Slashdot but I have to wonder about Time magazine. Of course, I wonder about just everything that the mainstream media does these days....
Those can be kind of cool if you are into that kind of stuff.
Einstein was indeed a brilliant man...but he was also very...wrong. A lot. Einstein would not have been the scientist of the century...that one would have to go to Neils Bohr. This man, one of the creators of quantum theory, understood the universe in a way that Einstein never could. Einstein was very entrenched in classical physics..he was absolutely sure that the universe was, in essence, a great "clock." A clock whose gears could be seen by science, and understood in the most basic sense, ultimately.
/.'ed
:)
Bohr, on the other hand, was open enough to realize the value of quantum mechanics. He saw the outcomes of quantum theory as nature's way of telling us that we have no business imposing our own macroscopic concepts on nature itself. Ideas such as color, particle, and wave have essentially no meaning in terms of electrons, quarks, and photons. Do a search on "Copenhagen interpretation" or "Einstein Bohr debates" to find out how Einstein was so shortsighted in his quick disregard of "quantum strangeness" and "weird forces at a distance" thought experiment...see the quantum physics story posted earlier for details...it's about two photons being emitted in opposite directions having a superposition of two states until one is measured...then the other becomes definite...also see "Schrodinger's cat" for an interesting thought experiment">. Anyway, Bohr was a greater thinker than Einstein, without a doubt..at this level where philosophy and science intertwine.
I would have to agree underservedly about their selection as Einstein for man of the century. Bohr was a scientist and philosopher. Einstein was a cultural icon. In his personality, his naive political beliefs, and ultimate quotability have made him an ultimately unique figure, recognized worldwide. His disregard for any cultural norms made him loved. He was also a man of paradox....showing a tremendous understanding of everything, so much more than the average genius...but also displaying a magnificent naivite in every aspect of his being. Einstein represents the goals, ideals, and accomplishments of this century more than any man - culture, science, politics....
I'll shut up now, and I'm sorry if most of this was mentioned in the article...it was
Did i miss anything?
I dont know how many read the druge report on here, I do. I like drudge alot but he has said 3 differnt people in the past 2 weeks.
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
Does it really matter who "Time" chooses? Who decides at Time who the person of the century is? It's an editor/owner type of deal. Why should I listen to some guy in a suit telling me that the man of the century is Einstein or whatever?
I recommend you all stop waisting your time thinking what a single most important person of the century is. Just think about "people" who have influenced particular fields or parts of the every day life.
There is no single "Man of the century" that will be the man of the century for everyone.
PS: Why not have a person of the century? Women are people as well.. maybe TIME hasn't figured that one yet.
SpamMan
Look at how he showed us the fundamental problems with proprietary software through his programs and... what? Windows was actually seriously supposed to be an OS? Whoa... that changes my whole perspective. I thought it was a joke...
Devilled Eggs - A disturbing little creation of mine.
HA HA HA ROFL.
That was a joke posting right?
luser
All this most important person crap is making me sick. Some say that the ability to reflect and think about oneself defines intelligence, but this proves otherwise. It is impossible to compare people's influence if they are from different points in time since all achievements are based on others. And anyway, I'm not really sure if I can agree on Einstein as influential since the average moron of the nineties doesn't even know what e=mc^2 stand for, let alone understands relativity. "Well... I'm no Alfred Einstein" -Joe Namath
A search for "Einstein" results in 190,720 pages found. "Roosevelt" scores 2nd with 175,130 hits. "Gandhi" is found on 62,695 web pages.
This might not be the best way to judge people and their influence on the society (There are only 436 pages about "John Postel", but every Slahsdotter will agree that his work influenced the life of everybody on Earth in the past decade)
But looking for some name on Altavista is a good way to judge people's popularity among the web users (how does this relate to popularity among the general public, I don't know).
Einstein's science may have directly affected everybody's life, but he had become an icon for the whole sceintific field. Have you seen the science icon on Slashdot?
He deserves being the person of the century.
It's strange. On the Time webpoll, the top listed people are Elvis Presley, Yitzhak Rabin, Adolf Hitler, and Billy Graham, with Einstein coming in 5th. Gandhi was 9th, and FDR didn't make the top 20, while Drudge's report lists them as the runners-up. IMHO, Presley, Graham, and Rabin can be ignored as ballot-stuffed votes. But as much as I hate to say it, wasn't Hitler really much more influential on world history?
Then it's Leonardo DeCrapio for man of the millenium.
What about Einstein's work on the photoelectric effect? The photoelectric effect was not explainable by classical physics.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Einstien is probably the best choice from the aspect of "this is someone we're proud of."
;). Aside from the passion of the moment, computers and the Internet, Einstien's work also made possible the earlier communications revolutions, such as TV.
Who has had real impacts on the 20th century? Well... Hitler and Stalin come to mind. Both individuals certainly changed the course of history in a way that, possibly, no one else could. Hitler's aftermath, especially, is still being felt today. The reunifcation of Germany and the events in Bosnia after communism's collapse are both events that have hitler's fingerprints on them. Of course, few would want to commemorate sharing a century with him...
You might argue that Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., and others of a more humane bent had a major impact on the 20th century. Certainly, their impact on their homelands was great... and their philosophies have inspired many beyond the borders of the lands where they primarily did their work. But, quantifying their direct impact on any arbitrary world citizen's daily life is hard. There are still the opressed, there are still those killed in the name of supressing freedom.
Einstien is a safer choice. His work has weaved its way into our lives on a daily basis. His papers basically jump-started the field of quantum mechanics, which gave rise to modern electronics, which gave rise to Slashdot (how could you get more noble?
And... of course, his little E=MC^2 equation was put to rather dramatic use in Hiroshima, and held the world hostage to the fear of complete and utter destruction for the better part of half a century.
I guess, in all, that sort of duality is symbolic of the 20th century. We've seen advances in medicine that can cure as a matter of course what was incurable at the start of the century. We can save the unsaveable, give relief to those in great pain. And, we've also seen the infliction of pain en-mass, from the mustard gas of WWI, to the ovens of Auschwitz. We saw the Earth rise over the barren wastes of the moon, a tiny, fragile world... conspicuosly lacking the lines demarking the arbitrary borders that people have fought and died over. We've also seen that we can destroy the Earth (at least for ourselves) either quickly through nuclear explosion and fallout, or slowly through CO2, DDT, CFC, and...
Einstien, as part of all this, can be credited with the best and damned with the worst. Well, perhaps damning is too strong a word. Certainly, though, it's a warning that even the work of what seemingly was a kind, gentle man can wreak havoc when let loose in this world.
As for credit, Einstein wasn't working alone on these things, there were a lot of brilliant minds involved. Einstein is a good figurehead to hang it all on.
Sadly, Adolf Hitler is without much question, IMO, the true man of the century. WWII has altered our lives in profound ways. Beyond the deaths of millions and the rewriting of European borders. He also has affected how America deals with threats, ie Hussien, Vietnam, Korea, all directly affected by wartime interaction with axis powers. I think Albert Einstein is the Scientific personality of the century, but not the "man of the century"....
