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Einstein seems to really deserve his iconic status in popular culture as the most brilliant mind ever. I’m not sure that he was, but that seems to be the popula
by surfsvammel 5y ago
Einstein seems to really deserve his iconic status in popular culture as the most brilliant mind ever. I’m not sure that he was, but that seems to be the popular image of him.
One thing that does amaze me though, is his unbelievable capacity for intuition.
- papito 5y agoInformed intuition.
- credit_guy 5y agoSome people indeed have that image. But quite a lot of other people consider Newton to be the most impactful scientist and mathematician ever. I count myself in that camp. Gauss was obviously a more brilliant mathematician than Newton, and maybe even Terry Tao, or Grothendieck, or a few others, but none of them change the the world the way Newton did. There is simply math after Newton, and math before, and they are like spacecraft vs stone tools.
- adgjlsfhk1 5y agoas evidenced by Leibniz, it seems like most of it would have happened without him. his work on series was probably not going to happen for a bit without him.
- JadeNB 5y ago> as evidenced by Leibniz, it seems like most of it would have happened without him. his work on series was probably not going to happen for a bit without him. I think that part of what was marvellous about Newton (Einstein, too) was how many things he did. As you say, it seems plausible any individual thing Newton did would have been done by someone else—probably the same is true of anyone—but it seems unlikely that any one person could have done everything Newton did.
- dylan604 5y agoEven Newton himself has said "If I have seen further my self it is because I stand on shoulders of giants."
- credit_guy 5y agoI always wondered who he had in mind when he said that. My guess would be Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe. But while both Kepler and Brahe qualify as giants without question, there's still a world of difference between them and Newton.
- lmkg 5y agoThere is some belief that when Newton said that, the actual meaning was to denigrate the contributions of Robert Hooke, who was physically infirm.
- lkbm 5y agoEinstein is the only modern physicist many people can name easily (some will also get Hawkins or Feynman), and his name has become synonymous with "smart". In a poll of the general public for "who's the smartest person?" he'd win due to name recognition. Even ten-year-olds know "Einstein = smart". I suspect that if you asked the HN crowd for their guess at the smartest person, Mozart (thanks to Hofstadter) and von Neumann would come out on top (though I might just be biased towards whom I'd answer). Tao is a likely candidate for living person. In terms of impact, Newton is truly stand-out, though I think when it comes to math, his most significant contribution was calculus, and Leibniz came up with that independently at the same time, and we now use his version instead of Newton.
- AprilArcus 5y agoAmused that your apocryphal "easily name"d scientist "Hawkins" appears to be a confused jumbling of popular science writers Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins.
- lkbm 5y agoI meant Stephen Hawking. Hadn't thought about Dawkins at all. I was specifically thinking about physicists in that case, though I guess Neil deGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan fall under that umbrella.
- amelius 5y agoIf you'd ask about the smartest person, the HN crowd would probably name the richest person, which is Bezos or Musk (too lazy to look it up).
- lkbm 5y agoI was wondering if Bezos, Gates, or Musk would come out as number 1, at least for living people.
- hidden-spyder 5y agoI don't know anything about Terry Tao, but what makes you think he'll be placed above Einstein by the HN crowd?
- dhimes 5y agoIt's a tough call. Newton connected third dimension (up/down) to the other two; Einstein connected the fourth (time) to the other three. They both were impactful, even creators, of multiple fields of physics (sorry about the pun).
- albrewer 5y agoI'd put Euler up there. And Laplace, Fourier, Heaviside, Lagrange, Poisson, Gauss, Jacobi, Green, and all the other guys you cover in an undergrad classical engineering degree. Our current world is literally built on their work.
- amelius 5y ago> One thing that does amaze me though, is his unbelievable capacity for intuition. If you partially submerge a stick into water, it appears as if the stick is broken. When a physicist first sees this phenomenon, their reaction is: space must be warped/contracted/broken! It's a strange kind of intuition.
- emerged 5y agoHis intuitive approach has always felt like “my” kind of smart. Just ramped up to 1000. Contrasted with someone like von-Neumann whose mind and abilities I can’t even comprehend at some basic level.
- abecedarius 5y agoEinstein had such a characteristic style that his proof of the Pythagorean theorem, as a kid, is unmistakably his. That's remarkable because you might think there's just no room for anything so simple to bear a personal stamp.
- mnadkvlb 5y agoCan you point a book or article about that, would be a great read. Thanks in advance
- em3rgent0rdr 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem#Einstein's_proof_by_dissection_without_rearrangement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem#Einstein's...
- sudders 5y agohttps://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/einsteins-first-proof-pythagorean-theorem https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/einstein...
- surfsvammel 5y agoWow. Didn’t know about that one. Blew my mind.