5 ms·

TL;DR: yes. Are there candidate examples of ideas in philosophy, natural sciences or maths that are so original that only a single mind could think of them?

jeffreyrogers 8y ago
General relativity, or maybe some stuff that Ramanujan figured out? But probably other people would have eventually figured those things out if they thought about them long enough. In general I think the answer is no. There's a fascinating book called The Sociology of Philosophies that explores this question. The author's main idea is that intellectual ideas arise from competition and variation among different intellectuals who are related to each other through intellectual networks and that only ideas that are creative, but not too creative, get remembered and extended, refined, or rebutted and passed on to later generations of scholars.
- temp74829 8y ago
  GR is not an example: Hilbert deduced the correct action functional (following geometric rather than physical intuition) at roughly the same time as Einstein worked out the (equivalent) field equations. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Hilbert_action https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Hilbert_act...
  - dcuthbertson 8y ago
    How about Special Relativity? IIRC, Einstein's paper had no references to previous work.
    - gog-ma-gog 8y ago
      Lorentz symmetry was already kinda-sorta baked into Maxwell’s equations. It was only a matter of time before someone took it seriously.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - chubot 8y ago
      I'm very rusty in this area, but I thought that people had given credit for Poincare for precursors. Some Googling revealed this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute
  - nikofeyn 8y ago
    yes it is. hilbert has no claims to originating the theory of general relativity, and he had been talking with einstein before this, even inviting him to give talks. einstein already had the ideas of general relativity much earlier than when he, and hilbert, finally published his final theory. hilbert simply had a better command of the mathematics and was able to put things together once einstein had already come up with the physical theory and much of the mathematics. in fact, einstein was originally a little annoyed with hilbert in that he felt hilbert tried to come in at the end and shore up the final mathematics before einstein could. it isn't as though hilbert was working independently during this time, independently discovering general relativity.
nabla9 8y ago
Einstein came up with the idea that light would behave like particle. He published the paper in 1905 where he eloquently explained his thinking and gave three examples demonstrating it. One of the examples was the photoelectric effect. He won a Nobel price for that discovery. >Energy, during the propagation of a ray of light, is not continuously distributed over steadily increasing spaces, but it consists of a finite number of energy quanta localised at points in space, moving without dividing and capable of being absorbed or generated only as entities. Plank had explained black body radiation as it would originate from quantified oscillators 1900, but nobody except Einstein believed that light could propagate as energy quanta. Only after Compton effect was discovered in 1923, everybody saw that Einstein had been on the right track all along. Being the only physicist who saw it for almost 20 years, even when everybody has read your explanation and takes you seriously is a sign of highly original mind.
- selimthegrim 8y ago
  The Fizeau experiment definitely had some people thinking. For more on that and Planck, see https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft4t1nb2gv&brand=ucpress https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft4t1n... (From c-numbers to q-numbers by Olivier Darrigol) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute#Olivier_Darrigol_(2004) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute#Ol...

jeffreyrogers 8y ago

General relativity, or maybe some stuff that Ramanujan figured out? But probably other people would have eventually figured those things out if they thought about them long enough. In general I think the answer is no. There's a fascinating book called The Sociology of Philosophies that explores this question. The author's main idea is that intellectual ideas arise from competition and variation among different intellectuals who are related to each other through intellectual networks and that only ideas that are creative, but not too creative, get remembered and extended, refined, or rebutted and passed on to later generations of scholars.

temp74829 8y ago
GR is not an example: Hilbert deduced the correct action functional (following geometric rather than physical intuition) at roughly the same time as Einstein worked out the (equivalent) field equations. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Hilbert_action https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Hilbert_act...
- dcuthbertson 8y ago
  How about Special Relativity? IIRC, Einstein's paper had no references to previous work.
  - gog-ma-gog 8y ago
    Lorentz symmetry was already kinda-sorta baked into Maxwell’s equations. It was only a matter of time before someone took it seriously.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - chubot 8y ago
    I'm very rusty in this area, but I thought that people had given credit for Poincare for precursors. Some Googling revealed this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute
- nikofeyn 8y ago
  yes it is. hilbert has no claims to originating the theory of general relativity, and he had been talking with einstein before this, even inviting him to give talks. einstein already had the ideas of general relativity much earlier than when he, and hilbert, finally published his final theory. hilbert simply had a better command of the mathematics and was able to put things together once einstein had already come up with the physical theory and much of the mathematics. in fact, einstein was originally a little annoyed with hilbert in that he felt hilbert tried to come in at the end and shore up the final mathematics before einstein could. it isn't as though hilbert was working independently during this time, independently discovering general relativity.

nabla9 8y ago

Einstein came up with the idea that light would behave like particle. He published the paper in 1905 where he eloquently explained his thinking and gave three examples demonstrating it. One of the examples was the photoelectric effect. He won a Nobel price for that discovery. >Energy, during the propagation of a ray of light, is not continuously distributed over steadily increasing spaces, but it consists of a finite number of energy quanta localised at points in space, moving without dividing and capable of being absorbed or generated only as entities. Plank had explained black body radiation as it would originate from quantified oscillators 1900, but nobody except Einstein believed that light could propagate as energy quanta. Only after Compton effect was discovered in 1923, everybody saw that Einstein had been on the right track all along. Being the only physicist who saw it for almost 20 years, even when everybody has read your explanation and takes you seriously is a sign of highly original mind.

selimthegrim 8y ago
The Fizeau experiment definitely had some people thinking. For more on that and Planck, see https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft4t1nb2gv&brand=ucpress https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft4t1n... (From c-numbers to q-numbers by Olivier Darrigol) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute#Olivier_Darrigol_(2004) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute#Ol...