Newton vs Einstein: Who Revolutionized Physics?

[jedishrfu]

Gibbs makes the shortlist for sure.

He is surely my favorite physicist.

He's also on NCIS but I digress.

 

[micromass]

Yeah but, Einstein's adamantcy over defining the speed of light, c, as fundamental really is the single most significant "game changer" in science. My point is that what he did was not obvious. f=ma and all the other stuff Newton did was "inside the box".

It's not really out of the box since Poincarre has the same ideas before Einstein. Furthermore, it wasn't really a surprising hypothesis after the Michelson-Morley experiment.

 

[ZombieFeynman]

It's not really out of the box since Poincarre has the same ideas before Einstein. Furthermore, it wasn't really a surprising hypothesis after the Michelson-Morley experiment.

Perhaps not surprising, but certainly unpopular. Looking back on the literature of the time, it becomes readily apparent that scientists went to great lengths to avoid getting rid of the aether.

A lesson to be learned for our generation and those ahead of us.

 

[BobG]

To add to this point. Newton really came up with a novel theory. Laws like "Everything that is in motion remains in motion" or "Every person exerts a force on the earth" are extremely counterintuitive. It is obvious now since we learn those laws in kindergarten (so to speak).

Back in the middle ages, Aristotle was the source for good science. His works were almost holy. But Aristotle stated that "everything in motion eventually stops moving". So what Newton did was going directly against Aristotle and 1000's of years of established science!

Newton's first law (conservation of momentum) wasn't all that novel. It was Galileo's Principle of Inertia ("A body moving on a level surface will continue in the same direction at constant speed unless disturbed.") It just got included with Newton's other two laws, since they logically fit together better than learning Galileo's Law of Inertia and Newton's Two Laws of Force.

As to Einstein, there was a lot more to the theory of relativity than just light maintaining a constant speed, no matter how fast of slow the object emitting the light was traveling. It was coming up with laws that were consistent with that fact.

For that matter, Hamilton developing quaternions was as impressive an accomplishment as Newton's Laws of Motion and development of calculus and Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It just didn't have the same impact as Newton's or Einstein's work.

Once you start into which had the greater impact, I think Newton wins.

 

[DiracPool]

Furthermore, it wasn't really a surprising hypothesis after the Michelson-Morley experiment.

OMG, you people, don't you get it? It's not about who developed this or that, it's about who defined this or that. There are so many examples of this. One could argue that lionel pauling was the true discoverer of DNA, but he envisioned a triple helix, not a double. Lorentz had all the hardware required for special relativity but he did not define it as so, and he was too much of a woosey to argue about it, as are most insecure mathematical physicists such as myself.

 

[Sayajin]

I think Einstein was better. I respect them both but what Einstein did is much bigger.
Sure Newton did invent calculus, the laws of motion, law of gravity, reflector telescope etc but what Einstein did is not something that can be observed or visualized so easily.
He had to break the most fundamental concepts ( that time and space are universal and the same for every refenrece frame) which were assumed to be true since the beginning of man. He basicaly had to start from 0 complately ignoring Newtonian physics.
He actualy discovred what is the source of gravity (space-time curvature is not something that you can visualize or see every day) and when he was developing General Relativity he was fighting with some mathematical problem. At this time Hilbert was hunting for the same thing. Einstein got it first. We are talking about one of the greatest mathematicians. Even when he did mistakes he actualy was in the right direction.
His cosmological constant, and quantum entanglement (Einstein, Rosen Podolsky experiment) turned out to be the most misterious things even today. He is the one that pointed this things out and now people 80 years later are actualy making nobel prices by making discoveries about this staff. All the modern cosmology is based on Einstein's GR.I respect them both but in my eyes Einstein will aways be on top.

Just tell me some modern theory that does not use SR or GR( except for some reason Quantum Mechanics does not like gravity).

 

[WannabeNewton]

While everyone is certainly entitled to their opinion on who their favorite physicist is, one can look at popular opinions amongst lay people and conclude that pop science has made a hyperbole out of Einstein. I would be the last person to say General Relativity isn't one of the greatest achievements of any human being but you cannot claim with absoluteness that it is unequivocally THE greatest. All the pillars of physics today were built on the foundation forged by Isaac Newton.

