Is Einstein the last genius? | Hacker News Reader

Is Einstein the last genius?

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

10 pointsnreece16 comments

Am I the only one who doubts that popular vote can accurately select the greatest (or last) "genius"?

I mean, it's not like the mainstream has a better grasp of the relative magnitudes of the achievements than the physics or math communities. Why would they be right about Einstein? From my limited understanding of the matter, I'd venture that Newton was a greater genius for his time. In mathematics, Andrew Wiles and Gregory Perelman solved more vexing problems than Einstein did in physics. Is Einstein overrated?

You write "in mathematics, Andrew Wiles and Gregory Perelman solved more vexing problems than Einstein did in physics."

Wiles and Perelman are rightly honored for solving problems that had been posed long ago and resisted any number of efforts to solve them. But Einstein is honored not only for that, but also for being the one who posed some of the startling questions that he also answered. E.g., is the speed of light an absolute bound on causal interactions, with all coordinates and other measures being bent as necessary (and quantum phase information being hidden as necessary) to keep that bound from being passed?

Einstein's technical achievement in solving problems that everyone else recognized was very impressive: see General Relativity especially. But if that was all Einstein did, we might (only!) compare him to Maxwell or Dirac. To appreciate Einstein's achievements in terms of analogous achievements of mathematicians, you can't just compare to the achievements of people like Wiles or Perelman, you also need to compare to the achievements of people like Goedel, who is famous for both stating and proving a fundamentally important out-of-the-blue conjecture.

I agree with you that popular vote is not something that can accurately select the "greatest genius". I'm also skeptical of these "greatest"/"No.1" rankings as far as Scientists go; no matter who does the selection. You can definitely say that Einstein, Newton and a bunch of others are great scientists and contributed greatly to the progress of science. Why does one have to come up with rankings? these are more of a media hype in my opinion.

"I'd venture that Newton was a greater genius for his time."

I don't want to get into the trap of Newton Vs Einstein debate; However here are some reasons that IMO make Einstein's contribution to science a very important:

When Newton declared that he was "standing on the shoulders of giants", it was literally true. Galileo with his experimental physics, and Kepler's work on planetary motion had pretty much figured out everything necessary for Newton's work on gravitation. Newton had to formalize these things and put a framework around. Newton's work here was incremental.

OTOH, when Einstein entered the scene, Physics was in trouble. There were many things that classical physics couldn't explain. Though earlier works had pointed at the dichotomies in classical physics, no one was able to come up with a consistent theory to explain things. At this point in time, Einstein came with his fresh ideas and explained so many fundamental things like "what is gravity". Another important thing to note here is that the concepts Einstein came up with are not something that could have been learnt from observations of the world around us. ["like deducing Earth's gravity from an apple that fell on one's head"]. In that respect Einstein's contributions are really important; It's not often that one comes up with a grand theory about how the universe works by pure imagination and the universe obeys the theory.

Also, AFAIK, Newton is at least as popular as Einstein with the masses.

I agree that Einstein is better, because we can point to other geniuses of Newton's time who would have replicated his results. Leibniz for Calculus and Lorentz or Hamilton for mechanics. I'm not aware of anyone who could have come up with Einstein's Relativity or his explanation of the photo-electric effect in the early 1900's. Most of the experiments he used were decades old and no one else could piece them together.

Though I don't know of any names, I think Einstein's explanation of photo-electric effect is not completely out of this world or without precedents. Quantization was known though it was not applied to light earlier; Light's particle nature was considered earlier, though the double slit experiment convinced everyone that it's a wave. If I remember correctly Newton was of the opinion that light is particle in nature. Though it might have been hard to make the jump, I would assume that some smart guy would have been able to put these together and explain photo-electric effect, if Einstein hadn't. In a sense this achievement is more or less on the expected lines of progress for science.

However Relativity is a huge leap in my opinion.

Einstein is likely overrated in terms of pure IQ. But you cannot underestimate his creativity and confidence in pure reason. Lorentz had come up with the equations of Special Relativity decades before Einstein. Einstein was the only person who "thought outside the box" and applied Lorentz's equations to relativity instead of Electrodynamics alone.

An example of Einstein's type of genius is in Bose-Einstein condensates, which can be described simply as lasers made of matter as well as photons. Bose came up with equations that described photons. This work led to the fundamentals of lasers. Einstein recognized that the equations could be applied to matter as well. This was only experimentally verified within the last 20 years.

You can't really compare geniuses, because each is different. Wiles worked with great determination on one very difficult problem so his genius is really one of perseverance. I don't know how to rank that against Einstein's rebellious creativity. It's apples and oranges.

Presumably this doesn't include mathematicians, since there would doubtless be any number of counterexamples if it did (Grigori Perelman springs to mind). Clearly maths and science are group enterprises, and always have been. Regardless of scientists' institutional affiliations, human knowledge must be transmitted once discovered. The point the article makes is that the process of scientific discovery itself is generally no longer one pursued by lone individuals. This may in fact be accurate; however, this is more a shift in degree than in kind. Einstein, after all, worked with plenty of people: Planck, Schrödinger, Grossmann, and of course Podolsky and Rosen. His most important theoretical breakthroughs may have been made alone, but they were the result not merely of prior discoveries and theories (both physical and mathematical) but of collaborations with his contemporaries. Experimental verifications of his predictions were, and continue to be, carried out by the scientific corpus.

Well does it really matter? Why the focus on "genius"? Why not just focus on hard work and doing as much as you can without worrying about factors you cant control?

John von Neumann was widely considered a genius, though he was probably more Einstein's contemporary outliving him by only two years.

There are more people of that level of intelligence, they just don't stand out as much because there are so many and their work is more obscure.

I suppose it's a legitimate question whether anyone will ever achieve the same public mythology that Einstein has, but I wouldn't bet against it.

Are you saying there was a proportional increase caused by population growth?

What do you think about increases due to stability in the West, better quality food, better quality healthcare, and taller giants upon whose shoulders we can stand?

(About the last one, I mean that as a collective whole, we have much more specific scientific knowledge than our predecessors)

Yes, yes, yes, yes, and however many yesses are required to agree with all those things.

We also shouldn't forget the opening of more intellectual jobs to women, minorities, poor people . . . well, it use to be that only the aristocracy had a shot at being scientists.

Einstein's creative/innovative genius is what he's known for - If you're going by IQ alone, people like Bobby Fischer and Ted Kazinsky(sp?) would end up as the most amazing brains in recent history. They probably had more raw processing power than Einstein, though they couldn't function in society. John Nash is another.

What is genius?

I'm curious about your Ted "Kazinsky" comment. Are you talking about the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski? If so, I would like to know why him, of all the brilliant people in recent history? I know he was a precocious mathematician, and very gifted academically, but I could think of a dozen more people with similar—if not better—credentials than him.

Paul Erdős was at least as deserving of the title "genius" and died quite a bit later (1996). He was a highly productive mathematician until late in his life.

Feynman for the win

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