And he’s an anti-Plutite too.
If you are ever stuck in a stalled elevator with Neil deGrasse Tyson you will have an over whelming urge to chew your own leg off to get out of the trap. Don’t do it.
All you end up with is your own leg chewed off and you are still stuck in an elevator with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
There’s an argument for “overrated” to be applied to groundbreaking scientists who subsequently tarred their reputations by descending into pseudoscience, quackery and/or racism.
Nobel Prize winners who fell victim to arrogance and pontificating on subjects outside their areas of expertise (plus in one instance reportedly dropping way too much acid) are described as suffering from Nobel Disease.
Victims of this ailment have included William Shockley, Luc Montagnier and Kary Mullis.
Yes he was a brilliant scientist, but he was no Einstein or newton. Though popular culture wants to place him in that caliber. He was great but overrated.
Loved him as Bones.
Teller was somewhat unhinged, for sure. One good outcome of his “nuclear engineering” ideas was that his plan to excavate harbors on the Alaska coast using nuclear bombs led to the very first environmental impact study.
From the early Age of Science:
(1) Copernicus is over-rated IMO. Heliocentrism was very important, but would have developed without Copernicus anyway. And Copernicus (a) didn’t guess that orbits were ellipses — instead he posited a complicated epicycle system similar to Ptolemy’s, (b) didn’t guess that the stars were themselves suns, an insight which led to the Doctrine of Uniformity and the idea of natural laws. Copernicus may be very important but I doubt he belongs near the very top where many place him.
(2) I was aware that Galileo made several mistakes (e.g. his explanation for tides) but thought the huge number of his contributions made him one of the very greatest anyway. I’ll read the transcripts linked from http://intellectualmathematics.com with interest. Recently I read that Galileo was supposedly first to figure out the actual experiment Archimedes planned when he allegedly ran naked shouting Eureka! I also thought Galileo espoused the Doctrine of Uniformity but Googling just now I find
Is this correct? I thought Galileo (and Giordano Bruno!) were credited with that understanding.
(3) Simon Stevin may be under-rated. He lived a generation before Galileo, and not only made some of the same discoveries as Galileo did, but made several discoveries Galileo did not.
(4) Another scientist who is under-rated is … Albert Einstein! He’s most famous just for Relativity and is often portrayed as almost opposing quantum theory, but in fact Einstein was a key discoverer of quantum theory!
Somewhere I read that Newton, if he did use the phrase, was making a dig at one of his fellow scientists who was of short stature. Boyle, I think.
Yeah. How many have heard of Alan Guth, the guy who came up with cosmic inflation? He deserves about as much fame as Hawking, yet most people have never heard of him. I’ll nominate him for the most underrated scientist.
Tyson has Mike Brown as a scapegoat for that.
Well, he wasn’t talking about the Jets, that’s for damn sure.
Actually, considering the huge number of researchers (most of whom remain anonymous), I think that anyone who has been recognized probably deserves it, and that there ar a lot more people who deserve credit who aren’t getting it.
The closest to “over rated” I can think of might be Alexander Fleming, discoverer of Penicillin. He undoubtedly DID discover penicillin, the first antibiotic, and published his results. But his paper was largely ignored, and he found that cultivating Penicillium, the mold responsible for the antibiotic, was difficult, and in the 1930s he pretty much abandoned his work on it. It remained for Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain, both at the Radcliffe Infirmary at Oxford, to persevere and find a way to mass-produce it, just in time for it to be useful in WWII. Again, though, I think this is not so much a case of Fleming being over-rated as of Florey and Chain being under-rated to the point of being virtually forgotten.
I seem to remember an ad for GE or some other company, which made the claim that Edison’s greatest invention was the research laboratory. This may be a bit of hype, but I can see it.
I wonder if we’ll ever have another Einstein or Newton? From my layperson persepective, it seems that the big questions these days require a collaborative effort.
Carl Sagan’s fame as popularizer and talk show guest probably caused the general public to over estimate his actual scientific contributions. (I loved Sagan, BTW)
My uncle says that if the government hadn’t confiscated all of Tesla’s notes and destroyed his work after he died, we would have flying cars and wireless electricity everywhere and death rays by now
Something we have discussed at Straight Dope was the Higg’s Boson. Yet it turns out:
Yet very few here would recognize any of these names except Higgs.
For popular recognition it is important that a law or object or whatever be named after you. Not only popular recognition but also in the scientific community for anything more than very recent decades–most scientists spend little time studying the history of their scientific field.
I don’t believe this is correct. Einstein discovered phenomena which other scientists (primarily Niels Bohr) then explained by developing quantum theory. But Einstein himself did not accept quantum theory and spend a long time seeking an alternative explanation for the phenomena.
Tesla died in 1943 - when the United States was in the middle of World War II. Can your uncle explain why the American government would choose to destroy plans for this new technology instead of using it to fight the war?
Hard to answer that, but if you look at work published by famous contemporary theoretical physicists like Witten, some of it is in collaboration with others, and some of it is solo work. It’s not like anyone is making a single effort rather than having many irons in the fire, and it’s not like you have to choose once and for all whether to leave your office door open.
In an appendix to his book on the subject of inflation, Guth makes an outstandingly asinine mathematical claim (that Newton was wrong). Basically, that you can extrapolate from properties of finite spheres (which are topologically compact to infinite space (which isn’t). Since then I have never quite trusted him.
Sagan is not quite overrated since I don’t think he was ever highly rated as a scientist. Yes, he was well known, but so was Asimov and no one ever thought his repute was science based.
One curious case is that of Linus Pauling. Maybe it is the Nobel disease, but he was a top chemist–until he discovered vitamin C and then went off the deep end.
My favorite candidate for overrated is James Watson. From their subsequent careers, I feel that Crick was a far better scientist.
Then there is Roger Penrose. Fine physicist and all. But in one of his books he makes an absurd claim that human brains can solve a certain logical problem (having to do with the halting problem) that no machine could. His argument is absurd. And he continues to deny that he is wrong.
But maybe we should only judge the best of a person’s career and ignore everything stupid they do.
Hedy Lamarr.
Although both of their names appeared on the frequency-hopping spread-spectrum communication patent, it’s pretty clear that her husband George Antheil did all of the heavy lifting. The invention even used punched paper tape just like the player pianos that he had synchronized with other instruments years earlier.