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Yeah 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 phys

Yeah 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 ago
You're forgetting general relativity. Special relativity, yeah, someone else was going to do that one the same decade as Einstein.
- sgillen 3y ago
  Hilbert almost beat Einstein to the punch though!
  - tonightstoast 3y ago
    Only after Einstein told him what he had been working on.
    - bmitc 3y ago
      Yea, 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.
      - anonyfox 3y ago
        I would argue that the biggest achievement in physics ever was sir Isaac newton: not only the 3 laws formulating classical mechanics, but also inventing calculus itself - which nowadays is basically all what these scientists use all day now (massively complex differential equations) + statistics
        bmitc 3y ago
        I think it's fair to say that Newton was a genius but also that a lot of the stuff during that time was ripe for the picking. There were several contributors to the developments of calculus. And Newton's calculus was pretty quickly "re-factored" from geometric to analytic terms.
        bboygravity 3y ago
        That's kind of like claiming that SpaceX isn't that special because it was all just "ripe for picking" (or any new tech or theory really was all ripe for picking at the time that it was picked). It seems to me that people forget that the "picking" part is what it's all about: actually doing the work.
        coldtea 3y ago
        SpaceX isn't that special. It's 70+ years of NASA work and the inevitable improvements found in 2023 tech compared to the last time NASA was actually given budgets for this.
        llamaLord 3y ago
        That's why there's so many other companies effectively competing with them... Oh... Wait...
        kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
        Making reusable boosters work was pretty special. No incumbent was going to attempt it because they were unwilling to reduce their per launch profit margin on an unproven risk. SpaceX changed the entire economics of launch services and obsoleted every other player with their plan that detractors were sure would never work.
Panoramix 3y ago
I haven't met anyone that has read Einstein's papers and things of him as something but a super genius. Obviously his work is based on the result of others, you could make that claim for 100% of scientists and mathematicians. Not only was relativity a mind blowing thing that he clearly saw through, there's the massive leap to general relativity, then there's the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, the mass energy equivalence, Bose-Einstein condensate, the cosmological constant and even his work on quantum entanglement. Any of which would make a physicist very famous. For one single person to come up with so many ideas, is almost unbelievable.
- dmbche 3y ago
  And let's not forget that he released four monumental papers THE SAME YEAR( called Annus Mirabilis, miraculous year)! Brownian motion, Special Relativity, Photoelectric Effect and Mass-Energy Equivalence. Astonishing!
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Thanks to the timing, I strongly suspect that half of those four — in aggregate, not necessarily two of the four complete items — were from his wife, who was also brilliant.
- 317070 3y ago
  And even when Einstein didn't know the answer, in things like the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky it shows he was also really good at coming up with the right question.
- contravariant 3y ago
  I sometimes wonder what it would look like if a time traveller became stranded in the past and needed to advance physics by several decades in order to build a device to return home. Einstein ticks quite a few of the boxes.
  - dingaling 3y ago
    Perhaps he was an avatar of one of the universe simulator's programmers, giving us a nudge to move the scenario along.
wslh 3y ago
What you are saying applies practically to any person, scientist, professional, artisan or whatever. You and me are writing this on HN because someone invented integrated circuits, before the transistor, before and before and after and after (e.g. Internet). It is the basics for the old adagio [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...
agumonkey 3y ago
This debate has popped up in France since Henri Poincaré was also working on these topics.. what I got out of it is that Einstein was the only one who could integrate all the bits into a coherent physical model, regardless of the genius of the other scientists involved.
coldtea 3y ago
>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. Who says that doesn't take super-genius?
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  Not necessarily. Einstein himself said that his greatest advantage over others mathematical physicists was that he was willing to stay with a problem longer. I'm not disagreeing that he was a genius, only that genius is a very ill-defined term.
nabla9 3y ago
Einstein did 3 separate and mind bending discoveries each worth a noble-price (and published them in the same year). More importantly Einstein's peers thought he was above them all. Quoting Eugene Wigner who know both Einstein and Von Neumann. "I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jancsi (John) von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed. But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jancsi's brilliance, he never produced anything as original."
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Exactly, everyone builds on the past. Criticizing Oppenheimer in this way is missing point. Maybe he wasn't Einstein, but maybe Einstein wouldn't be able to organize and run a project. Part of this was also a combination of Physics Knowledge merged with getting things done, managing, organizing.
rvense 3y ago
> someone smart who was willing to embrace the weirdness and take these ideas together to their logical conclusion. It's been pointed out to me a few times that a lot of big advances in the natural sciences are made by people early in their careers who aren't very old. Perhaps it's easier to accept something "weird" and follow such a thought when you're not two-three decades invested in an old paradigm.
- DimitriPetrova 3y ago
  It also helps when you're working as patent clerk and don't have doctorate advisor
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
_zachs 3y ago
You can take kahnclusions' word for it, or you can take Eugene Wigner's: > I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jancsi (John) von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed. But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jancsi's brilliance, he never produced anything as original.
- naijaboiler 3y ago
  Neumann was a human calculator + encyclopedia in one. If there was ever intellectual olympics track and field, he would dominate the single sprint event. What Einstein had was a deep curiosity, damn near super-human persistence, and some measure of an inventor's creativity. Even in mundane interactions, his curiosity stood out.