-- Moondog
Which human, of the billions on the planet, changed the course of history in his time, and left an indelible mark in perpetuity?
You could pick mass butchers like Hitler or Stalin, who qualify due to the sheer volume of their atrocities.
Or you could go with the person who is identified with literally changing the way everyone thinks.
The guy earlier is right about Bohr. And Rutherford. And Pauli. And Oppenheimer. And Rabi. And a whole lot of other physicists in the first half of this century.
Sorta sorry I missed it. But I got to study with a lot of guys who worked with the above. Hard to forget this legacy. Screw the politicians, movie stars, sports figures, and other 'leaders'.
You're right, it's late and i didn't quite say exactly what was meant. Einstein wasnt entrenched in classical physics at all. What he steadfastly believed was the same thing classical physicists: that the universe could be completely understood through the scientific process, eventually. Einstein believed that there were no mysterious probabilisitic elements to the universe. He saw quantum physics as a manifestation of our current limitations - limitations which will be overcome shortly enough. He stated that we simply didn't know enough to explain it, not that electrons were these weird probability waves.
/. isn't a place for modern philosophy.
He refused to believe that the universe was not totally mechanistic....this has implications on randomness, chaos, and determinism, but
How about "best religion of the millenium!" or "Worlds worst hunting accident of the century!" or "America's Funniest beheadings!"
I once listened to a man tell me that "America is a sick society." He was wrong, America is a society with a lot of sick people.
And btw, you can email me and I can point you to some sources if you'd like to read some more on the political and philosophical leanings and implications of Einstein.
Where would Hitler be without SATAN.
I vote for our LORD SATAN. Without the Dark Prince nothing would be possible,
Wasn't he Al Gore's assistant.
"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it feels like an hour. Talk with a pretty girl for an hour, and it feels like a minute. That's relativity." - Albert Einstein
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"Okay, who taught the cat how to type ctrl alt delete?"
Perhaps you got him confused with Paul Erdos.
There's no reason for a sig here.
That's especially hard for me to say, being Jewish and knowing very closely the extent of his atrocities. But the fact is, he had more influence than Einstein.
Yuck.
There's no reason for a sig here.
A leader of his people, unsupported by any outward authority, a victorious fighter who always scorned the use of force; a man of wisdom and humility who has confronted the brutality of Europe with the dignity of the simple human being and has at all times risen superior ..... Generations to come, will scarce believe that such a man as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth"
- Albert Einstein on Gandhi
"A normal telegraph is like a large cat with it's tail in New York and it's mouth in LA. When you pull the tail in New York, the cat squaks in LA. A wireless telegraph is the same thing, but without the cat." - Albert Einstein
There's no reason for a sig here.
"It's of no concern to me with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but I know that World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones." - Albert Einstein
There's no reason for a sig here.
T'is being the LAST OFFICIAL Christmas of the 1xxx years, if I am allowed to ask only ONE question, my question will be -
What man have accomplished (good and bad) in the two thousand years since Jesus Christ was introduced into this world?
It sure beats "Who is the man of the century" type of useless survey.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I would have selected Churchill (Time's Many of the Half-Century). I have always believed that people overrate Einstein. Further, I consider scientific progress inevitable and one-directional, but freedom fragile, and subject to the tides of history. Einstein makes a reasonable choice, though. I thought they would pick that !@#$%^&* socialist FDR.
Satan himself of course. No one has done more than the Dark Prince to shape our way of life, past, present & future.
Are we writing off next year? Maybe the "man" of the century is holding out on us...waiting until the last moment to put his bid in. :)
For the record....the 21st century and the 3rd millennium dont start until January 1st, 2001...not January 1st, 2000.
Jim
I did not know that fictional literary characters were elegible. In that cas I vote for Capt. J.L. Picard.
Nobody likes a math geek...besides since when has accuracy been allowed to get in the way of a good posting, news story etc. Especially here at /.
While it is obviously flawed to try and work out who was the most significant out of Einstein, Ghandi, JFK and any number of great people, there is one person who bears special consideration. I think, in the very long march of history, perhaps many thousands of years from now, people will remember this as the Turing century. Quantum physics and relativity will be historic relics, while politicians and spiritual leaders will have assumed mythical status. One concrete, profound change will remain wedded inseperably to the future of humanity: the conception of the general purpose programmable computer, or Turing Machine. Why? Because it is the computer that is the first real extension of the human mind. In a similar way that an axe or hammer is an extension of an arm, the general purpose computer is the direct extension of what makes us inherently different to other known species: intelligence. I will not try and predict the future of computing or speculate any further on the future of humanity (many others have done this already in this context), but will ask you this: Would you even be reading this message if it wasn't for Turing?
Note -- please see this web site for more information on Turing's life and achievments.
Doesn't sound very profound, does it?
150 million people have died this century in conflicts directly or indirectly related to a belligerent German state.
Computers as we know them were forged as part of the effort to combat Germany, as was our atomic technology.
Besides telling us what we already know, the fact that Germany sucks and is a fucked up country, what is your point. What should we say to Germany, "Thanks for the PC Adolf." The only thing truly German is disgusting Pr0n. You overstate Germany's importance. Like a bee sting they hurt like hell but it is still just an insect pissed off at something.
Shoulda been Bob Fineman, who used to live
next door to me. Periodically, he'd give
give up drinking and smoking dope, and gimme
all his dope.
So you say Einstein is Person of the Centrury, and you post a link to the Drudge report for further information? This is about equivalent to saying "Einstein is not Person of the Century". The Drudge Report is at best, accurate half of the time. Why don't you just wait until it's officially declared, instead of reporting rumors? Is this from the same crowd that said RedHat was going to buy Be, or what?
I think Slashdot would do well to check the sources of its information, lest it become a gossip page.
-lx
This is your opinion, as I have some doubt about the statement. I never liked this desire people have to say one person is smarter than the other. And Einstein's place and importance in society has been exaggerated, largely due to the social phenomenon of celebrity. (He is certainly a better choice than a rock star, actress or politician, and I was almost expecting one of these to be picked by Time.) But Neils Bohr was so often wrong himself. The "Bohr model of the atom," for example, shows electrons in elliptical orbitals, like planets orbiting a star. It's well known in physics and chemistry to be completely false, and it is only valued today as an appoximation for hydrogen-like atoms.
In any case, I am thrilled to see a fellow scientist chosen for person of the century. It almost restores my respect for the media. This is a much better choice than the runners-up would have been, which (I haven't checked but I bet) are Elvis, John Lennon, JFK, Princess Diana, James Dean, etc. Yuck.
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
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This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
HAL9000
"The important thing is not to stop questioning." -Albert Einstein
Really. He said it.
Devilled Eggs - A disturbing little creation of mine.