 

[micromass]

While everyone is certainly entitled to their opinion on who their favorite physicist is, one can look at popular opinions amongst lay people and conclude that pop science has made a hyperbole out of Einstein. I would be the last person to say General Relativity isn't one of the greatest achievements of any human being but you cannot claim with absoluteness that it is unequivocally THE greatest. All the pillars of physics today were built on the foundation forged by Isaac Newton.

I agree. Einstein has accomplished something amazing. But I find that he's been hyped by the media. A bit the same way as Stephen Hawking is called the smartest person alive by some.
There are many physicists out there who made remarkable discoveries and paradigms, some of which are on par with Einstein. For example, the physicists who developed QM were pure genius. People like Maxwell are entirely forgotten by the popular media, although their accomplishments are no less than Einstein.

 

[BobG]

People like Maxwell are entirely forgotten by the popular media, although their accomplishments are no less than Einstein.

E=mc^2 isn't quite as intimidating as Maxwell's equations. The general public may not quite be sure what it means, but at least they can remember it.

 

[micromass]

E=mc^2 isn't quite as intimidating as Maxwell's equations. The general public may not quite be sure what it means, but at least they can remember it.

F=ma is even easier

 

[WannabeNewton]

I agree. Einstein has accomplished something amazing. But I find that he's been hyped by the media. A bit the same way as Stephen Hawking is called the smartest person alive by some.
There are many physicists out there who made remarkable discoveries and paradigms, some of which are on par with Einstein. For example, the physicists who developed QM were pure genius. People like Maxwell are entirely forgotten by the popular media, although their accomplishments are no less than Einstein.

Indeed even people like Dirac are not mentioned nearly as much as they should. Dirac was nothing short of a damn super human. You can tell just by the nature of this thread "Einstein vs Newton" that only the two physicists who have been extremely popular in the public eye (Einstein grossly more so than Newton) are being compared and this isn't a rare occurrence: these kind of physicist comparison threads always seem to centralize themselves around Einstein and Newton (whatever happened to Maxwell and Faraday guys? They were brilliant in every way!) and the popular science media painting GR in such a romantic light contributes greatly to very clouded views of not only his theory but also of his involvement in physics. People praise him as the greatest mind in history and his theory as the greatest thing to have been engendered without actually understanding the theory or looking into how the theory was developed historically. Respect is due where it is due but not much more than that.

 

[micromass]

Indeed even people like Dirac are not mentioned nearly as much as they should. Dirac was nothing short of a damn super human. You can tell just by the nature of this thread "Einstein vs Newton" that only the two physicists who have been extremely popular in the public eye (Einstein grossly more so than Newton) are being compared and this isn't a rare occurrence: these kind of physicist comparison threads always seem to centralize themselves around Einstein and Newton (whatever happened to Maxwell and Faraday guys? They were brilliant in every way!) and the popular science media painting GR in such a romantic light contributes greatly to very clouded views of not only his theory but also of his involvement in physics. People praise him as the greatest mind in history and his theory as the greatest thing to have been engendered without actually understanding the theory or looking into how the theory was developed historically. Respect is due where it is due but not much more than that.

Not to talk about people like Gauss who are 10 times more brilliant than Einstein (in my opinion). Without Gauss, there would be no differential geometry and no GR. If there should be a comparison between scientists, then a more correct comparison would be Newton vs Gauss.

 

[micromass]

And what about people like Cantor?? The entire works of Cantor are genius. The guy has been responsible of some of the most elegant mathematics known to man.
Furthermore, he developed his entire theory of mathematics entirely on his own! I have no knowledge of any predecessors of Cantor that he relied on.

What happened after Cantor developed his theory? His was ridiculed by many other mathematicians (although some accepted his work). He eventually got severely depressed. It was only later that people saw value in his work.

Cantor is one of the perfect example of a genius that is not known by many people. Although what he did was much more brilliant than Einstein. And it took a long time for people to understand the brilliance.

Of course, I do agree that Cantor's theories are not applicable to the real world, unlike Einstein. But it's still a magnificent accomplishment that more people should know about.

 

[DiracPool]

Respect is due where it is due but not much more than that.

