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Relativity comes to mind. You could nitpick a rebuttal, but no matter how many people you give credit, general relativity was a completely novel idea when it w

Relativity comes to mind. You could nitpick a rebuttal, but no matter how many people you give credit, general relativity was a completely novel idea when it was proposed. I'd argue for special relatively as well.

johnfn 9mo ago
Even if I grant you that, surely we’ve moved the goal posts a bit if we’re saying the only thing we can think of that AI can’t do is the life’s work of a man who’s last name is literally synonymous with genius.
poplarsol 9mo ago
That's not exactly true. Lorentz contraction is a clear antecedent to special relativity.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- DonaldFisk 9mo ago
  It isn't an anteceent, it's part of special relativity, discovered by Lorentz. It's well known that special relativity is the work of several people as well as Einstein.
lamontcg 9mo ago
Not really. Pretty sure I read recently that Newton appreciated that his theory was non-local and didn't like what Einstein later called "spooky action at a distance". The Lorentz transform was also known from 1887. Time dilation was understood from 1900. Poincaré figured out in 1905 that it was a mathematical group. Einstein put a bow on it all by figuring out that you could derive it from the principle of relativity and keeping the speed of light constant in all inertial reference frames. I'm not sure about GR, but I know that it is built on the foundations of differential geometry, which Einstein definitely didn't invent (I think that's the source of his "I assure you whatever your difficulties in mathematics are, that mine are much greater" quote because he was struggling to understand Hilbert's math). And really Cauchy, Hilbert, and those kinds of mathematicians I'd put above Einstein in building entirely new worlds of mathematics...
- hn_acc1 9mo ago
  Are you saying Newton was aware of quantum entanglement? Because that's what the "spooky action at a distance" quote refers to.
  - DonaldFisk 9mo ago
    Newton wrote, "That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it." Source: https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00258 https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THE...
    - dotancohen 9mo ago
      This quote itself must be taken in the context of Newton's own aspirations. Newton was specifically searching for force capable of moving distant objects when he realised the essence of gravity. No apple really fell on his head - that story was likely invented by those who could not stand Newton (he was famously brash) and meant simply that his personality was a result of getting hit on the head. And Newton was famously interested in dark religous interference in worldly affairs - what today we would call The Occult. When he did finally succeed in finding his force for moving objects at a distance, without need for an intervening body, he gave credit to these supernatural entities - at least that is how this quote was taken in his day. This religious context is not well known today, nor is Newton's difficult character, so today it is easy to take the quote out of context. Newton was (likely) not disputing the validity of his discovery, rather, he was invoking one of his passions (The Occult) in the affairs of one of his successful passions (finding a force to move distant objects). It should be noted that some of Newton's successful religious work is rarely attributed to him. For a prominent example, it was Newton that calculated Jesus's birth to be 4 BC, not 1 AD as was the intention of the new calendar.
- Paracompact 9mo ago
  Agree with you everywhere. Although I prefer the quote: "Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore." :)
Paracompact 9mo ago
I am not a scientific historian, or even a physicist, but IMO relativity has a weak case for being a completely novel discovery. Critique of absolute time and space of Newtonian physics was already well underway, and much of the methodology for exploring this relativity (by way of gyroscopes, inertial reference frames, and synchronized mechanical clocks) were already in parlance. Many of the phenomena that relativity would later explain under a consistent framework already had independent quasi-explanations hinting at the more universal theory. Poincare probably came the closest to unifying everything before Einstein: > In 1902, Henri Poincaré published a collection of essays titled Science and Hypothesis, which included: detailed philosophical discussions on the relativity of space and time; the conventionality of distant simultaneity; the conjecture that a violation of the relativity principle can never be detected; the possible non-existence of the aether, together with some arguments supporting the aether; and many remarks on non-Euclidean vs. Euclidean geometry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity Now, if I had to pick a major idea that seemed to drop fully-formed from the mind of a genius with little precedent to have guided him, I might personally point to Galois theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois_theory). (Ironically, though, I'm not as familiar with the mathematical history of that time and I may be totally wrong!)
- bananaflag 9mo ago
  From that article: > The quintic was almost proven to have no general solutions by radicals by Paolo Ruffini in 1799, whose key insight was to use permutation groups, not just a single permutation. Thing is, I am usually the kind of person who defends the idea of a lone genius. But I also believe there is a continuous spectrum, no gaps, from the village idiot to Einstein and beyond. Let me introduce, just for fun, not for the sake of any argument, another idea from math which I think it came really out of the blue, to the degree that it's still considered an open problem to write an exposition about it, since you cannot smoothly link it to anything else: forcing.
- _alternator_ 9mo ago
  Right on with special relativity—Lorentz also was developing the theory and was a bit sour that Einstein got so much credit. Einstein basically said “what if special relativity were true for all of physics”, not just electromagnetism, and out dropped e=mc^2. It was a bold step but not unexplainable. As for general relativity, he spent several years working to learn differential geometry (which was well developed mathematics at the time, but looked like abstract nonsense to most physicists). I’m not sure how he was turned on to this theory being applicable to gravity, but my guess is that it was motivated by some symmetry ideas. (It always come down to symmetry.)
DonaldFisk 9mo ago
Agreed. General relativity was a completely novel idea. Einstein took a purely mathematical object (now known as the Einstein tensor), and realized that since its coveriant derivative was zero, it could be equated (apart fron a constant factor) to a conserved physical object, the energy momentum tensor (except for a constant factor). It didn't just fall out of Riemannian geometry and what was known about physics at the time. Special relativity was the work of several scientists as well as Einstein, but it was also a completely novel idea - just not the idea of one person working alone. I don't know why anyone disputes that people can sometimes come up with completely novel ideas out of the blue. This is how science moves forward. It's very easy to look back on a breakthrough and think it looks obvious (because you know the trick that was used), but it's important to remember that the discoverer didn't have the benefit of hindsight that you have.