I prefer The Onion's choice for Man of the millennium: Death
Back in October, A&E ran a countdown of the top 100 people of the millenium. I don't quite remember the criterion they used, I believe it was polling a bunch of academics and important people today.
Anyways, I thought the list was pretty decent once you got in the Top 50 (#50-100 were largely from the 20th century) They tried to keep the areas of influence pretty separate (ie, how do you weigh influence on culture against influence on physical life?), but within the categories, the ordering seemed right.
I'm sure you can get a complete list from A&E, but here's an except from an email to a friend:
53) Murie Curie
41) Billy-Bo-Bob Gates
28) Beethoven
27) JS Bach
26) Wolf Mozart
24) St. Thomas Aquinto
23) Abe Lincoln
17) Mahot Gandhi
16) Al Hilter
13) Sig Freud
10) Galileo
9) Nick Copernicus
8) Al Einstein
5) Will Shakespeare
4) Chuck Darwin
3) Martin Luther
2) Issac Newton
1) Guttenburg
Tom
I think you really mean more people believe they understand what Gandhi was talking about. But Einstein's thoughts, even if most people didn't understand them, affected more people.
After all, the end result of Gandhi's efforts was the creation of three of the world's poorest nations, who waste their scarce resources in making war against each other. Two of them have now atomic weapons, how long till Bangladesh gets its own Bomb?
Spiritual end emotional leaders may get the admiration and respect of millions of people, but it's only the fear of atomic bombs that stopped WWIII from happening. You love and admire that Apple ][, but it's the pentium III that gets things done.
I believe that, if it's possible to choose a "person of the century", he should be Henry Ford. This has, very definitely, been the century of the automobile. People often do not think about it, because it's so trivial, but the way we live today is entirely shaped around the automobile, for better or worse.
Any list that has Steve Guttenberg has got to be a joke. come on Police Academy was not that great. Al Hitler...any relation to Adolf?
Einstein's E=mc2 'was Italian's idea' Rory Carroll in Rome Thursday November 11, 1999 The mathematical equation that ushered in the atomic age was discovered by an unknown Italian dilettante two years before Albert Einstein used it in developing the theory of relativity, it was claimed yesterday. Olinto De Pretto, an industrialist from Vicenza, published the equation E=mc2 in a scientific magazine, Atte, in 1903, said Umberto Bartocci, a mathematical historian. Einstein allegedly used De Pretto's insight in a major paper published in 1905, but De Pretto was never acclaimed, said Professor Bartocci of the University of Perugia. De Pretto had stumbled on the equation, but not the theory of relativity, while speculating about ether in the life of the universe, said Prof Bartocci. It was republished in 1904 by Veneto's Royal Science Institute, but the equation's significance was not understood. A Swiss Italian named Michele Besso alerted Einstein to the research and in 1905 Einstein published his own work, said Prof Bartocci. It took years for his breakthrough to be grasped. When the penny finally dropped, De Pretto's contribution was overlooked while Einstein went on to become the century's most famous scientist. De Pretto died in 1921. "De Pretto did not discover relativity but there is no doubt that he was the first to use the equation. That is hugely significant. I also believe, though it's impossible to prove, that Einstein used De Pretto's research," said Prof Bartocci, who has written a book on the subject. Einstein's theory held that time and motion are relative to the observer if the speed of light is constant and if all natural laws are the same. A footnote established the equivalence of mass and energy, according to which the energy (E) of a quantity of matter (m) is equal to the product of the mass and the square of the velocity of light (c). Now known as: E=mc2 . The influence of work by other physicists on Einstein's theory is also controversial. A German, David Hilbert, is thought by some to have been decisive. Edmund Robertson, professor of mathematics at St Andrew's University, said: "An awful lot of mathematics was done by people who have never been credited - Arabs in the middle ages, for example. Einstein may have got the idea from someone else, but ideas come from all sorts of places. "De Pretto deserves credit if his contribution can be proven. Even so, it should not detract from Einstein."
You are right in that GPS wouldn't work without relativity. We are deeper down in the gravity well than the satellites, and the frequency shift caused by the signal falling down to us must be taken into account (it's not the same as the Doppler effect, also taken into account in GPS).
In 1957, a german student named Rudolf Mössbauer invented a very precise method for measuring this effect, using gamma rays emitted by radioactive nuclei. This method was much more precise than all other confirmations of Einstein's general relativity theory at the time, and Mössbauer was awarded the 1961 Nobel prize for his invention.
But I don't think relativity has been proved beyond a doubt. We never reach the final truth in Science, but we are always moving closer to it.
No one can be considered "better" than others today. If someone is obviously superior in some respect, then he *must* have other handicaps. That's why every scientist in Hollywood productions is mad, every millionaire is corrupt, every artist is a dope fiend. Only Joe Average, who has absolutely nothing to distinguish him, is allowed to be perfect.
The award should've gone to Kurt Cobain,
Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix. They embodied
the 20th Century perfectly.
Who is this Einsten guy and why do you use the picture of Albert Einstein?
I wonder if Time had chosen Einstein if he hadn't emigrated to the US when he fled from Nazi-Germany. Some people have even claimed Einstein for America, although he retained his Swiss citizenship until his death in 1955.
Einstein himself had ambivalent feelings towards Americans. After his first visit to the US he noted, among other things, that Americans are somewhat shallow compared to Europeans.
Still, I think that even from a global perspective Einstein was probably the best choice.
This posting is complete hogwash. How can something like that get moderated up?
I don't want to sound like a smart *** here.
...
If you look at your upper arm (left or right), you will see several scars. Now whose idea was that to put those scars on your arm so you and your loved ones are spare of:
Smallpox, Yellow Fever, Plague, Hepatitis, Tuberculosis
And who discovered Penicillin so you didn't die of infection?
something you are lookin' for, is something you can't see
--- You make things foolproof, and they'll find you a damn fool.
Take any semiconductors course and 99% of all the material you study is based on Einstein's equations. Are semiconductors important? You might argue that a biologist should be man of the century but the fact is, you're not a biologist. It's semiconductors which feed you, semiconductors which clothe you, semiconductors which allow biologists do get research grants. Well that just about qualifies Einstein for man of the century doesn't it.
I won't disagree that this is the century of the car, but does that make Henry Ford person of the century? Put another way, was Henry Ford neccassary or sufficient to create the changes you're talking about? That is my criterion for even considering the "great man" theory of history, and it is rarely satisfied.
(To give you a hint on how rarely, after spending a semester reading about the life and times of Martin Luther, I wrote my final paper on the thesis that the Reformation would have happened just fine without him and he couldn't have brought about the reformation if he had lived a few decades earlier.)
From what I know of the history of the automobile, Henry loses out on both counts. Our car culture and other modern life would be largely the same if Ford had never lived. And Henry Ford a few decades earlier would not have had the same impact.
Einstein, on the other hand, seems to have been nessaccary, if not sufficient, for the changes that occured in the world at the time they occured.
...will work for Chick tracts...
For instance: He used them in South Africa for years before trying them in India. You'll note that South Africa's Apartheit system didn't fall until long after Ghandi's death.
