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I really don't understand this American attitude where everything someone does always has to be a revelation like never seen before. Oppenheimer was clearly an
by rustybolt 3y ago
I really don't understand this American attitude where everything someone does always has to be a revelation like never seen before. Oppenheimer was clearly an extremely capable physicist, and to portray him as "no Einstein" is just lazy, dishonest, and plainly ignorant.
There was a similar thread were people were talking about Alan Turings running times, and concluding that they are worthless compared to modern-day Olympic athletes. I mean, if that's really the thing you want to point out about Alan Turing, to me that just demonstrates that you have some issues.
- FreshStart 3y ago[flagged]
- jayd16 3y agoThat national character flaw got us to the moon.
- dtech 3y agoWhich is another weird thing. US declared the space race "won" when they got to the moon, despite being behind in all other milestones like sattelite and manned space flight. If SU got to the moon first US would've ignored it too and said Mars was the real target...
- mjamesaustin 3y agoThere's a show about that exact scenario! For All Mankind.
- arethuza 3y agoI love For All Mankind - largely because it portrays the future I used to think we were going to have when I was a kid in the 1970s.
- WorldMaker 3y agoSeason 2 captured so much of my 1980s kid "this is the space future I was promised". At the time my uncle even worked on projects at Nasa and would describe some of the ideals of the space shuttle program in a way that For All Mankind Season 2 captured that boring reality never quite did, especially after the Challenger disaster. (Plus, spoilers: Project Orion in that season! Which is one of the things that I can point to where FAM's timeline is maybe worse than ours, as it is fun to bring up every time people suggest they can't watch FAM because it is too "utopian". Project Orion was in part cancelled because of advances in cancer research, especially with respect to radiation. The FAM timeline seems to be spending so much on aerospace at the expense of cancer research among other things, and things like the 80s and 90s fights against tobacco seem almost non-existent in that timeline. People are still smoking nearly as much in that timeline's 80s as they did in the 50s. There are no signs of the near ubiquitous anti-tobacco PSAs of our timeline's 80s and 90s. I don't know how much the writers are intentionally working in such trade-offs, versus just trying to maintain storylines and aesthetics across its decade jumps, but it makes a ton of sense that there would be such trade-offs. Similarly, there are signs that civil rights are still generally worse in that timeline than ours, especially gay rights and feminism.)
- thrashh 3y agoNo, the battle was an economic one, never a science one. Let’s face it: both the US and Soviet Union had extremely capable scientists. But the entire Cold War was about which economic system was the “best” and in the end, the Soviet Union frankly ran out of money and could not even test their Buran spacecraft before launching it to see it crash. Running out of money is how you lose this battle.
- dijit 3y ago> the Soviet Union frankly ran out of money To be perfectly fair, this was at least partly the result of the immeasurably expensive clean up of Chernobyl. Estimates vary but the most recent numbers put it at about $700 Billion.
- badpun 3y agoSU was economically unviable long before Chernobyl disaster. It was so mismanaged it had large-scale famines, for God's sake.
- allarm 3y agoI don’t think they had famines around 1986. Long before that - yes.
- p_l 3y agoHonestly, it would have had them either way. You can't change the shitshow that was Imperial Russia that easily, and tsarist legacy was hamstringing any reform (for example in the decision to continue the systems of secret police and prison camps - neither was Communist invention) However they did fuckup in many areas in the economy, something that was recognised internally at least by some - as seen by multiple attempts at reforms. Also, one can't discount the unbelievably favourable position of the USA at the end of WW2 when analysing this (in comparison, Soviets started with a worse position than many would believe, because Imperial Russia really wasn't well off)
- 3y ago
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoYou can give all the space battles to the Soviets, the war was lost by them though lol.
- coldtea 3y agoYeah, that's why for decades later and until now the US couldn't even send somebody to the space station and had to borrow their tech, lol
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago> Yeah, that's why for decades later ... Do you live in a universe where 2020 are closer to 1960s than 1990s? Must be great to live in such a world. > US couldn't even send somebody to the space station and had to borrow their tech Anyways, I wouldn't call Russian tech, Soviet tech. Remember the Soviet Union died in 1991, we can't call 2010s tech Soviet lol.
- krapp 3y ago[flagged]
- jayd16 3y agoRaces are won at the end, not the beginning or middle.
- dtech 3y agoExtremely convenient the end was determined during the race.
