It seems to me that people forget that the "picking" part is what it's all about: actually doing the work.
> 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).
Yea, that kind of is the point. General relativity came out of nowhere and was executed on at the same time. SpaceX is irrelevant to discussing achievements in physics.
Newton was a genius, but calculus isn't solely his. A lot of modern calculus is closer to Leibnitz's formulation rather than Newton's, e.g. notation [0].
We use Newton's insights into the applications of the Calculus to other sciences and we use Leibniz's artful way of capturing the Calculus to symbols on paper (and chalkboards).
There's a power of "dualism" in mathematics that sometimes you don't know that you have the right math until you've got two (or more views of it), enough to say "these lenses really do show the same thing".
I find it interesting to spot such dualisms, and especially how many of them were contemporary mathematicians working at some remove or another (countries or an ocean apart). From a computing perspective that's always been fascinating to me about the Church-Turing Theorem (which is always a relevant tangent on HN). Most people ignore Alonso Church's contributions and just call it the Turing Theorem, but the Theorem itself is about dualism (that all formulations we found of computation themselves are dual and can be translated or emulated between each other) and doesn't exist if it weren't for Church and Turing coexisting and conversing. (Plus, it has been said that it was Church that originally proposed the math to prove the dualism between their work and it was a sequence of correspondence that Church originated.)
That is no disrespect to Alan Turing, of course, to include Church in that theorem name and respect the dualism of their contemporaneous work. I think that balance looks a lot like Newton versus Leibniz: Turing knew the practical applications of computing and was starting from a place of having built them (though classified at the time) and Church was working from pure principles and theory in mathematics (the Lambda Calculus). We greatly benefit from both having worked on the same ideas as duals of each other, and we greatly benefit that their correspondence involved an ocean in between them so that they also weren't entirely in the same mindspace. We use a lot of Turing's applied practical synthesis of computing and we rely on a lot of things from Church's notations or things derived from it (including the Y Combinator for which this site's domain name refers).
Modern computing owes a lot to the dualism of Turing and Church. Modern Calculus owes a lot to the dualism of Newton and Leibniz. I find that incredibly interesting and I appreciate that about the mathematics of both things.
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.
Einstein ticks quite a few of the boxes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_mirabilis_papers
(General relativity was 1915.)
Plenty of other physicists were contemporaries of Einstein and did not see what he saw.
I suspect also that had Einstein instead lived in this modern age where, at least to this layman physics progress appears to be floundering, he too would have been struggling to stitch all the pieces together into some semblance of a whole.
Astonishing!
Einstein's genius was the General Theory of Relativity. That was truly original and revolutionary thought, the likes of which we only see every few hundred years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...
Who says that doesn't take super-genius?
I'm not disagreeing that he was a genius, only that genius is a very ill-defined term.
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
Included in that package is a story telling addition, that ignores facts and truth, to self grandize.
For any seasoned reader, American == unreliable narrator. Take whatever is said like the "im an ex-seal" story in a dive bar, with a grain of salt.
If SU got to the moon first US would've ignored it too and said Mars was the real target...
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.
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.
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)
It's not just the man or woman at the top who make the country work. Peter the Great and Catherine the Great tried to modernize. But the nobility put up a lot of resistance or simply didn't turn up for committee meetings.
The pre-soviet famines were of natural causes - crop failures due to droughts etc. After soviets took over the country, these were still ocurring, but were dwarfed by man-made famines, caused by idiotic economic policies (mainly by forced collectivization, which decimated productivity).
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/06/stalins-war-by...
It's just that usually in such comparisons you get to see USA, and USA was an extreme outlier that makes comparison useless in my opinion.
And in the USSRs case, it was from an ecomony that had just had gotten into large scale industrial production, after having been way behind under the Czars, and after a major war, a revolution, and several years of civil war.
If anything, they did better than expected. Even more so given that they had an inexperienced government, external pressure from unfriendly western countries, and had to prepare for future wars that were already breeding (and luckily the did it just in time for WWII).
The US had millions of hungry people. At the peak of the Great Depression, deaths from starvation peaked at a (still terrible) ~110k. Under Soviet rule, an order of magnitude more, actually millions, perished unnecessarily from hunger just in Ukraine.
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory2os2xmaster/...
The initial emergency response, together with later decontamination of the environment, involved more than 500,000 personnel and cost an estimated 18 billion roubles—roughly US $68 billion in 2019, adjusted for inflation.[3]
Wait, what? Buran did launch for a test flight, in a fully remote-controlled flight(something that the US Shuttle couldn't do at the time), and landed successfully. It never crashed.
I've been watching MIT 16.885J recently, it's a lecture series from 2005 about the space shuttle with lectures given about numerous shuttle subsystems by people who actually worked on them, administrators and lead engineers. Several of them have expressed reservations about the systems in the shuttles. Fear that the hydraulic system was a ticking timebomb that should be replaced with electromechanic systems, recounting an early fear that the Colombia breakup had been caused by a landing gear explosion, etc. These guys weren't certain of much, everybody knew it was a risky project.