A major power block in Britain, on the other hand, was looking to unload India from the British Empire. It was very expensive to keep it under control, and they could use the money at home. Ghandi gave them the excuse they needed to cut India loose.
Ghandi's prescription for how Jews should handle their oppression in Nazi Germany amounted to going peacefully to the ovens, the better to make the Nazis look bad.
Similarly, Martin Luther King's Ghandi-inspired non-violent protests set the stage for the extension of full civil rights to Blacks in the US. But for years Black protesters (along with non-black civil rights marchers) were beaten, jailed and killed, while the rights were still denied.
The extension of civil rights for real came right after the riots of '68 - when the Blacks (having obtained the moral high ground via years of ineffective non-violent protests) finally made it clear that there would be no more mister nice guy.
And it seems to me that the continued lionization of Ghandi and King, and their non-violent protests, combined with the near purging of such people as Malcom X or Charlie Thomas from the historical record, is very convenient for those who would like to detour any future opposition political movements into a decade of ineffective posturing.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Now, the next moderator will look at that post, make sure that it meets the above criteria, see that someone has already moderated it up, and will moderate it up some more.
The meta-moderators, most of them being pretty lazy, will then overlook this mistake, by automatically marking all fairly long and nice-looking up-moderated posts as "Fair". I will admit to having done so a few times, but upon realizing so, I now read the posts in question, and often even track back to read them in their context.
Easy enough, right? Now, you try it... :)
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don't forget the late d.r. goettel of skinny puppy! hey, even einstein had a heroin overdose.. or two..
How 'bout the dude who made up this freakish calendar.
Otherwise we would be either in Jewish year 5760 or Islam 1420 AH, and we can save all these fuss.
'Time' are just trying to sell their magazines, dude.
And I'm just trying to collect some Karma.
--- You make things foolproof, and they'll find you a damn fool.
And yes, I realize we still have a bit over a year left in the century and in the millennium. But I doubt a great candidate will suddenly appear in the last year.
Unfortunately, this shows a common phyisicist approach to quantum dynamic, which totally misses the whole concept. In many ways, quantum physics is a simply a different viewpoint on classical physics. However, relativity is a very big change, and I don't believe anyone has a decent theory which relates to realtivity as quantum physics relates to classical physics. However, one of the better attempts has resulted in the theory that anti-matter exists, so it is an interesting area.
Did i miss anything? :)
Yes, you forgot all the other people who worked on quantum mechanics. Niels Bohr was not alone, in fact ha had a rather minor role. Dirac, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, de Broglie and others also participated in the making of quantum theory.
Relativity, however, was created by one single guy - A. Einstein. And he deserves enormous credit for that. And, ironically enough, with his work on the photoelectric effect, he even made the foundation for quantum theory, which he later loved to hate so much.
It's not correct to claim that he was "wrong" though - the Bohr hypothesis (aka the "Copenhagen interpretation") has not been proved. In fact it's not possible to prove that there is nothing deterministic behind QM, there might always be something that we haven't thought of yet. (Yes, I know about the Bell inequalities, the Aspect experiments and all that.)
Madonna gives you 313,910 hits,so what does that prove?
I think some people here on Slashdot have expressed their surprise at TIME's selection of Albert Einstein as Person of the Century.
What is interesting is that TIME had three final candidates (probably a week ago): Albert Einstein, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Mahatma Gandhi. Roosevelt was perhaps the most influential US President of this century, a leader that created our modern welfare system during the Great Depression and led our country through most of World War II. Mahatma Gandhi was the leader that preached non-violent civil disobedience and was instrumental in getting independence for India.
TIME probably did not choose FDR or Gandhi because their influence were mostly domestic--their influence during their primes were confined to the United States and India.
But Einstein's contributions to modern science are incalculable: the Special and General theories of relativity paved the way for most of the scientific research of this century. The fields of atomic energy, particle physics and electronics owe a huge debt to Einstein's work on relativity.
But yet, Einstein was a big dichotomy of sorts. He was a major pacifist, but yet was one of the signees on the letter that led to the creation of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. One wonders what kind of regrets he had late in his life for being a signee on that letter.
TIME chose Einstein because he best represents the modern scientific age that is the 20th Century, but also because Einstein often wondered with open regret the effects of modern science.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Freud should be on any list of major figures for the 20th century. You cannot even think of yourself in ways that have not been directly influenced by his thought. (The Freud meme kicks the Ghandi/Roosevelt meme's ass.)
Time magazine would have us beleive this is the century of science and technology. This has also been the century of psychology.
Subconsciously, you know I'm right.
I continue my assertion that Adolf Hilter has profoundly changed society more broadly and significantly than any other person. Although it has been pointed out that Stalin was in the back ground to this.
Can I ask one question: Albert Einstein was one of the many creatives that escaped europe in the 1930's and ended up in the United States (don't forget the Bauhaus school which shaped and influenced American architecture!). What proportion of his work did Albert do in the US compared to Europe, and could it be argued that if he had not come to the US, his work may not have proceeded as it did ?
The fact that he worked so hard to try and disprove Quantum Theory is his great contribution to Quantum Physics. The only way that it was able to become what it is to day was for people of caliber of Eistein and Schrodinger to try and disprove it mathematically. Ultimatly, the only way they could attack it was philisophically, sisinctly in Einstein's quote (I think this is exact) "God does not play with dice", refering to the assignment of probablities; and Schrodinger with his famous "Cat" Thought Experiment.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Robin Williams!
---
maybe what you said is true in your basement with you and your computer with no life in the _real_ world but it's certainly not true in the US where 95% believe in God (including Einstein who wrote papers arguing the existence of God). Maybe what you said would've made sense in the 19th century but it's certainly not true today. Time to face the real world.
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Did you all know that Einstein was a socialist? A socialist Jew in Germany, no wonder he had to leave!
Here is his essay, "Why Socialism". It starts off a bit dry but gets better. He also mentions the fact that a planned economy (e.g. USSR - but he doesn't say this), is not what he considers socialism.
Happy holidays
More importantly, however, is that Einstein did NOT have the greatest impact upon the course of 20th century history. Only one man can be said to have done that:
Lenin.
Think about it.
Yes, he was a monster. But no one had a greater impact on this century than this monster. If TIME refuses to acknowledge this, it's only because the real truth is that they do consider their silly "Entity of the Timespan" to actually be an honor -- and they don't want to honor Lenin. So instead they pick someone who has been *far* less important to the course of the century, thereby proving they don't care about history.
Bad show, TIME.
Let's face it. It was the hair.
Yes! - I saw a T.V. programme about this a few years ago in the U.K.
The man who organised the experiment was Albert A. Michelson, the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.
He conducted two particular experiments, one to calculate the speed of light and another whose answer gave an early indication of the relativistic effects of the speed of light.