- ojl 3y agoWith the help from German rocket scientists..
- shapefrog 3y ago[flagged]
- Tommstein 3y agoSwitch test pilot with medical doctor from Harvard and you've got this guy: https://www.nasa.gov/content/jonny-kim-md-lcdr-us-navy-nasa-astronaut https://www.nasa.gov/content/jonny-kim-md-lcdr-us-navy-nasa-...
- usrbinbash 3y agoNo, it didn't. What got people to the moon was working together instead of against one another, trusting science instead of beliefs, and valueing knowledge over money. Oh, and remind me: Who was in charge of the Saturn rocket project again?
- bena 3y agoYeah. Operation Paperclip is a thing. It's really weird to take a Nazi and say, "Hey, could you shoot us to the moon please?"
- coldtea 3y agohttps://img.ifunny.co/images/8e534b0182c6449fac238c52a3d8745ce9535602d6073bb6618ac01e70c1b594_1.webp https://img.ifunny.co/images/8e534b0182c6449fac238c52a3d8745...
- vunderba 3y agoI still find it very odd when someone takes an abnormal amount of pride in the accomplishments of other people that they just happen to share a geographic proximity with. Did you go to the moon? Were you involved in anyway with the advancement of rocketry, the mercury missions, the Apollo missions, etc?
- zpeti 3y ago> despite it leading nowhere worth visiting Really? Every major technological (and cultural) advance since the steam engine has been from the US. Atomic bomb, Hollywood, internet, social media, AI, (wokeness?). Granted, just like on an individual level, success != happiness, Americans are extremely unhappy and messed up IMO on average. But in terms of performance, they are friggin amazing, and have changed the world multiple times for the better.
- 317070 3y agoI mean, it's obvious that this is what you're being told in the US. But trust me, they tell people in the UK or in France the exact same thing. They cherry pick different examples though, but the story is the same. US/English/French-exceptionalism. Not in Belgium though. I figure that in Belgium it would be too obviously false.
- glenngillen 3y agoI couldn’t believe the narrative of WW2 I “learned” when I visited the War Museum in New Orleans. It’s really quite remarkable how countries can simultaneously tell the truth while having widely differing narratives.
- aziaziazi 3y agoReminds me an Hezbollah war museum in Lebanon. What a surprising history class, keeps me curious of what I ear /read that is produce in “my” western country. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_Landmark_of_the_Resistance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_Landmark_of_the_Resi...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fooblaster 3y agowhat was incorrect about it?
- msla 3y ago> American hyper compettyness is well known, despite it leading nowhere worth visiting. And you're saying this on the Internet. I'd be amazed, but I suppose Twitter seeps in even here.
- nehal3m 3y agoAre you implying the Internet is a result of competition? It's not; it's origins are a government project. The competition part is what's ruining the Web.
- robertlagrant 3y agoThe internet wouldn't be what it is as a government project. Millions of person-hours invested by mostly private companies to make networks and lay cables and create software (which is also constantly out-competed by other software). A government can't do that, and wouldn't try. The internet is overwhelmingly a result of private indivuals and companies doing work. Ironically of course, the internet's origins were a US government project. So even then, you're not making tons of sense in the context of this thread.
- nehal3m 3y agoYou're right, of course the market did have something to do with the internet exploding into what we know and love/hate today. It's also true that ARPA/DARPA (depending on when you'd have asked) was responsible for its invention. That is a US government institution, however this thread places the origin of the internet in the context of American competition, so in my opinion it does make sense to deny that the internet came from that. I do disagree that a government couldn't or wouldn't do that; the internet is infrastructure and governments do that kind of thing all the time.
- robertlagrant 3y ago> in the context of American competition In the context of American competitiveness, and there's nothing more competitive than a defense department (-:
- Noughmad 3y agoIt isn't so much about competitiveness or pettiness, but rather about individualism. Americans for some reason always like to think that everything was invented by a single super-genious individual working alone in a cave with a box of scraps. That's how it's always presented in the media - superheroes (alone or in a very small group), lone scientists, billionaires who single-handedly created their wealth from scratch, etc.
- ploum 3y agoThat’s one huge part of Ayn Rand’s legacy. In Atlas Shrugged, Hank Rearden locks himself for year in a small laboratory, comes up alone with a new formula for super strong steel and, because it is the best steel, Rearden becomes a very successful entrepreneur. This makes absolutely no sense but for some reasons I don’t explain, this is now seen as how science and business should work in the eyes of people calling themselves "realists".
