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.