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> If he hadn't been born other people would have come to the same conclusions. Definitely. But in his generation? Some things, like Calculus, pop into human u
by newsbinator 5y ago
> If he hadn't been born other people would have come to the same conclusions.
Definitely. But in his generation?
Some things, like Calculus, pop into human understanding because there comes a time when our existing tools + our understanding of peripheral stuff inevitably intersect.
Other things maybe not.
One of my favorite sci fi short stories, The Road Not Taken, has as its premise that some scientific discoveries might be low-hanging fruit that we happen to overlook in one generation after the next, so we develop along one road and not another.
In this case, simply because no particular Einstein comes along to explain it to us, and because our other discoveries, impressive as they might be, are always one or two circles of overlap removed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_stor...
- Arrath 5y agoLove that story also, and the conclusion of "oh no what have we done"
- antognini 5y agoPoincaré was very close to the special theory of relativity when Einstein published "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" in 1905. And David Hilbert discovered the Einstein Field Equations a few days before Einstein. (They really should be called the Hilbert-Einstein Field Equations.) If Einstein hadn't existed we wouldn't have had to wait generations to learn of relativity.
- kryptiskt 5y agoThere is no way Hilbert would have been working with that without Einstein's work. Hilbert was a mathematician, not a physicist, who based it all on Einstein's premises.
- taylodl 5y agoYou may find this interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity_priority_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity_priority_di...
- bigbillheck 5y ago> Some things, like Calculus, Also famously and indisputably invented by one singular unique mind.
- newsbinator 5y ago> Today the consensus is that Leibniz and Newton independently invented and described the calculus in Europe in the 17th century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz–Newton_calculus_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz–Newton_calculus_contro...
- bigbillheck 5y agoYes, that was the joke.