I beg to differ Newton. It is well understood that Einstein's popularity was a product of an uncertain time in history, and the bridge with Eddington and the the "30 years war" between England-France and Germany to put a kind face on science and cooperation. The thing about Einstein, though, was that he was a celebrity for all the wrong reasons..He was a celebrity because of the strain of the times but he should have been a celebrity because of his physics. The popular culture did not recognize this. It is quite a funny predicament.

 

[DiracPool]

Indeed even people like Dirac are not mentioned nearly as much as they should. Dirac was nothing short of a damn super human.

Yeah but...I'm reading "the strangest man" right now, the biography of Dirac. He wasn't that special, he was a left brain thinker, totally absorbed in the maths and incapable of thinking outside the box as I say like Einstein was. He wrote a piece talking about how students should study pure maths as an approach to to solving the outstanding issues in physics. Not bad advise, but it demonstrates his myopia when it comes to conceptual modeling.

 

[micromass]

Yeah but...I'm reading "the strangest man" right now, the biography of Dirac. He wasn't that special, he was a left brain thinker, totally absorbed in the maths and incapable of thinking outside the box as I say like Einstein was. He wrote a piece talking about how students should study pure maths as an approach to to solving the outstanding issues in physics. Not bad advise, but it demonstrates his myopia when it comes to conceptual modeling.

You keep asserting that Einstein thought outside the box. We have demonstrated multiple times that he didn't and that everything he did was done by others at the time. Apparently your made is already made up.

 

[WannabeNewton]

Well Dirac (hehe) I think that is a matter of opinion. I love pure math and I feel it greatly enhances a physics education. Think about how much more people would understand GR if they knew about the theory behind differentiable manifolds and topological manifolds etc. and if people knew about the functional analysis behind QM. A good example in this forum itself is Fredrik because he is well versed in both the physics and the pure math (shout out to Fredrik =D). You have to define by what you mean by outside the box because again that is a matter of perspective. Cantor's formulations regarding set theory were certainly not regarded as thinking outside of the box by some of his contemporaries who continually vilified him but most people now look at his proofs and praise their beauty. In the end, it all comes down to a matter of opinion because things like thinking outside of the box are hard to define an absolute standard for.

 

[DiracPool]

You keep asserting that Einstein thought outside the box. We have demonstrated multiple times that he didn't and that everything he did was done by others at the time. Apparently your made is already made up.

I'd argue the counter, it seems as though YOUR mind is already made up. Again, the qualifying standard is the consolidation of the concept. An attorney for Bill Gates told him he should slap the name Microsoft as a prefix on everything he did, to consolidate that concept. I don't think you're going to argue with me that Bill took his advise. My point is that it DOES mean something to consolidate your idea into a "package" rather than leave it wafting in some pseudo-conceptual hyperspace. This is what Einstein did.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

You keep asserting that Einstein thought outside the box. We have demonstrated multiple times that he didn't and that everything he did was done by others at the time. Apparently your made is already made up.

We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the “Principle of Relativity”) to the status of a postulate, and also introduce another postulate, which is only apparently irreconcilable with the former, namely, that light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body. These two postulates suffice for the attainment of a simple and consistent theory of the electrodynamics of moving bodies based on Maxwell's theory for stationary bodies. The introduction of a “luminiferous ether” will prove to be superfluous inasmuch as the view here to be developed will not require an “absolutely stationary space” provided with special properties, nor assign a velocity-vector to a point of the empty space in which electromagnetic processes take place.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/
Besides Einstein, who else did this?

 

[DiracPool]

You have to define by what you mean by outside the box

Yes, you're absolutely right. What I mean is that is that Einstein bucked the tradition and invented his own physics, and he paid for it, not long though, but he demonstrated that he wasn't willing to sell out. What does it mean to say that people invented concepts of Einstein before he did? It means nothing. I publish in the field of cognitive neuroscience, there are a billion ideas that move around as they should and everyone feeds off of everyone else's research. Every once in a while someone will collect these common results and musings into a generalized model of something and we have something to get excited about, either because we like it, or we like to hate it. And the discourse goes from there.