Here's a link I found using Google :-
Albert Abraham Michelson
All the compliments of the Season from Glasgow, Scotland. The 1999 UK City of Architecture and Design
Adolf Hitler is without much question, IMO, the true man of the century
No, but he might qualify as the monster of the century. Although the competition is stiff.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
J.S. Bach.
A man who wrote an entire enclyopedia worth of music without writing a single bad note. A man from from whom much of western music directly descends from, including the music you listen to. A man who affects more of us in our daily lives than we can possibly imagine. A man who had more than 20 children from the same wife. A man whose music is as relevant today as it was 350 years ago. A man who could see truths so deep that we still have no way of analyzing them today.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Thanks to him, our concept of formal logical systems will never be the same:
[From Around Gödel's Theorem]"Mathematics is the part of science you could continue to do if you woke up tomorrow and discovered the universe was gone."
Z. the M. [Cursing the fact that /. doesn't support markup for superscripts and subscripts... ;-)]
Zontar The Mindless,
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I am just curious why Thomas Edison was chosen as the man of the 19th century? What did he invent other than DC eletricity?
I seem to recall that Bohr also had something to do with the failure of the German atomic bomb project. (Beyond just the fact that he fled Germany while being one of the top scientists working on the project.)
Anybody know more?
The cake is a pie
The sheer quantity of music produced by JS Bach is incredible. Just look at the BWVs compared with, say, the Köchels for a sense of the volume. Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin all had copies of the WTC. Chopin especially praised it as a daily font of inspiration. Many would have picked Mozart. I don't think so. Mozart is trendy and overhyped. Yes, he did very pretty stuff. Sometimes he did great works. But truly, Mozart is accorded more glory in our superstar-filled age than he would to me appear to legimately merit.
Sometimes I hear in Mozart the echoes of a greater work that came before him. On glory and reflected glory, do but compare the Kyries between the Bach Bm Mass and the Mozart Requiem. Do you hear the resonances? Now, study the harmonic work, the counterpoint. What doubt is there as to who was the master? I recommend the Joshua Rifkin recording of the Bm.
Go listen to the Bach suites for unaccompanied cello, or the sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin. Listen to the haunting pain in the Sarabande in the 2nd cello suite. Listen to the joy and light in the 6th one. Listen to the phantom instruments that aren't there in the fugues for solo violin, and 'ware the divine terror of regarding a musical intelligence that could piece together so awe-inspiring a contrapuntal work on what is fundamentally a single-threaded instrument. Now find string works by Mozart. Oh, they're nice enough, but majesty?
For the keyboard, listen to Bach's St Anne fugue for organ, or the many shorter works, like the Dm (Dorian) prelude and fugue. Or just play through the 48. Now, what do we have from Mozart and the kyeboard? Plenty of stately classical music, of course. But greatness? Hm. Yes, I suppose so. The Dm piano concerto is fine enough, I'll grant you that. And some of the piano sonatas are, again, pretty. But still you feel yourself more often in the presence of a child prodigy than of a measured master. What keyboard work of Mozart comes close to the opera magna for organ from Bach? Perhaps it exists, but I don't know it. I wish I did.
At this time of the year, the Bach Christmas works are especially noticeable. The quiet chorales and glorious choruses fill us rapture and inspiration. Who here this season has not heard the simple but compelling melodies of Jesu bleibet meine Freude ("Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring") or Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott ("A Mighty Fortress is Our God")? Don't get lost on mechanics and subtleties of counterpunctual intricacies. Melody--plain, simple, and warming melody--is at the very heart of Bach, the foundation for everything else. In his vocal works, melody is right there waiting for you to hum along to.
Please don't mistake me. I love Mozart. I really do. I doubt a week goes by without playing something of his. I love Beethoven, too. And Chopin. And Schubert. And Liszt and Mendelssohn and Schumann. And fifty other delightful composers who never get the time of day, much to our impoverishment.
But no day finishes without Bach in my life, somewhere. Sometimes he is in my fingers. Sometimes on the CD player. Sometimes he finds his way into my whistle, or shower singing. Sometimes I sit in meetings and let my fingers trace through inventions and fugues on the conference table. And best of all, on those long flights across the ocean, I sometimes close my eyes and quietly let the the Bm Mass or St Matt's unfold in silent sonority and sublime splendor in my mind's eye. After all, who really needs piped-in airplane music when you can at will summon up Bach?
If you are not yet accquanted with it, do yourself a favor: go out today and get the Canadian Brass's recording of the Art of the Fugue. It is a warm and comforting work, perfect for sitting by the fireplace on a cold and wintry night with family and friends. You will be happy you did this.
In a lot of ways Einstein is a good choice because of the symbolism. A man of peace and intellect forced to flee the tyranny, wars, racism and genocides that are Europe's main contribution to history in the 20th century.
A man who gave the world great intellectual accomplishments only to be remembered as the enabler of nuclear terror - he becomes the harbringer of the duality of technology as a force for both good and evil.
A quiet, retiring person who has fame shoved on him, at the end of the century he becomes one of the first of a wave of celebrities created by the media for their own purposes.
Time magazines most influential person of the century is not limited to good people, just the "most influential".
Yes, i agree with Time's choice. I will also add that Time was running a "Fraude of the century" poll where L. Ron Hubbard was clearly winning and Gates was behind. Unfortunately this upset Co$ and M$ to no end and it was pulled. While these two might not be the most *evil* of the century, the poll was not about that and therefore quite agreeable to me.
:)
I fully disagree with Time's 19th century person. T. Edison was both evil and a fraude. The real prize for then probably goes to another scientist, a woman, Marie Curie.
Kaht should stay away from computers while drunk
One can only feel unfulfilled by a choice of any one person as a pinnacle force of the century. Time magazine set a precedent several years ago when it chose the personal computer as the "Man of the Year." In so doing, the publication recognized that the influences of technology are more powerful forces in our time than are people. Drum roll, please...the winner of the century... TV!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hands down. No doubts. The technological force of the twentieth century. And all those other people? Images. Characters. Content. TV. The window through which the collective "WE" is now synthesized. We are watchers. We are watched. b
Although he was a great man in his own right. I think there is an additional reason. Looking back, this was the century when technology met warfare in the worst way. It is a century marked by mass genocides. So, the choice of Einstein, a great man, but also a european jew has a second, deeper meaning.
I really didn't think "Battleship Potempkin" was *that* influential myself... ;-)
I wonder if many of you have thought of the influence of John Logie Baird and Alexander Graham Bell on this century?
Bell in particular... would we all be reading this if it weren't for Bell's genius?
Of course I'm biased, I reckon the man of the century should be Scottish! Maxwell anyone?
Once the transistor was invented, the integrated circuit became inevitable, and once the IC was invented, the information society became inevitable. Some might argue that the transistor could not have been devised without Quantum Mechanics and that therefore men like Heisenberg (who was roundly castigated by Einstein for promoting such an "absurd" theory) should have been considered. But then relativity and quantum mechanics were inevitable given the results of insightful empericists once given Hamilton's mathematical physics discoveries in the 1800s, such as the quaternion and the relativity of changes in state of the observer vs changes in the state of the observed (embodied in the Hamiltonion equation).
