Re:One Einstein Is Worth a Legion of PhD Drones
by antognini on Friday November 19, 2021 @06:55PM
(#29284198)
Poincaré 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.
Re:One Einstein Is Worth a Legion of PhD Drones
by kryptiskt on Friday November 19, 2021 @07:17PM
(#29284361)
There 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.
Re:One Einstein Is Worth a Legion of PhD Drones
by taylodl on Monday November 22, 2021 @12:01PM
(#29308641)
You may find this interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity_priority_di...
Re:One Einstein Is Worth a Legion of PhD Drones
by bigbillheck on Friday November 19, 2021 @08:00PM
(#29284600)
> Some things, like Calculus,
Also famously and indisputably invented by one singular unique mind.
Re:One Einstein Is Worth a Legion of PhD Drones
by newsbinator on Friday November 19, 2021 @08:11PM
(#29284651)
> 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_contro...
Re:One Einstein Is Worth a Legion of PhD Drones
by bigbillheck on Friday November 19, 2021 @08:24PM
(#29284728)
Yes, that was the joke.
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_stor...