True, but I honestly find it hard to conceptualise how that relates to military spending.
You think the Soviet population would be better fed if MIC scientists had paid more attention to food production? Unlikely, it seems if anything in the Soviet Union that has a negative correlation. And the factories are, famously, dual use in capitalist or communist systems, so without the military demand, it seems more likely their population wouldn't have engineered products at all.
By design, they lacked a middle class. I think it's worth stating: any system that can produce a > Mach 2 fighter is incredibly advanced, that that society was serfs < 100 years prior also incredible. But the products - military or civil - were consistently less rounded, more slapdash, than US fare. We could therefore infer - again, since the factories and talent are dual-use - the middle class drove product quality in both the civil market, and ultimately the military one.
They also, of course, didn't trade much with the richest economy in the world - unlike, say, recent China. It certainly seems to be a famous nail in the Soviet coffin that people did know regular civilian life in the West was better, and they couldn't get a slice of that pie.
(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.)
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.
But looking at the big picture, the Soviet Union was far superior to the US in terms of space technology and scientific accomplishments up to that point. As with World War 2, the US showed up late to the game, spiked the football and just declared itself the winner.
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?
Did you go to the moon? Were you involved in anyway with the advancement of rocketry, the mercury missions, the Apollo missions, etc?
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.
Not in Belgium though. I figure that in Belgium would be too obviously false.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_Landmark_of_the_Resi...
The place is also massive, you do get a sort of mental fatigue going through, reading, and processing all of the stuff. We were there from opening at 9 and I think we left some time around 2 or 3. And while we made it through all of the building and exhibits, we were definitely spending less time on any one thing towards the end. So if there were any real errors, if they came towards the end of the day, I'd have likely just not been paying any real attention by that time.
There are little NFC cards you get that you can scan on various stations to hear about the person your card represents. There are various soldiers, leaderer, and Bob Hope (not kidding, you get to hear all about his USO tours).
But you hear about everything through the lens of its relationship to America.
don't forget fentanyl
When I think of French inventions, the stethoscope, braille, and pasteurization are immediately obvious. Hot air balloons too I believe.
I donno, it doesn't seem like much of a competition to me. Hell, I'm a Canadian - we've got the snowmobile and insulin, to reference, not a whole lot else. I don't think it's unreasonable for one to observe that some countries have been more inventive than others.
You might say those are a different categorie of things, and they would say it is a more important category of things and it therefore demonstrates French exceptionalism. Countries tend to demonstrate their exceptionalism on metrics they are good at.
(btw, the French list of inventions is actually quite long too. Bicycles, cars, airplanes, submarines. In fact, many of the things Americans and English also claim to have invented. Like Americans have the atom bomb, the French have radioactivity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_inventions_an... )
While America is the poster child for car culture, Europe isn't a panacea either: lots of cities built up post-WWII are car-bound hellscapes too. Lots of other places have bowed to worshiping at the altar of the automobiles too, it's not just the US.
As for equitable urban planning, Europe is going through a huge housing crisis now too.
That layer (which is now often confused with Internet itself) is an European invention. (A Brit and a Belgian, sitting in an office on the border between France and Switzerland, could not be more european than that).
The point is not to be pro-european, just to say that if you list inventions and remove the components not invented in the US, you will end with a list of inventions from the US.
Mostly foreign Jewish scientists who were neither taught nor started their research in the USA and came because of the situation in Europe. Even Oppenheimer had to go do his PhD in Germany.
> Hollywood
Both the camera, the first films and the foundation of filming come from the Lumieres and their company based in France and the films they made around the world.
> internet
Packet switching is from Batman in the UK. HTML was from a British engineer in Switzerland.
Even the rocket you sent to the moon was built by a German.
The Limelight Department was one of the world's first film studios, beginning in 1898, operated by The Salvation Army in Melbourne, Australia.
The Limelight Department produced evangelistic material for use by the Salvation Army, including lantern slides as early as 1891, as well as private and government contracts.
In its 19 years of operation, the Limelight Department produced about 300 films of various lengths, making it one of largest film producers of its time.
The original cut of this silent film ran for more than an hour with a reel length of about 1,200 metres (4,000 ft), making it the longest narrative film yet seen in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limelight_Department
That isn't a result that makes Europe look clever. The major intellectual innovation out of that era was communism. The US approach outperformed Europe's by such a margin that it isn't worth comparing them.
That came out of Europe, and well after the steam engine.
And, I think you mean "Marxism", not "communism"?
Communism in the West predates capitalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_communism lists examples like Tommaso Campanella's 1601 work "The City of the Sun" and Morelly's 1755 work "The Code of Nature" as some of the works which predate Smith's 1776 work "The Wealth of Nations".