- mathgeek 3y agoIt goes back a lot further than that. “One man who did it all himself” is at least as old as Hercules, Atlas, Noah, etc.
- ploum 3y agoI guess you’re right, "Randism" is only one more fundamentalist bigotry where people take a fantasy book and assumes it is a scientific truth.
- nvm0n1 3y agoWhy does that make no sense? Sounds a lot like how Google and Facebook were both born along with many other businesses. Rearden is never said to run the whole business himself after all, just do the experiments to develop the new tech.
- throwaway6734 3y ago>despite it leading nowhere worth visiting. America has some of the most beautiful natural landscapes on the planet due to its diverse environments. Generally, there is no country that has as favorable as a future outlook as the US due to its robust demographics, dynamic economy, and wealth of natural resources.
- fasthai 3y ago[dead]
- seydor 3y agoHe is a hollywood character now, hero of a movie. And we live in internet scale now. Everyone is comparing because there is nothing else to do.
- __loam 3y agoThere's so many other things we could be doing lol.
- bigbacaloa 3y agoI don't understand your complaint. Oppenheimer was a good physicist but nothing spectacular. The idea he did novel worthy stuff (whatever that means anyway) is not much shared by professional physicists, whatever their politics.
- Beldin 3y agoThe article makes the argument that he did Nobel-level-worthy work. There are a few reasons Oppenheimer is remembered today, including reasons having to do with physics. Unlike most physicists from 1900-1950.
- willis936 3y agoI'm having trouble coming up with a more spectacular physics experiment than orchestrating the first fission chain reaction. It's so spectacular that it's put on 70 mm film 70 years later.
- kahnclusions 3y agoYeah I don't think it's fair to compare him that way. Einstein on the other hand benefited a lot from the timing of when he was born and started working in physics. His work was very much built upon that of others... Maxwell discovered the relationship between electromagnetism and light, Michelson inadvertently proved 'c' was a constant, Lorentz described the transformations between frames of reference and effects like time dilation and length contraction. It sounded like Lorentz was on the verge of special relativity but just couldn't accept the universe being that weird. I think what it took was not a super-genius, but someone smart who was willing to embrace the weirdness and take these ideas together to their logical conclusion.
- staunton 3y agoYou're forgetting general relativity. Special relativity, yeah, someone else was going to do that one the same decade as Einstein.
- sgillen 3y agoHilbert almost beat Einstein to the punch though!
- tonightstoast 3y agoOnly after Einstein told him what he had been working on.
- bmitc 3y agoYea, and Hilbert was just operating mathematically once he new the setup, as far as I understand. Einstein's special sauce with general relativity was the whole curved space-time thing. I mean, very few even really valued the theory once he released it until decades later. A century later, it's effectively unchanged, with a lot of extensions of course. It is probably the achievement in physics.
- 3y ago
- skybrian 3y ago“No Einstein” is often used as a put-down so it sounds insulting, but here I think it’s literally comparing his achievements to Einstein? Coming off second-best in that contest isn’t as much of a dishonor as it sounds.
- crossroadsguy 3y agoI think "You are good, even though you are no Einstein" or just "You are no Einstein" is complement enough.
- sgtnoodle 3y agoI took high school AP physics without the prerequisites, and managed to do well in it. An underclassman took it after I graduated, and apparently the teacher would goad him on by saying that exactly, but compared to me rather than Einstein. Years later on the other side of the country, I was walking down the hallway at the rocket factory I worked at. I saw that guy sitting alone in a conference room, and he was interviewing for a job! On sight, he shook his fist and cursed my name, declaring me his nemesis! I took him out to lunch, but made him pick up the check...
- aidenn0 3y agoYeah, I mean Phil Rizzuto was no Babe Ruth, but he's still in the Hall of Fame.
- goatlover 3y agoRunning times? Are they confusing Turing with Roger Bannister, the guy who first broke the four minute mile? Track surfaces, shoes, nutrition and training methods were quite different then. Someone gave a Ted Talk in which they factored out all the technological advantages that modern sprinters have over Jesse Owens, and Owens comes in at 0.1 seconds beyond Usain Bolt in one of Bolt's Olympic 100 meter races. Which means that there great athletes in the past who would be very competitive today. Wilt Chamberlain in basketball being another example.
