Re: importance of Einstein

[John Denker <jsd@AV8N.COM>]

Larry Smith wrote:
> What do y'all think of this letter to the editor of Discover Magazine (Nov
> 2004, page 8) by Calvin Neill in response to a special Einstein issue
> (September):
>
> "I can think of dozens of scientists whose work was more important than
> Einstein's.  His work was mostly theoretical and has been of little use to
> humanity.  I rate Watson and Crick, Newton, Bernoulli, Faraday, Clausius,
> and dozens of others as being more important scientists than Einstein."

1) This is fundamentally a silly debate.  Scientific achievement,
like many things, is multi-dimensional ... and therefore cannot be
ranked on a one-dimensional scale.  The "flower-pressing theorem"
says you cannot have a mapping from one dimensionality to another
that is one-to-one and continuous.

2) When Newton submitted a solution anonymously, Bernoulli recognized
it immediately /tanquam ex ungue leonem/ -- "as the lion is known by
its claw".  Much of Einstein's work was of a similar caliber: only
Einstein could have done it, as his colleagues well knew (although
like Newton, he too stood on the shoulders of giants).  In contrast,
I hesitate to put Watson & Crick in the same category.  I think
Rosalind Franklin would have hesitated, too.

I mention that because along the dimension of "impact on humanity",
only DNA is in the same catetory as E=mc^2, i.e. giving humanity the
capacity to annihilate itself ... something that Newton, Bernoulli,
Faraday, Maxwell and other first-rate geniuses never approached.

====================

Overall, I'm not in a big rush to rank any of these characters as
being vastly more important the others ... or vastly less.

=======================================

In any case, on any reasonable scale, 1905 was a Wunderjahre, and
we would do well to celebrate the centennial.  Some valuable
resources are starting to appear.  I recently stumbled accross
this site:
http://home.tiscali.nl/physis/HistoricPaper/Historic%20Papers.html#Einstein

which contains the original papers (and in most cases English
translations).  A couple of years ago not everyone had easy
access to these documents.  Read them and decide for yourself
on their importance.  (IMHO they're important enough!)