A triumvirate like Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley isn't a single "person", but I would argue that their innovation, in spite of the "support" of Bell Labs, was not inevitable and that it has had as great an impact on the world as Guttenberg's press did when it lead to decentralization of literacy at the dawn of the Enlightenment, Protestant Reformation, Age of Exploration and finally the state craft of the late 1700s that renewed republican forms of governance.
Seastead this.
I think that we are all missing an important thing about human beings. We all have to work together in order to acheive things. I think Newton said that all of his achievements were built upon the backs of those that had come before him. Without Newton, Einstein might not have done what he did. We should be judging groups of the century or millenium. :) Oh well.
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/7/0,5716 ,117277+8,00.html
"A few days later, on January 30, while he was on his way to his evening prayer meeting in Delhi, he was shot down by Nathuram Godse, a young Hindu fanatic."
The Brits didn't kill him.
You're all wrong. Person of the century should be Cmdr Taco - after all, without him, none of this would be possible :-)
See, Tom, that's what you get for posting under your own name. Just choose some anonymous login so people don't know who you are. Then you won't get abused with unmetamoderated "overrated" marks by pissy whiners.
A man who had more than 20 children from the same wife.
;)
From where I sit, that speaks much more to his wife's ability not to die in childbirth than to anything on his part. Maybe she deserves some credit for her achievement.
The rest of your post is spot on, though.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
John Horton Conway, without whom I wouldn't be here today.
- Glider Gun #31255 ("Steve"), an artificial lifeform at the dedicated LIFE simulator (conway.impa.br), Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
You're forgetting that "Einstein" is still a popular surname. If you search altavista for +eins tein -albert, you'll come up with 134,250 pages found. Albeit, plenty of people refer to Einstein by just his surname, but plenty of those 134k pages have nothing to do with our dear Albert.
/. munged "+einstein" by inserting a space in the middle.
Now if I could just figure out why
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
In real life, he doesn't split infinitives.
Paul who?
Paul erdos! The greatest mathematician of all time. He lived for mathematics and for nothing else, a very brilliant genius who was never afriad to admit weakness. He knows when he faces problems greater than him, and when this happens, he takes the small money he makes from lectures and sets up prizes for anyone that solved it. He wrote and co authored more than 1500 mathematical papers. He didn't expire at an old age, he did mathematics till the day he died, hell he collapsed at a mathematics conference when he died. Talk about Fermants theorem, Number theory and prime number, combinatorial mathematics, sure, just don't forget to thank uncle paul. I was totally blown away when I read "The Man Who Loved only Numbers" - by Paul Hoffman. But of course this is the man of the century, not mathematicain, suffice to say, I think he is even greater than Einstein. Einstein was brilliant but a man who was very wrong and stuborn, think of the progress he would have made, if he accepted humility and pursued other things within his reach, instead he wasted his life chasing after dreams. Anyway, to make this short, The man of the century is me and you. Do not let anyone else tell you otherwise, the next century depends on us, just me and you. That is right, without us, there is no tomorrow. *cheers*
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
"And as a philosopher with faith both in science and in the beauty of God's handiwork, he personifies the legacy that has been bequeathed to the next century."
Einstein was an atheist. This comment was out of place and insulting.
AFAIR, his wife was given the Nobel price when she divorced him. I don't know why, but I would guess it was because she was the one deserving it. Worth checking out.
-segfault
Are there any more reliable sources to confirm Einstein as the person of the century? (I noticed the Drudge Report said it would be "revealed" on Sunday).
I see over at the Time 100 he's the "featured profile", but that doesn't confirm anything.
Sorry, but TIME is incorrect. I am the person of the century. I think that I have shaped the lives of everyone this century, and contributed positively to society.
Furthermore, after exhaustive market research, my company found that audiences would buy more of my magazines if I were labeled person of the century. You cannot blame me for the decision, simple profit maximazation.
Please, "person of the century" indeed.
CUZ HE'S JUST SO DARNED CUTE...
...I must say the rule "thou shalt not splint an infinitive" is much SHORTER!
Why not pick someone who had a definite impact? All Eistein did was increase our ability to do things, he didn't help with the decisions that mattered this century. My nomination: the widely unknown creator of the Atomic Bomb: Leo Szilard. If you check out his biography, you'll see why (hint: vastly threatening to the machineries of ignorance).
the entire electronic media network, and modern medicine, just to scratch the surface of what he influenced. Hoover Dam was engineered and built by him. Radio Broadcasting owes him everything it is. As far as I can tell, his biggest mistake was getting sucked in by businessmen who were greedy, such as Thomas Edison(the Bill Gates of the first half of this century) who stole his invention of the AC Generator, and Marconi,who supposedly invented the Radio, but actually copied Tesla's work, as proven by The U.S. Supreme Court,June 21, 1943, Case No. 369.
If you want to find out about what is happening to honor the man who truly influenced your life the most, visit here:
http://www.concentric.net/~Jwwagner/
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
Interestingly enough, my 9th grade history class recently discussed this particular topic (most influential person of the century) and came up with these three most important people:
1. Adolf Hitler
2. Karl Marx
3. Albert Einstein
Explanations:
1. Even though Hitler may have been wrong and evil and whatever else, he influenced every part of this century from the 1930s till now. Example:
A. Holocaust made us aware of discrimination, prejudice, etc...
B. After terrible losses to the German Army during the war, the Russia began to expand and formed the USSR...Iron Curtain, Berlin Wall...etc..This started the America/democracy versus USSR/communism and the Cold War.
C. Take a look at NATO and Yugoslavia, that was also partly affected by the USSR and thus Germany.
D. WWII helped to bring to international attention the need for a United Nations.
E. Nuclear weapons.
2. Although Karl Marx lived during the 1800s, his ideas affected this century. The man refined the concept of socialism; communism is based upon that concept, and the effects of communism are quite obvious. (see above: USSR, Cold War, China, etc....)
3. I disagree with Einstein for the fact that he and his discoveries/theories don't affect the majority of the world. The man did NOT invent the atom bomb, even though he might have contributed in some ways, so it can't be reasoned that he helped to stop WWII. Ok, sure, in the US, we know who Einstein is. In Western Europe, they know too, but what about India, China, the Middle East, and Africa? (especially the rural areas) How much can the theory of relativity affect those farmers? Would they even care if they knew?
--- "Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." ~ Ben Kenobi, 'Return of the Jedi'
BTW Times mag ought to have followed their web site without cheatery and placed that Hitler or Ataturk at first place. The ridiculous vote would have been better visible after that.
Now, you born suckers /. moderators, you can rate this as -1 or 0, as you want. I don't care anymore, your notation means nothing and only reflect your partial point of view.
Was invented for purpose of submitting people into new religion.
It is as real as Santa Claus.
Qualify this post as "flamebait" or "troll", I don't care. This is information, not flame.
