No. Math was more his thing.
I read Wolfenstien vs. Shakespear. I want to play it now.
Awesome question.
One consideration is that Shakespeare wrote in English, which doesn’t represent the whole of mankind whereas Einstein wrote in math, which explains universal truths. However, Shakespeare wrote in English of universal truths, so maybe it’s a draw there.
I agree that the stuff that Einstein wrote about would have eventually been discovered. The stuff that Shakespeare wrote about would never have been expressed in the same way. Edge to Shakey.
While Shakespeare wrote beautifully, he didn’t create entire new categories of literature or thought. Einstein changed the way people looked at the universe. Edge to Steiny.
I think this one goes to the scorecards with Einstein winning a split decision based on the universality (literally!) of his ideas.
Einstein’s achievements in 1905 alone surpassed Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. And General Relativity in 1915 was just as remarkable and far, far more difficult than all the 1905 stuff put together.
Einstein by a long margin. And Shakespeare is still my favorite writer, which is to me more important.
Einstein. Let me clarify one thing. Special relativity was in the air and would have been discovered (had been discovered, just not with a full explanation yet) shortly. By several people likely. General relativity, on the other hand, was absolutely original. I suppose it might have been discovered by now, but even that is not obvious.
Shakespeare was an extraordinary genius, no question. But of necessity limited in both time and space. To have written in English gave him a leg up in the English-speaking world. But speakers of other languages cannot really read him. And modern speakers of English find it often difficult and getting harder all the time. If there were a Shakespeare of some obscure language in Central Asia or South America, would we even know it? We can compare Einstein with every physicist in the world. We cannot do that with Shakespeare.
Why should Einstein get credit for writing in a universal language? Would Shakespeare be more of a genius if wrote in Esperanto? Was Mozart then a greater genius than both of them?
I’m not actually picking a side. I don’t think there’s a simple way to compare these two greatly disparate skills being practiced at such a high level by these men.
zombie or no
both zombie Einstein and zombie Shakespeare were in
Treehouse of Horror III
on the Simpsons, Homer killed them both again.
i’m going with Einstein, he worked on a refrigerator.
Einstein and his ilk are the only ones capable of getting us off this godforsaken ball of mud. Without that, writers will be nothing when the sun goes dwarf on us.
According to the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not that I had as a kid, Shakespeare predicted nuclear power:
+1 Shakey.
So here’s my new theory. Using his relativity knowledge, Einstein successfully built a time machine. He decided to retire back in the 16th century, and try his hand at writing some plays under a pseudonym…
I just don’t have any proof that Shakespeare was a genius. can tell he’s a good writer by his work, but not that he is actually at the genius level. Genius would involve giving him an objective and watching him do it. An artistic genius is someone who can achieve nearly any results in their medium.
Einstein, on the other hand, definitely got there from what he did. His goal was to understand how light works, and he succeeded. He showed a deliberate path from A to B, and shows an ability to quickly understand something in his field.
Oh, and although I don’t think it’s fair to judge someone’s genius on their legacy, we’re definitely well past the Shakespearean age. If all of Shakespeare’s plays were to vanish off the earth, enough of his legacy would have been improved upon in other works that modern literature, theater, and filmmaking would not be any different. Einstein’s stuff, in contrast, is still directly being used.
I have no idea what you’re trying to say with the statement I bolded. I’m assuming, from your Einstein example, that you don’t believe Shakespeare invested his work with depth deliberately? Or what?
Because the process by which Shakespeare invented his works is fundamentally identical to the way Einstein worked, in that he had an idea and he worked toward its conclusion. All artists start with objectives. They’re not different from scientists in that way.
The notion that art is soft or amorphous, or that artists don’t approach things deliberately, is completely removed from the truth. Artists don’t write and paint without a method or technique, hoping the result is something that approximates their intention. They approach it carefully and deliberately and thoughtfully.
Just because Shakespeare’s methods are invisible to you doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.
There’s no such thing as a “Shakespearean age,” and if there was, we wouldn’t be past it. Maybe you meant an Elizabethan age? If that’s the case, then granted, that ended awhile ago.
And you’ll have to point out where Shakespeare’s “legacy” has been improved upon in modern literature, theater, and filmmaking.
Well, let’s wait four hundred years and see where we’re at, shall we?
It’s times like this that I wish Harry Hillwas better known in the US.
Nonetheless I’m reluctantly going with Shakespeare. If Einstein had not existed, others would have eventually recreated his work. But Shakespeare, with both his vocabulary and his stories, has had such a profound effect on our culture that without his oeuvre the world (certainly the English-speaking world and to a lesser extent the rest of it) would be a significantly different place.
(This pains me as a Scientist.)
One of the things I focus on as to how great is X’s Big Idea is “How much longer would it have taken if X had not done it?” I.e., if it was a year from probably someone else thinking of it, it’s a small act of genius, 20 years then it’s a major act of genius, etc.
E.g., Bell and Gray both filed on the same day. The telephone was something that was just plain going to happen at that time. Not a major achievement.
For Einstein, Special Relativity was actually quite close to being thought of by others. I don’t see anything he did that wasn’t even 20 years from being thought of by someone else. (He did have an impressive volume of early work, though.)
Shakespeare, OTOH, well … he was just so ahead of his time that it’s still astonishing.
So, Shakespeare in a blowout.
It’s like you have never seen or read one of his plays or a movie of them, or don’t believe that a writer can be “at the genius level”. There are a lot of very talented genius writers throughout history who are not even in Shakespeare’s league. Geniuses like Nabakov and Conrad are a B leaguers compared to The Bard. Marlowe was a genius and maybe fit to bring Will drinks and be talked of as a lesser playwright in comparison. Oh, and I voted for Einstein.