You say that the rocket sent to the moon was built by a German, as if that's points against the United States. To many Americans that isn't a bad thing. It is a foundational American value to adopt culture, skill, and ambition from abroad.
The US wasn't disrupted by WWII nearly as much as France. The US also has a larger domestic monolingual market, so there's more potential for network effects.
By the way, this is true even today. The EU is a larger unified market than the US, but linguistic divisions are still a significant barrier.
When pointed out that it wasn't one American but many imported people from around the world then suddenly things shift to "well of course, that's because only the US allows lots of individuals from around the world to work together as a team to do great things".
Which one is it?
In the end it's a definition of how far back you want to look to define "original natives". And the further back you go the more inexact are the "facts". Do we all come from this one place in Africa in the end? Are we 100% Homo sapiens Or How much Neanderthal is in us? Does it depend on which migration wave our ancestors were part of?
Meaning by extension of your logic if I choose the right cutoff Europe is African actually so the Atomic bomb was invented by an African!
Personally I think that the cutoff should be somewhere around second or third generation immigrants. Specifics can depend on how much integration with existing local culture happens or how much individual silo groups cling to their country of origin. And then there's of course the "eradication of previous inhabitants" that sometimes happened. The majority population of the US has roots in Europe, yes. But US culture" is definitely distinct enough now to stand on its own.
It's not as easy as that though on a more philosophical level and from various different angles. E.g. think yourself back to the days those Asian tribes presumably came to America. I read it was three waves. Was the first wave the only true "native Americans" then and the second wave was an immigrant already? That became "native" when and how then? (never mind that there was no such thing as citizenship of a country at that time)
Even an oblique reference deserves the Tom Lehrer reference [0] :-)
[citation needed]
It's interesting to me how people who talk of advancements of our civilization in such an absolute manner are often the ones who know less about our civilization.
I would argue that synthetic bovine insulin is much more important than Hollywood or social media, but YMMV.
I would also argue that the telescope, the printing press, the telephone, the cinematograph and the world wide web together had the biggest impact on human culture since the invention of writing and agriculture, they basically boostrapped the modern society as we know it.
I would also argue that steam power is known since the ancient Egypt and that the steam engine is from the 16th century, USA wasn't even a thing back then
> Atomic bomb, Hollywood, internet, social media, AI
accidentally proving that leading nowhere worth visiting
The US is exceptional in many ways and can solve problems no other nation could, of that there is no doubt, but I would agree that the exceptionalism does extend to marketing itself as well.
Rockets were built by German scientists who were (voluntarily) picked up by the U.S.forces after WW2.
Let's take a look at Sun Microsystems. Bechtolsheim is German, Khosla is from India (if I'm not mistaken).
The Google founders are children of immigrants.
ChatGPT was built by a guy with a Russian name. If Altman takes credit, that's just very American.
Most open source contributions come from Asia, Russia and Europe. Americans commercialize them, take credit and start bullying the original contributors.
I'll give you Hollywood and Bernays. Americans are great at reality distortion.
Who developed the compound steam turbine?
Who developed penicillin?
The "Green Revolution" depends on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. Who developed the Haber process?
Hint: none of them were from the US.
History is more complex than what we learned in school. Many of the great advances in technology now attributed to the USA were actually transferred as part of a trade deal in return for support in WW2.
Funny how everyone is pointing out all these inventions were by immigrants in the US.
And that’s the point. The US takes the best of the world and reaps the rewards of their work. And also makes those people wealthy in the process. Everyone wins except for the countries that lost those genuiuses.
And despite my pro US stance, I’m actually from Eastern Europe, and my country lost a lot of talent to the US.
And you're saying this on the Internet.
I'd be amazed, but I suppose Twitter seeps in even here.
The competition part is what's ruining the Web.
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.
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.
In the context of American competitiveness, and there's nothing more competitive than a defense department (-:
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".
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.
And we live in internet scale now. Everyone is comparing because there is nothing else to do.
There are a few reasons Oppenheimer is remembered today, including reasons having to do with physics. Unlike most physicists from 1900-1950.
It's so spectacular that it's put on 70 mm film 70 years later.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
No one is Mozart. All we can control is our disposition and the work ethic of Amadeus' Salieri is worth striving for.
However the notion that Oppenheimer and Salieri were mediocrities because they weren't the best is a bit insulting. If those highly capable and powerful figures in history aren't worth dignity then what about the 99.9% of people that are below their level? Everyone deserves dignity.
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?
Just movie is coming... Remember 2012 ? Same. Money.
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.
Hell no.
-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.
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?"
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).
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%8...
The American taste for comic book superheroes makes such stories compelling.
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.
Related: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost...
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.
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. N. David Mermin, writing about Landau, referred to the scale, and ranked himself in the fourth division, in the article "My Life with Landau: Homage of a 4.5 to a 2".
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.