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General relativity, or maybe some stuff that Ramanujan figured out? But probably other people would have eventually figured those things out if they thought abo
by 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 agoGR 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 agoHow about Special Relativity? IIRC, Einstein's paper had no references to previous work.
- gog-ma-gog 8y agoLorentz 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 agoI'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 agoyes 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.