Sucker.
You stupid.
geesh, surprising.
The end of those stupid headless cunts ?
There was never any single real positive apport from pyschanalyse.
Simply speaking, in a few wrds, what is the meaning of your post ?
"blah blah blah genocide..."
Hey, man wake up! genocides and racism there ever been, are even nowadays, and will ever be.
Example: by flaming back this post, you prove that you as as subject to irrational riots as any of barbarians you are talking about.
Massacre is carved in human's genes.
That's our way. You can't help it. You are an animal, a hunter, a very aggressive animal.
Ever ate living sashimi ? Delicious !
Just remember native americans genocide, you bastard american immigrants. More than 100 millions killed by you. You stole our land to bring it junk food and crime. You don't deserve survival, the Great Spririt will blow you away, at the end.
Hitler led a massacre of around 50 millions, and serves as a good subject of conversation even currently, when you have nothing to say.
Joseph Staline ruined the vastest country in the world and made more than 170 million people die in agony. But oddly he is not regarded as a butcher.
Einstein was only an obscure researcher, whose findings were being worked on by many other scientists. If he hadn't been there, Poincare, for example, would have publish a similar theory.
Einstein served as a prominent figure for the american to show a "good" jew during the world war 2.
All that Einstein hype was ever a political thing.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Too bad he wasn't friend with Rocco Sifredi. Could have been a top harder !
Wasent it Bohr that replied to the "God does not play with dice" statement form Einstein with "stop telling God what to do" or something like that?
Let's face it : Janeesh Chandra must be the man of 19th century. He discovered law of cocksucking while fondling balls, after all. Fundamental for humanity and good sequel to Kamasutra.
In real world, was a swiss physicist exiled during ww2. Jew, he was used by americans to ideologically counter-attack germans.
Known to have in the first place declared that Lorentz equations described a real geometry of space-time. That works until you push to 3rd degree, where at present there is no working theory. Note that space-time relativistic geometry doesn't work on quantum scale either.
Major breakthroughs in current technologies came from quantum mechanichs (Bohr, Heisenberg, Plank, Dirac), not Einstein, who didn't accept it.
In short, Einstein was not so bright as the widespread image suggest, but his easily recognizable figure, as well as a hype campaign 60 years ago or so are still fruitful.
It's the naked truth.
No, no, you're wrong : the /. moderators, giving points to postings according to their own biased apriori, must be blamed for that crap.
He was not one of those bastards who want to prevent people from being deceived by religion. He only was an agnostic, which is pretty different.
Isn't it odd that Germany was conquered, and that Russia has become a failed state, and is fast shrinking back down to its origins, as a small country near Finland.
And China...well, would you bet money that the current gov't will last another 10 years without major political changes (note that the Ji Gong leaders got time, not death)? Japan, Italy, fascists states of all kinds that murdered, massacred and annihilated all ended up going out of business, while countries whose rulers could be (to any degree) shamed, grew in influence. Violence is weakness; non-violence is strength.
Regimes that fail to compromise with dissidents eventually fail altogether.
s i g
Boeing 747: The amazing thing is that it can be operated at a profit. This plane is cheaper than it looks.
I'm cool like a fool in a swimming p-p-pfft-pool
This is a pathetic comment.
You are bitching about Time picking the one most influential person of the century. You make the obvious point that many different people would choose a different person.
So what? First off, it is interesting to know who Time picked. Secondly, the pick might be especially interesting to Slashdotters who like science/math stuff. And most importantly, it has fed some great discussion about Einstein and other choices and many other things, which IMO is really the point of Slashdot anyway.
But to top it all off, you then complain that it should be "Person of the Century", not "Man of the Century". Well I really don't think it matters. I doubt there was a woman in the top 5(in fact, there wasn't, it was Einstein, FDR, Gandhi, Hitler and hmmm, I think either Stalin or Mao, either way, it was another guy). But you know what? It doesn't matter. Why?
BECAUSE ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS READ THE FUCKING TITLE: "Science: Albert Einstein - Person of the Century". Are you happy? Did you really have to get on your damn "Women are people too" soapbox and then sarcastically bash Time for being sexist? How pathetic. I'm sorry that the world doesn't discriminate as much as you hope and imagine, but the rest of us don't need to wallow in your self-righteousness because of it.
Godel proved that you have to pick one: either a mathematical system is inconsistent or incomplete. That is, either you can prove false things to be true (obviously a bad thing) or there are statements that can't be proved to be true even if they are true (which is the world we're stuck with).
What was particularly important about Godel's proof was that it was about arithmetic itself. Since all of our mathematical systems incorporate arithmetic in some fashion, all of our mathematical systems suffer from this problem.
Godel essentially proved that there are infinitely many unsolvable mathematical problems. Tie this in with Turing's proof that there are infinitely more uncomputable problems than computable ones, and it doesn't look too good for the home team.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
nt == no text
bwahahaha, interesting and funny
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Einstein.htm
Boy, I guess he was just Ayn Rand's slobbering dog there, yup.
However, I do have to give you some points for the sarcasm/picking fun at the mentality of some Slashdotters.
Maybe there should be an award for "Most Under-Credited Person of the Century".
Seastead this.
'The Einstein-Szilard Refrigerators' by Gene Dannen. Scientific American, January 1997.
Sorry, it's not online.
Germany was known as a nation of Peace for over 1000 years...Hitler was in rule less than Reagan...now Germany has the worst rap
Here's some more info found on the webb.
The man of the century? Simple. The American GI. Without his courage and self-sacrifice in turning tyranny back multiple times this century, Time would be printed in German or Japanese or Russian. And most of the posts in the section would mention people who were just another number on a concentration or gulag roster.
His name was not Godel. It was Gödel, which if you must due to a broken keyboard, you may spell as Goedel with an extra `e'. But `Godel' may never substitute for `Gödel'.
Elvis Aron Presley
Yes, Germany was conquered. And yes, Russia is a mess, but it lost the Cold War because the West had the backbone to stand up to it. We did not fight an outright war, but I would not call building thousands of nuclear weapons "non-violent opposition."
Violent, dictatorial regimes do not voluntarily withdraw from the scene. Most of the time, they must be violently overthrown.
-cwk.
and who knows if Einstein was actually wrong about God not playing dice? I think it was Max Born who later came up with a completely mechanistic (ie. not probabilistic) version of quantum mechanics, completely compatible with the Bohr-Schrodinger version, albeit requiring so-called non-local hidden variables.
What is truly remarkable about Einstein is the huge range of his early work in physics, and the extent to which he came up with things nobody had thought of before. Bose-Einstein condensation, just achieved now at the end of the century, was mainly Einstein's work, though he generously gave Bose credit. The "bosons" of particle physics derive from Bose-Einstein statistics. Einstein's formulas show up in light absorption and emission, not just the photo-electric effect: check out the theory of the laser for instance. There's an Einstein formula for the specific heat of solids that explains high-temperature behavior very well, and still describes simply and well the low-temperature behavior of "optical phonons" in solids. The many refinements to get the rest of the picture correct are really just generalizations of what Einstein did first.