- wging 3y ago> Are they confusing Turing with Roger Bannister, the guy who first broke the four minute mile? I don't think they are. Turing was a runner. He ran in the 2:40s for the marathon, which is a reasonably good amateur time even today, and was a few places away from making the British Olympic team. (It's also ironic that you (understandably) refer to Bannister by his mile - he himself would rather have been remembered for his achievements in neurology.)
- iancmceachern 3y agoI came here to say this. The bombs worked, so I'd say he's a pretty darn good physicist... did it really need saying?
- epolanski 3y agoThe interviewed article doesn't imply that he wasn't a good physicist, it says that his contributions aren't comparable to the kind of geniuses like Einstein or Johnny Von Neumann. It also explains few of the reasons: lack of focus, timing, different scientific culture. I'm not exactly understanding why so many people are taking the offense either. The interviewer asks a very straight forward question multiple times: help the reader how does Oppenheimer ranks in his skills and contributions to other physicists of that era and it does just that.
- DharmaPolice 3y agoI don't know about taking offence but there's something grating about the tendency to try and "rank" everything (either explicitly or implicitly) - which underpins so much internet content. Such discussions always feel like those "who would win in a fight" conversations you may have had as a kid. This is not to say everyone is equal let's all sing kumbaya but if we're discussing classical composers do we really need to rank someone vs Mozart/Bach/Beethoven? It rarely adds anything.
- epolanski 3y agoI understand that too, but you also need to understand that the public for such articles are the people that wonder exactly how does Oppenheimer ranks among the scientists of his era.
- lifeonlars 3y agoThere are (in that era) no other geniuses 'like' Einstein or von Neumann. Einstein was probably the most visionary scientist of the whole century at making huge steps forward in several key areas. John von Neumann made landmark achievements across pure maths, physics, engineering, computer science and economics. To say that a basketball player is not comparable to Larry Bird or to Michael Jordan is no disparagement.
- __loam 3y agoImagine building and testing the first atom bomb and still having people question your credentials
- siva7 3y agoby people with no qualifications in that subject matter anyway ;)
- epolanski 3y agoAmerican? That's the interviewed person view. I don't understand how's that dishonest and ignorant. If you said Carmelo Anthony was no Michael Jordan are you being lazy, dishonest and ignorant?
- Woodi 3y ago> I really don't understand this American attitude Just movie is coming... Remember 2012 ? Same. Money.
- constantly 3y agoI think he’s fascinating and capable. I read American Prometheus a few years ago, which is the biography of him that’s really in depth and factually accurate. One note I thought was interesting was that Einstein was considered from a different generation of physicists and people looked at him differently. But the book compares Oppy’s contemporaries like Hans Beta to Oppy and reaches the same “no Einstein” conclusion. But my read was that that wasn’t a bad thing, Oppy was extremely capable in physics, but his real natural talent was in bringing out the true insights from others rather than making those insights himself directly, and was otherworldly good at coordination leadership. Which is why he led the Los Alamos project. I don’t think I view “no Einstein” as a dig, but rather a factual truth presented in the best biography of the man and meant to highlight his world beating talent.
- jhbadger 3y agoBeing a scientific administrator (which was Oppenheimer's primary job in the Manhattan Project) is a different job than primarily being a researcher, and Oppenheimer was quite good at it which is all the more impressive given that this was his first administrative role.
- foobarian 3y agoThis is kind of like those software engineers who end up great technical managers and eventually directors or above. There is a very valuable skill involved that is not necessarily the same skill that makes a good IC.
- StackOverlord 3y ago> "Oppy". Hell no.
- naijaboiler 3y agoBeing damn good enough to warrant a comparison to Einstein, even if it to mention that you fall short, makes you pretty damn remarkable
- hapticmonkey 3y agoMarlon Brando touched on this attitude when he asked if he’s the greatest actor of all time. https://youtu.be/fgvMPUcw_2Q https://youtu.be/fgvMPUcw_2Q
- aredox 3y agoEven Einstein is overrated (or, at least, his reputation was inflated because he was the archetypal quirky scientist that journalists love to write about): -most of the groupwork was laid by Poincaré -Einstein's wife helped him a lot (and wasn't properly credited) -Despite being a supposed genius, Einstein didn't "get" quantum mechanics.