So, the point I'm trying to make here is that Lorentz had a good idea but didn't develop it, Reimann had a good idea but didn't develop it, M&M had a good experimental result and didn't develop it, etc. Einstein did, though, he "packaged" these concepts into a general model(s). That is more than luck, it is vision. A masterful vision that trumps Newton and everyone else.

 

[WannabeNewton]

Well the people who developed the ideas deserve credit where it is due. I will agree that unifying gravity with riemannian geometry and tensor calculus was a stroke of genius and to this day it blows my mind how he even came up with the association of the equivalence principle with the locally euclidean property of manifolds. That is definitely worthy of great praise and it is what makes GR such a beautiful physical theory. Still this is a matter of semantics because while he was creative, his contributions cannot be placed on the same pedestal as those of Newton.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

So, the point I'm trying to make here is that Lorentz had a good idea but didn't develop it, Reimann had a good idea but didn't develop it, M&M had a good experimental result and didn't develop it, etc. Einstein did, though, he "packaged" these concepts into a general model(s).

I make a loose association as follows:
Brahe collected the experimental data, Kepler came up with the formulaic expression of the data, Newton explained the physics behind the formulae.
Michaelson and Morley collected the experimental data, Lorentz and Fitzgerald came up with the formulaic expression of the data, Einstein explained the physics behind the formulae.

 

[DiracPool]

his contributions cannot be placed on the same pedestal as those of Newton.

I think the point you're missing is that Newton was a reluctant contributer to physics whereas Einstein was an active contributer. Newton was simply an intelligent man in the presence of swine, and developed a model of the world in course. I said earlier that mathematical physics was a reluctant burdon for Newton, he did revel in it. Einstein, on the same hand, hated the maths too, although he came to appreciate them more whilst developing GR. In any case, Einstein had a purity of focus that Newton semi-had, like Darwin he had to be pursuaded to write his great works. The Principia was motivated by a request to prove Kepler's law's, from what I understand.

 

[Permanence]

I honestly don't even put Einstein in my top 10. If we were arguing who was 'better' I'd go with Newton, but your question is who revolutionized physics. For that reason, I'll be going with Einstein on this one.

 

[Sayajin]

I agree. Einstein has accomplished something amazing. But I find that he's been hyped by the media. A bit the same way as Stephen Hawking is called the smartest person alive by some.
There are many physicists out there who made remarkable discoveries and paradigms, some of which are on par with Einstein. For example, the physicists who developed QM were pure genius. People like Maxwell are entirely forgotten by the popular media, although their accomplishments are no less than Einstein.

The only difference is that QM was developed by many physicist over a large period of time while Einstein did it all by himself.
Yes he used concepts that were invented by other mathematicians but there is no physicist who haven't done that. You can't just start from 0 you have to use the knowledge that has been before you. " If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." even Newton said that. Lorentz infact did got to the Lorentz transofrmations but he didn't even know what they mean. He was thinking about the eather slowing objects and such things. No one at that time expect Einstein knew what was actualy happening. This is only special relativity. Even when mathematician like Hilbert tried to steal Einstein's GR and solve his problem Einstein managed to make it first.

Einstein did all this without performing a single experiment while QM get developed mainly by experimentations and then the scientist tried to fit the data.
Einstein came up with his math first then he was able to actualy predict real experimental data like the orbit of Mercury for example.
Not only he developed the most beautiful theory known by physics which led to the development of modern cosmology but he left the world with so many new things to explore. Black Holes, Quantum Entanglement, Dark Energy, you name it.

If i follow the same logic as some of the other people Maxwell actualy used the work of others too. Michael Faraday actualy was the first to think about electromagnetic fields but he was not good at math. Maxwell took his theories and made a mathematical framework. He would not been able to do this without mathematicians like Gauss.

Most of the people just hate the fact that some scientists are hyped by the popular media.
Whats the point anyway? Most of the people of the general public think that the theory of relativity sums up to E=mc^2 and quantum mechanics is all about E=hv (or even worse some mystic paranormal stuff happening there like shown in some new POP-pseudosci movies).

The fact that someone is hyped by the popular media does not automaticly disproves him in anyway. Newton is pretty hyped too. I am sure that most of the people are more familiar with Newton than Einstein due to the fact that Newtonian's laws of motion is the first thing that school physics referes to.

