Chronology | Current Month | Current Thread | Current Date |
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] | [Date Index] [Thread Index] | [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] | [Date Prev] [Date Next] |
Larry Smith wrote:(Nov
What do y'all think of this letter to the editor of Discover Magazine
than2004, 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
use toEinstein's. His work was mostly theoretical and has been of little
Clausius,humanity. I rate Watson and Crick, Newton, Bernoulli, Faraday,
Einstein."and dozens of others as being more important scientists than
tein
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#Eins
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!)