What If Newton and Einstein Were Alive Today?

[zoobyshoe]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but if it hadn't been Newton or Einstein, it would have been someone else.

Probably not. It was 2000 years between Aristotle and Newton during which time there was nothing preventing anyone from seeing and explicating what we know as Newton's Three Laws of motion. Why didn't, for instance, Archimedes arrive at the equivalent of these? Newton's 3 laws can be read, understood, and accepted by any reasonably bright person in a few minutes, so they seem trivial and even obvious, but that is deceptive: failure to arrive at this way of analyzing motion lingered, literally, for millenia, with only parts of it cropping up rarely here and there.

Has modern education really generated huge numbers of people making such massive cognitive leaps all over the place that we just don't know about because their field is too narrow and specialized to get public attention? It's obvious there are more educated people, and it can be argued that people aren't getting any dumber, but are people actually getting smarter, such that there are considerable numbers of Newtons and Einsteins today? I don't think so. What we have are far greater numbers of educated people each contributing much smaller insights to the pool.

 

[Werg22]

What bubble? I am not saying that I am Einstein or Newton!
Again all I am saying is that there is no way you can prove that people like Einstein and Newton exist today. Also bear in mind these two didn't have the best education, as say compared to most of their peers.
I have heard arguments that Special Relativity would have been discovered quite soon, even if Einstein had not come up with it. But General Relativity was at least several decades ahead of its time. I agree that education has made people "smarter" in some sense, but the fact that a large number of physicists exist today does not convince me that even a few of them may be as good as Einstein or Newton. There is no way to know.

Yes I am aware that the statement is not a logically necessary one, if this is the only point you're advancing. Neither is the statement that today's athletes are better than those who lived three and half century ago.

Probably not. It was 2000 years between Aristotle and Newton during which time there was nothing preventing anyone from seeing and explicating what we know as Newton's Three Laws of motion. Why didn't, for instance, Archimedes arrive at the equivalent of these? Newton's 3 laws can be read, understood, and accepted by any reasonably bright person in a few minutes, so they seem trivial and even obvious, but that is deceptive: failure to arrive at this way of analyzing motion lingered, literally, for millenia, with only parts of it cropping up rarely here and there.

Has modern education really generated huge numbers of people making such massive cognitive leaps all over the place that we just don't know about because their field is too narrow and specialized to get public attention? It's obvious there are more educated people, and it can be argued that people aren't getting any dumber, but are people actually getting smarter, such that there are considerable numbers of Newtons and Einsteins today? I don't think so. What we have are far greater numbers of educated people each contributing much smaller insights to the pool.

Newton is a product of his time, as Aristotle was. Had it not been for the likes of Copernicus, Descartes, Galileo and Kepler who came before him, Newton would not have been able to state his laws of motion or gravity. This is why there aren't many Western scholars in the domain of science that we remember from, say, the Middle Ages; those were times where people like these were unlikely to live. Putting it like you did is absurd; Newton stood on a higher mountain than did those who lived before him by as little as a century.

 

[DaveC426913]

The fact that you have no interest in a particular field of study does not make it nonsense.

True in principle, but what is "Bible code"?

 

[tribdog]

If Einstein were alive today he'd still be getting nowhere on his Theory of Everything.

 

[CRGreathouse]

If Einstein were alive today he'd still be getting nowhere on his Theory of Everything.

If Newton were still alive today he'd still be working on charting Hell based on its biblical descriptions.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Newton is a product of his time, as Aristotle was. Had it not been for the likes of Copernicus, Descartes, Galileo and Kepler who came before him, Newton would not have been able to state his laws of motion or gravity. This is why there aren't many Western scholars in the domain of science that we remember from, say, the Middle Ages; those were times where people like these were unlikely to live. Putting it like you did is absurd; Newton stood on a higher mountain than did those who lived before him by as little as a century.

No. Newton, et al, are remarkable to the extent they refused to be products of their time and thought independently of the people around them. They changed the religio-mystical downward trend started by Aristotle that lead to the middle ages: they changed their times.

 

[Pyrrhus]

Newton, a physicist?, you mean alchemist..

 

[WhoWee]

If Einstein were alive today he'd still be getting nowhere on his Theory of Everything.

Can you prove that?

 

[Werg22]

No. Newton, et al, are remarkable to the extent they refused to be products of their time and thought independently of the people around them. They changed the religio-mystical downward trend started by Aristotle that lead to the middle ages: they changed their times.

The shift away from the middle ages is due to more than a few men of science appearing at the right time. You are inverting cause and effect. Factors such as the recapture of Spain, the introduction in Europe of Indo-Arab numerals, the invention of the printing press, and so forth are what pushed Europe away from the middle ages. It's the circumstances created by those events that brought us "Newton et al", not so much the other way around. Newton is very much a factor of his time: he devoted much of his time to alchemy and obscure studies of the Bible. As shown by Leibniz's independent discovery of the calculus some twenty years after Newton, Newton's results came in a time that was propitious to their discovery. Poincaré was very close to Einstein's results, which we now know as special relativity, when the latter published his 1905 paper.

 

[zoobyshoe]

The shift away from the middle ages is due to more than a few men of science appearing at the right time. You are inverting cause and effect. Factors such as the recapture of Spain, the introduction in Europe of Indo-Arab numerals, the invention of the printing press, and so forth are what pushed Europe away from the middle ages. It's the circumstances created by those events that brought us "Newton et al", not so much the other way around. Newton is very much a factor of his time: he devoted much of his time to alchemy and obscure studies of the Bible. As shown by Leibniz's independent discovery of the calculus some twenty years after Newton, Newton's results came in a time that was propitious to their discovery. Poincaré was very close to Einstein's results, which we now know as special relativity, when the latter published his 1905 paper.

In all cases you mention the "circumstances" were created by the actions of men. Men create the times. "Circumstances" do not just happen, unless you're talking about floods and climate changes. People either accept circumstances and adapt to them, or they take circumstances and change them. When circumstances change it's because of the actions of prominent people. Sometimes it's a little nudge, sometimes it's great, startling revolution.

Newton's pursuit of alchemy and Bible Numerology, unfortunate as they are to us, does nothing to invalidate Principia Mathematica. He stands apart from his times, and the 2000 years preceding it, for his physics.

 

[Hurkyl]

True in principle, but what is "Bible code"?

(To my knowledge) a field of study only recently settled by a clever application of modern statistics.

 

[Pinu7]

If ANYONE can live a century or more after their natural time(and keep sanity), I believe they could be making great strides in Physics.

Man, if only I could live 200 years.

 

[tribdog]

Can you prove that?

Can I prove that? hmmm what do you think?

 

[WhoWee]

Can I prove that? hmmm what do you think?

I think it's easy to sit here decades after Einstein has passed and discredit his work. How many of today's best could work without a computer?

 

[Werg22]

In all cases you mention the "circumstances" were created by the actions of men. Men create the times. "Circumstances" do not just happen, unless you're talking about floods and climate changes. People either accept circumstances and adapt to them, or they take circumstances and change them. When circumstances change it's because of the actions of prominent people. Sometimes it's a little nudge, sometimes it's great, startling revolution.

Newton's pursuit of alchemy and Bible Numerology, unfortunate as they are to us, does nothing to invalidate Principia Mathematica. He stands apart from his times, and the 2000 years preceding it, for his physics.

Of course the circumstances are created by men. The argument, I will remind you, is on whether Newton and Einstein were irreplaceable - to which I answer no, because it appears clear to me that they both lived in times propitious to their discoveries, this being evidenced by the work of their respective contemporaries.