staunton 3y ago

You're forgetting general relativity. Special relativity, yeah, someone else was going to do that one the same decade as Einstein.

sgillen 3y ago
Hilbert almost beat Einstein to the punch though!
- tonightstoast 3y ago
  Only after Einstein told him what he had been working on.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    Yea, 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.
    - anonyfox 3y ago
      I would argue that the biggest achievement in physics ever was sir Isaac newton: not only the 3 laws formulating classical mechanics, but also inventing calculus itself - which nowadays is basically all what these scientists use all day now (massively complex differential equations) + statistics
      - bmitc 3y ago
        I think it's fair to say that Newton was a genius but also that a lot of the stuff during that time was ripe for the picking. There were several contributors to the developments of calculus. And Newton's calculus was pretty quickly "re-factored" from geometric to analytic terms.
        bboygravity 3y ago
        That's kind of like claiming that SpaceX isn't that special because it was all just "ripe for picking" (or any new tech or theory really was all ripe for picking at the time that it was picked). It seems to me that people forget that the "picking" part is what it's all about: actually doing the work.
        coldtea 3y ago
        SpaceX isn't that special. It's 70+ years of NASA work and the inevitable improvements found in 2023 tech compared to the last time NASA was actually given budgets for this.
        llamaLord 3y ago
        That's why there's so many other companies effectively competing with them... Oh... Wait...
        kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
        Making reusable boosters work was pretty special. No incumbent was going to attempt it because they were unwilling to reduce their per launch profit margin on an unproven risk. SpaceX changed the entire economics of launch services and obsoleted every other player with their plan that detractors were sure would never work.

Panoramix 3y ago

I haven't met anyone that has read Einstein's papers and things of him as something but a super genius. Obviously his work is based on the result of others, you could make that claim for 100% of scientists and mathematicians. Not only was relativity a mind blowing thing that he clearly saw through, there's the massive leap to general relativity, then there's the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, the mass energy equivalence, Bose-Einstein condensate, the cosmological constant and even his work on quantum entanglement. Any of which would make a physicist very famous. For one single person to come up with so many ideas, is almost unbelievable.

dmbche 3y ago
And let's not forget that he released four monumental papers THE SAME YEAR( called Annus Mirabilis, miraculous year)! Brownian motion, Special Relativity, Photoelectric Effect and Mass-Energy Equivalence. Astonishing!
- ben_w 3y ago
  Thanks to the timing, I strongly suspect that half of those four — in aggregate, not necessarily two of the four complete items — were from his wife, who was also brilliant.
317070 3y ago
And even when Einstein didn't know the answer, in things like the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky it shows he was also really good at coming up with the right question.
contravariant 3y ago
I sometimes wonder what it would look like if a time traveller became stranded in the past and needed to advance physics by several decades in order to build a device to return home. Einstein ticks quite a few of the boxes.
- dingaling 3y ago
  Perhaps he was an avatar of one of the universe simulator's programmers, giving us a nudge to move the scenario along.

wslh 3y ago

What you are saying applies practically to any person, scientist, professional, artisan or whatever. You and me are writing this on HN because someone invented integrated circuits, before the transistor, before and before and after and after (e.g. Internet). It is the basics for the old adagio [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...

agumonkey 3y ago

This debate has popped up in France since Henri Poincaré was also working on these topics.. what I got out of it is that Einstein was the only one who could integrate all the bits into a coherent physical model, regardless of the genius of the other scientists involved.

coldtea 3y ago

>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. Who says that doesn't take super-genius?

kwhitefoot 3y ago
Not necessarily. Einstein himself said that his greatest advantage over others mathematical physicists was that he was willing to stay with a problem longer. I'm not disagreeing that he was a genius, only that genius is a very ill-defined term.

nabla9 3y ago

Einstein did 3 separate and mind bending discoveries each worth a noble-price (and published them in the same year). More importantly Einstein's peers thought he was above them all. Quoting Eugene Wigner who know both Einstein and Von Neumann. "I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jancsi (John) von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed. But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jancsi's brilliance, he never produced anything as original."

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Exactly, everyone builds on the past. Criticizing Oppenheimer in this way is missing point. Maybe he wasn't Einstein, but maybe Einstein wouldn't be able to organize and run a project. Part of this was also a combination of Physics Knowledge merged with getting things done, managing, organizing.

rvense 3y ago

> someone smart who was willing to embrace the weirdness and take these ideas together to their logical conclusion. It's been pointed out to me a few times that a lot of big advances in the natural sciences are made by people early in their careers who aren't very old. Perhaps it's easier to accept something "weird" and follow such a thought when you're not two-three decades invested in an old paradigm.

DimitriPetrova 3y ago
It also helps when you're working as patent clerk and don't have doctorate advisor

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

_zachs 3y ago

You can take kahnclusions' word for it, or you can take Eugene Wigner's: > I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jancsi (John) von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed. But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jancsi's brilliance, he never produced anything as original.

naijaboiler 3y ago
Neumann was a human calculator + encyclopedia in one. If there was ever intellectual olympics track and field, he would dominate the single sprint event. What Einstein had was a deep curiosity, damn near super-human persistence, and some measure of an inventor's creativity. Even in mundane interactions, his curiosity stood out.