- lifeonlars 3y agoHard to argue that Einstein is not overrated when he is literally the archetype of 'genius scientist' for most people in the world. But in his annus mirabilis Einstein literally made world-tier steps forward in 3 huge areas of physics simultaneously. Any of these in isolation would have ensured his immortality. This is either the single most important short productive period of scientific work of anyone, ever, or holds that accolade in tie with Newton's plague year. Of course, his later years did not live up to this stellar record - he both made mistakes and was less productive. But how could they? Joseph Heller was challenged by a journalist in later years that "he hadn't written anything as good as Catch-22 recently". He replied "No. But who has?"
- empyrrhicist 3y agoI'm currently reading through a book that pretty thoroughly eviscerates that last point as a myth. Part of the argument is that he was resistant to efforts to bring classical concepts into the new domain, thinking that something entirely new may be needed to explain reality. He also spent a lot of time (naturally) trying to square it with GR, something we're still working on today. He kept up with the math and the experiments, but took a contrary view on the interpretation. As an interesting side note, the Copenhagen interpretation which was emerging around that time is now disfavored by the wider physics community (except as a calculation tool).
- DiogenesKynikos 3y agoEinstein "got" Quantum Mechanics better than most physicists of his era. Einstein was one of the pioneers in Quantum Mechanics, making foundational contributions to the understanding of the quantum nature of light (the photoelectric effect and stimulated emission). Even in his criticism of certain elements of Quantum Mechanics, he was incredibly perceptive. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox is a really difficult problem, which gets to the heart of the apparent strangeness of Quantum Mechanics.[0] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Podolsky%E2%80%93Rosen_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Podolsky%E2%8...
- manojlds 3y agoEinstein is no Newton btw :)
- aqme28 3y agoHe's no Euler.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoHe's no Leibniz.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ncfausti 3y agoBlame Hollywood. The mythos of a lone, brilliant genius doing feats unimaginable to “normal people” is everywhere, unfortunately.
- copperx 3y agoHowever, such lone geniuses have indeed existed, no? e.g., Ramanujan. The American taste for comic book superheroes makes such stories compelling.
- suction 3y ago[dead]
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y agoIt's not American attitude, it's just people being people. As a reminder, even Einstein was dismissed as an incompetent quack by his colleagues in Germany when he unveiled relativity, so lack of respect for one another has always been a thing for our species.
- moonchrome 3y agoTo be fair most of "revolutionary" ideas are quackery so it's a good heuristic.
- jstanley 3y agoIt's a good heuristic if you just want to be right more often, but if you want to find new good ideas then it'll rule out every single one of them. Related: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost...
- moonchrome 3y agoThis implies new ideas have to be revolutionary ? It's usually possible to progress in the existing direction. Science advances one funeral at a time and all that jazz.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y agoWith such a heuristic, if you seek food, and most of your environment is not food, so you dismiss your entire environment as not food, and refuse to seek, you die :)
- strunz 3y agoIronically they portray Einstein as sort of out of touch with contemporary quantum physics in the movie and explain that as the reason he wasn't part of the Manhattan a project.
- Spooky23 3y agoIt’s tabloid gotcha/clickbait techniques metastasizing into everything. People have innate ability but achieve different outcomes based on where when and how they come of age. The problem with these trains of thought is he wasn’t born in 1980 or 1580. At that time, Einstein was the guy who was able to figure out how to connect a bunch of dots and communicate those ideas and concepts to the world. Oppenheimer may or may not have had the physics genius of Einstein - but he was certainly able to build a massive project team, execute on his project and release a new force. I’d venture to guess Einstein wouldn’t be suited to that work.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoWhy wasn't the movie called Einstein then? Would the project have been a success if Einstein and Oppenheimer had swapped places?
- ekm2 3y agoYou probably have not come across Lev Landau's ranking of physicists.From Wikipedia: Landau kept a list of names of physicists which he ranked on a logarithmic scale of productivity ranging from 0 to 5. The highest ranking, 0, was assigned to Isaac Newton. Albert Einstein was ranked 0.5. A rank of 1 was awarded to the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Satyendra Nath Bose, Paul Dirac and Erwin Schrödinger, and others, while members of rank of 5 were deemed "pathologists". Landau ranked himself as a 2.5 but later promoted to a 2.
- Aqueous 3y agoI think almost more offensively, is the concession that he did Nobel-level work but was ‘No Einstein.’ We are talking about the smallest fraction of individuals who are capable of insight in physics at that level, and I can’t help but think that it’s only chance that separates them.