Developing a theory is not the same as understanding it. Of course Albert Einstein kept pictures of Maxwell, Newton and Faraday on his working desk and Newton was his idol but you know that much often the student surpasses the teacher.

To sum it up Einstein>Newton and the people who say that what Einstein did is not a big acomplishment obviously don't know what they are talking about.

 

[D H]

Einstein did it all by himself.

That's a myth promulgated by popular media. It's not true.

Yes he used concepts that were invented by other mathematicians but there is no physicist who haven't done that. You can't just start from 0 you have to use the knowledge that has been before you.

You can't start from 0 without the concept of 0. You need to thank Brahmagupta for that.

There are lots of physicists who did invent/discover new mathematical concepts. Brahmagupta and algebra. Newton and calculus. Gauss and differential geometry. Lagrange and variational calculus. Hamilton and quaternions. Einstein is not in that select group.

No one at that time expect Einstein knew what was actualy happening. This is only special relativity. Even when mathematician like Hilbert tried to steal Einstein's GR and solve his problem Einstein managed to make it first.

More nonsense. Einstein's contribution to special relativity is important, but there were plenty of others who working on the problem, and Einstein had read several of their writings. With regard to Hilbert trying to steal Einstein's GR, that too is dubious. What isn't dubious is that Einstein *needed* Hilbert's help; Einstein's math abilities were not near as strong as Hilbert's. Without that help, Einstein wouldn't have been able to complete his theory.

 

[FreeMitya]

Not to talk about people like Gauss who are 10 times more brilliant than Einstein (in my opinion). Without Gauss, there would be no differential geometry and no GR. If there should be a comparison between scientists, then a more correct comparison would be Newton vs Gauss.

I wouldn't be surprised if Gauss has been under-appreciated by the general population because he didn't publish much of anything that would be accessible to the average layman. The same could go for many scientists. Einstein wrote myriad articles and essays on a variety of subjects that anybody can comprehend, thus more people can appreciate his intelligence. I have Ideas and Opinions and it's incredibly readable; he was a very good writer.

And hell, look at Michio Kaku: he's no longer a leading physicist in terms of practice (as far as I know), but he's ultra-popular because he writes a lot of accessible books on physics.

 

[DiracPool]

More nonsense. Einstein's contribution to special relativity is important, but there were plenty of others who working on the problem, and Einstein had read several of their writings. With regard to Hilbert trying to steal Einstein's GR, that too is dubious. What isn't dubious is that Einstein *needed* Hilbert's help; Einstein's math abilities were not near as strong as Hilbert's. Without that help, Einstein wouldn't have been able to complete his theory.

You guys are missing the point here, IMO. Not only is it arguable that Hilbert formulated the field equations before Einstein, he is also suspect for ripping off Lorentz and Poincare for special relativity, both of whom published before Einstein. Lorentz by several years and Poincare by a few months. But it is what it is.

My point is that there is something to say for actually crossing the finish line, and more importantly, crossing the finish line first. Lorentz, Planck, and Poincare sat around about 10 yards from the finish line but couldn't see it behind the Nascar mural. Einstein looked around the flyer, and said I'm going for it. Hilbert is only mentioned here because Einstein was stupid enough to show him where the goal line was before he put his shoes on.

BTW, Einstein didn't need Hilbert's help to develop the maths of GR, at that time he had paid "calculating horses" as he called them to help him with his maths, probably math grad students. In fact, there's no evidence that Einstein received any help from Hilbert here. Quite the contrary, Hilbert was trying to scoop Einstein and didn't let on to his trying to beat Einstein to the field equations. Although, again, I think the evidence is there that he actually did beat Einstein to it.

 

[DiracPool]

Gauss has been under-appreciated by the general population because he didn't publish much of anything that would be accessible to the average layman.

Pure mathemeticians are always underappreciated by the public. I mean, differential geometry unfortunately is not as sexy as quantum wormholes and entanglement, although ironically enough they derive from it. Gauss, though, is recognized popularly as the greatest mathematician ever in most texts, popular and otherwise. Unfortunately, you're going to have to look for that, you probably won't see it on the Science channel, just Brian Cox's Austin Powers teeth :)

 

[member 392791]

You are trying to argue something that doesn't have an answer. These are all OPINIONS!