johnfn 9mo ago

Even if I grant you that, surely we’ve moved the goal posts a bit if we’re saying the only thing we can think of that AI can’t do is the life’s work of a man who’s last name is literally synonymous with genius.

poplarsol 9mo ago

That's not exactly true. Lorentz contraction is a clear antecedent to special relativity.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
DonaldFisk 9mo ago
It isn't an anteceent, it's part of special relativity, discovered by Lorentz. It's well known that special relativity is the work of several people as well as Einstein.

lamontcg 9mo ago

Not really. Pretty sure I read recently that Newton appreciated that his theory was non-local and didn't like what Einstein later called "spooky action at a distance". The Lorentz transform was also known from 1887. Time dilation was understood from 1900. Poincaré figured out in 1905 that it was a mathematical group. Einstein put a bow on it all by figuring out that you could derive it from the principle of relativity and keeping the speed of light constant in all inertial reference frames. I'm not sure about GR, but I know that it is built on the foundations of differential geometry, which Einstein definitely didn't invent (I think that's the source of his "I assure you whatever your difficulties in mathematics are, that mine are much greater" quote because he was struggling to understand Hilbert's math). And really Cauchy, Hilbert, and those kinds of mathematicians I'd put above Einstein in building entirely new worlds of mathematics...

hn_acc1 9mo ago
Are you saying Newton was aware of quantum entanglement? Because that's what the "spooky action at a distance" quote refers to.
- DonaldFisk 9mo ago
  Newton wrote, "That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it." Source: https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00258 https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THE...
  - dotancohen 9mo ago
    This quote itself must be taken in the context of Newton's own aspirations. Newton was specifically searching for force capable of moving distant objects when he realised the essence of gravity. No apple really fell on his head - that story was likely invented by those who could not stand Newton (he was famously brash) and meant simply that his personality was a result of getting hit on the head. And Newton was famously interested in dark religous interference in worldly affairs - what today we would call The Occult. When he did finally succeed in finding his force for moving objects at a distance, without need for an intervening body, he gave credit to these supernatural entities - at least that is how this quote was taken in his day. This religious context is not well known today, nor is Newton's difficult character, so today it is easy to take the quote out of context. Newton was (likely) not disputing the validity of his discovery, rather, he was invoking one of his passions (The Occult) in the affairs of one of his successful passions (finding a force to move distant objects). It should be noted that some of Newton's successful religious work is rarely attributed to him. For a prominent example, it was Newton that calculated Jesus's birth to be 4 BC, not 1 AD as was the intention of the new calendar.
Paracompact 9mo ago
Agree with you everywhere. Although I prefer the quote: "Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore." :)

Paracompact 9mo ago

I am not a scientific historian, or even a physicist, but IMO relativity has a weak case for being a completely novel discovery. Critique of absolute time and space of Newtonian physics was already well underway, and much of the methodology for exploring this relativity (by way of gyroscopes, inertial reference frames, and synchronized mechanical clocks) were already in parlance. Many of the phenomena that relativity would later explain under a consistent framework already had independent quasi-explanations hinting at the more universal theory. Poincare probably came the closest to unifying everything before Einstein: > In 1902, Henri Poincaré published a collection of essays titled Science and Hypothesis, which included: detailed philosophical discussions on the relativity of space and time; the conventionality of distant simultaneity; the conjecture that a violation of the relativity principle can never be detected; the possible non-existence of the aether, together with some arguments supporting the aether; and many remarks on non-Euclidean vs. Euclidean geometry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity Now, if I had to pick a major idea that seemed to drop fully-formed from the mind of a genius with little precedent to have guided him, I might personally point to Galois theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois_theory). (Ironically, though, I'm not as familiar with the mathematical history of that time and I may be totally wrong!)

bananaflag 9mo ago
From that article: > The quintic was almost proven to have no general solutions by radicals by Paolo Ruffini in 1799, whose key insight was to use permutation groups, not just a single permutation. Thing is, I am usually the kind of person who defends the idea of a lone genius. But I also believe there is a continuous spectrum, no gaps, from the village idiot to Einstein and beyond. Let me introduce, just for fun, not for the sake of any argument, another idea from math which I think it came really out of the blue, to the degree that it's still considered an open problem to write an exposition about it, since you cannot smoothly link it to anything else: forcing.
_alternator_ 9mo ago
Right on with special relativity—Lorentz also was developing the theory and was a bit sour that Einstein got so much credit. Einstein basically said “what if special relativity were true for all of physics”, not just electromagnetism, and out dropped e=mc^2. It was a bold step but not unexplainable. As for general relativity, he spent several years working to learn differential geometry (which was well developed mathematics at the time, but looked like abstract nonsense to most physicists). I’m not sure how he was turned on to this theory being applicable to gravity, but my guess is that it was motivated by some symmetry ideas. (It always come down to symmetry.)

DonaldFisk 9mo ago

Agreed. General relativity was a completely novel idea. Einstein took a purely mathematical object (now known as the Einstein tensor), and realized that since its coveriant derivative was zero, it could be equated (apart fron a constant factor) to a conserved physical object, the energy momentum tensor (except for a constant factor). It didn't just fall out of Riemannian geometry and what was known about physics at the time. Special relativity was the work of several scientists as well as Einstein, but it was also a completely novel idea - just not the idea of one person working alone. I don't know why anyone disputes that people can sometimes come up with completely novel ideas out of the blue. This is how science moves forward. It's very easy to look back on a breakthrough and think it looks obvious (because you know the trick that was used), but it's important to remember that the discoverer didn't have the benefit of hindsight that you have.