What we know him for is his work in relativity, but his impact on physics was far, far greater. A truly remarkable man.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Be careful not to reach too far into what quantum probability and chaos theory imply. Certainly they demonstrate that completely deterministic descriptions are not always possible - even knowing all initial conditions, you can't know what all the final conditions will be in detail.
However, they do not at all preclude knowing in complete detail the mechanisms that bring one from initial to final conditions.
What Einstein and other detractors of quantum theory remind us is that we can understand the equations that model nature, and break them down into first principles, even if the equations themselves have non-deterministic solutions. Einstein's general relativity does this, by generating an understandable "thought model" for spacetime. Quantum mechanics does not yet do this, and won't until superstrings/manifolds/whatever results in a similar "thought model" to explain the probabilities we see.
It's like this: chaos theory has provided us with the mathematics to explain why a dripping faucet may have chaotic rhythms. Quantum mechanics has so far only told us exactly what to expect of the dripping.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
This is way too late for this to be read by anyone but me and thee. Who cares, so here we go.
I didn't say that non-violent opposition will always overthrow a violent regime. I'm saying that these regimes are inherently weak, having had to resort to injustice in the first place. In the zero sum game of conquest, they tend to collapse, or be defeated by countries strong enough to respect the humanity of their opponents (once again, to some degree. The crimes against humanity committed by the U.S. on Latin Americans over the last 2 centuries has weakened its position there, and it can exert influence beyond that enjoyed by, say, Europe, only by fostering corruption of L.A. governments.) (how's that for a parenthetical?)
I'm cool like a fool in a swimming p-p-pfft-pool
I did, and here is Sherwin's response:
Jim,
Thank you for alerting me to your discussion.
To provide a more solid foundation, one should be aware that I heard this story from the horse's mouth.
John Bardeen himself gave a talk one evening at Altgeld Hall on the University of Illinois campus, circa 1978, in which he related various experiences surrounding his inventing the transistor. At the time, people suspected that the scheduling of this presentation may have been related to Bardeen's health.
Professor Bardeen showed us the B&W 16mm film BB&S had made at Bell Labs immediately after they got the first transistor to work (and, presumably, before Bardeen's boss got to work the next morning...) I have seen individual frames and out-takes of this film since, but I don't know if the entire film still exists. The "rolly-cart" with their experimental set-up is plainly in evidence on the film.
It was John Bardeen himself, at Altgeld Hall, who related that his boss had said that the "solid-state amplifying device" which they wanted to develop was "not feasible," and that, "even if it were possible, it would have no practical application." Dr. Bardeen related that sometimes, when his boss stayed at work past 5 p.m., the three of them would become very impatient waiting for him to leave so they could roll their setup out of the coat-closet, and get busy on what they, apparently, thought was the greatest "cool hack" of the day.
I wonder who Bardeen's boss was. His boss should be immortalized in history next to the NASA manager who advised the last engineer withholding approval of the Challenger launch to "put on your management hat!"
One of the anecdotes John Bardeen related was how he had left his set of photographic slides in the taxi which took him to the ceremony to collect his Nobel prize, and all the trouble to which he and the Swedish government had gone in trying to recover them. But their efforts were unsuccessful; the slides were never recovered. Professor Bardeen was extremely apologetic that he didn't have them to use in his presentation, and so we would just have to make-do with his relating the incidents to us.
With my background in computer music, I found one of the pieces of supporting paraphernalia that Dr. Bardeen didn't lose in Sweden quite interesting. He brought along a transparent plexiglas box, approximately the shape of a 6" cube, with randomly distributed 3/4" or so holes (apparently for cooling?) in the sides. On the top were a number (6 or so) of black SPST N.O. push buttons. A small loudspeaker was mounted inside. (There must have also been a battery of some kind, but I don't recall it.) The box contained a collection of electronic components, their leads soldered to one-another ("tacked together"), and hanging in "free space." (He hadn't bothered to use a prototyping board or connecting strip.) There were resistors, capacitors, possibly some coils, and these ~1" long bar things (which were the transistors), of which there were 3. Dr. Bardeen explained that he had had chosen to build this device because it embodied what he considered to be the fundamental 3 types of circuit: an amplifier, an oscillator, and a filter. He remarked that he thought that pretty much covered everything you could do with electronics. Each of these had been implemented as a single-transistor circuit. Dr. Bardeen then demonstrated the device (which still worked!) by playing "a drinking song of the time, which some of you may recognize" by pressing the few buttons on top of the box in the proper sequence. He apologized because it had gone so badly out of tune (which it had). He apologetically related that he had never re-tuned it. (I'm afraid I didn't recognize the song, nor did anyone sitting around me. I believe he said he had chosen it, in part, because the chorus could be played using a minimal number of different notes. I got the impression that he was somewhat embarrassed by the song, and that's the reason he didn't tell us it's name. I wish I knew what it was.) Even though this makeshift musical instrument was out of tune, I believe the monotonicity of pitches, as one traveled from one end to the other of the row of buttons, still held. The pitches were also all still of a central musical frequency.
Professor Bardeen then passed this device around the audience for everyone to examine, which amazed me at the time, and still does. I wish I had a picture of it. I think this first all solid-state device -- an electronic organ -- should be in the Smithsonian. After all, it contained 3 of the first transistors ever made, AND THEY WERE STILL WORKING!
But I wax nostalgic. Jim, if your point was that Bell Labs did not support Bardeen's research into solid state amplifying devices, you are in good company; John Bardeen, himself, was certainly in agreement. If there were teams being supported to research that area, perhaps he just wasn't lucky enough to be on one of them. I have no idea. All I know is what he told us.
Please feel free to copy this e-mail (less my e-mail address) into any discussions in which you were involved. I find it particularly upsetting when people or organizations fraudulently assume credit.
While it is true that many research facilities can be viewed as "sand boxes" which, independent of management, enable invention, and that many great breakthroughs could not have been accomplished without the collections of tools and talent amassed therein, in reality the role played by management in R&D is much closer to what Scott Adams has chronicled in "Dilbert" than it is to any accepted management text or theory.
Sherwin Gooch
991227
--- Jim Bowery wrote: > http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99/12/26/01302 52&cid=195
Seastead this.
FDR, Lenin, etc.
The 20th century was the era of global wars
and terrible global weapons pretty continuously
between 1914 and 1989.
Clearly Hawking has a great mind, and has come up with observations that neither Bohr nor Einstein where able to see. True that Hawking has the benefit of modern technology, but he also has the limitation of his body which is ravaged by a disease. I hope that Hawking makes at least the top five.
;)
It just appears that Einstein has better marketing and public relations people than Hawking!
For the sake of all those who want to actually read about these concepts at a level thats understandable to someone with any schooling, see my favorite books page and pick up Schrodinger's Kittens or Why quantum physics is strange, but not as strange as you think.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)