I wonder how scientist feel about Stephen Hawking then? He is the media darling scientist that seems to rival Einstein.
I am very curious, which scientists had as many major papers as Einstein and were they working out of the University enviornment at the time like Einstein did?
Jim
There seems to be something wrong with the Zebra Puzzle as it is formulated at the wikipedia article linked to above. Here’s the link again.
Or else I’m reading something wrong.
[spoiler]Some of the rules seem to lead to a contradiction when taken together. Specifically:
Note that the article clarifies that “right” in rule six means “your right.” In other words, if the ivory house is number 2, then the green house is house 3, and if the ivory house is house 3, then the green house is house 4, and so on.
But what can we derive from the rules I just listed above?
A. The Norweigian is in house number one, by rule 10. (Numbering the houses from my left to my right.)
B. So the blue house is house number 2, by rule 15.
C. This means house number 1 is neither green nor ivory, by rule 6.*
D. Because of B, we also know that house number one is not blue.
E. From A together with rule 2, we know that house number one is not red.
F. From C, D, E, we conclude that house number one is yellow.
G. From F and rule 8, we conclude that the cigarettes smoked in house number 1 are Kools.
H. From rule 12, we know that either the horse is in house 1 and kools in house 2, or else, the horse is in house 5 and kools in house 4.**
I. From H, we can immediately derive that the Kools are in either house 2 or house 4.
J. From G and I, contradiction immediately follows.
So what gives?
*Since the green house is immediately to the right of the ivory one, it follows that house 1 is not green, since house 1 is not to the right of any house. Similarly, it follows that house 1 is not ivory, because the house to the right of house 2 is blue, not green.
**The rule says that the Kools are smoked in “the” house next to the one where the horse is kept. “The” here indicates that there is only one house next to the one where the horse is kept. There are only two houses which have only one house next to them, namely, houses 1 and 5. So the horse is in house 1 or house 5, while the kools are therefore in house 2 or house 4.[/spoiler]
-Kris
Yep. Einstein is one of those “flypaper” figures (Lincoln is another) to whom all sorts of free-floating quotes get attached either in carelessness (“it sounds like something he’s say”) or in an effort to borrow the figure’s credibility.
My post was a hijack. I’ll repost it in GQ. Mods may feel free to delete the post here.
Thanks and sorry!
-FrL-
I understand your point, but sometimes they talk about stuff that isn’t completely ridiculous. And as far as I’m aware, there’s no other national radio show that discusses things that are of a strange nature, things that happen to regular folks, like UFO experiences and such.
This change to the Wikipedia citation was mildly humorous, however, I think you’d have done better to take it outside the quote tags. Since we are pretty strict about indicating that quote tags are inviolable, I would not want anyone misled into thinking that it was OK to mess with them “if it is a joke” since one poster’s humor is another poster’s deadly insult.
Jus’ sayin’.
[ /Moderating ]
I have to disagree with you here. As a graduate student in physics, I can tell you that fields like solid state and particle physics exchange ideas regularly. Another example: particle physics and cosmology have some staggering connections with implications about the nature of the Universe. Mathematical techniques are traded like baseball cards, and so on.
On the broader question of Einstein - yes, he was very smart. But I think he is also somewhat overrated. He was not a lonely patent clerk who created relativity out of thin air. He was a trained physics graduate who had a falling out with his professors, so he then found it difficult to find a job in academia. That’s the only reason he was working in the patent office in the first place. What’s more, he was still reading papers and the like.
His contributions were extraordinary, don’t get me wrong. But he wasn’t superhuman. If he hadn’t done what he did, someone else would have, and we’d be using “Rothman” or “Miller” as a synonym for genius instead of “Einstein.”
I’m an electrical engineer, not a physicist. But it’s my understanding that the special theory of relativity was a great achievement, but would have been discovered within a decade or so by someone. Contradictory things were being observed by others; Einstein explained why.
The general theory of relativity, OTOH, was so far ahead of what others had been doing that had Einstein not come up with it, it might still not have been discovered today.
Einstein possessed a totally unintentional genius for PR that added to his reputation. Witness his explanation to a reporter of how radio waves worked (paraphrased from memory): "You know how the telegraph works? It’s like a cat with a long tail. You pull on it in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles.
“Radio is the same thing, except, there’s no cat”.
I also think Einstein’s discoveries ushered in an era where science became too counter-intuitive for lay people to understand. Newton was at least the equal of Einstein in the depth and breadth of his discoveries, but you could explain to most people what he discovered. This made Einstein the first genius who seemed almost supernatural.
As Mr. Moto said, Einstein had some very naive antipathy on military matters, and was not without some misogyny. But a Jew born in Germany in 1879 would have his reasons for the former, and two bad marriages seem to have resulted in the latter. Even geniuses can be wrong.
Will this do?
Two; relativity (if you lump in SR and GR together) and his explanation of the photoelectric effect which gave a firm theoretical underpinning of Planck’s quantitization of light. (Planck himself just considered it a mathematical convention and didn’t actually believe light could be quantitized.) Einstein actually won the Nobel Prize for the latter.
Not buying it. For one, while even he considered the theory to be Einstein’s, mathematician David Hilbert is actually responsible for working out the mechanics of the so-called Einstein field equations. Many other theorists were working in the same field, and it seems unlikely that someone wouldn’t have come to the same conclusions in short order. With Special Relativity, the case is even more clearcut; Henri Poincaré was working on the same essential theory and published a short precis of his work months before Einstein submitted his first paper on relativity. In a just work, Poincaré would be co-credited with the discovery of Special Relativity; instead, most people probably couldn’t even pronounce his hame assuredly.
I think this is fundamentally it. It’s not so much that Einstein is overrated, but that his image overshadows other scientists who’ve made equal or greater contributions. His jovial public personality, archtypical absent-minded professor behavior, his gift for glib presentation, and alliterative name gave him a one-up over some of his collegues. Frankly, in addition to those previously listed, Bohr, Heisenberg, de Broglie, Dirac, Pauli, von Neumann, Schrödinger, Feynmann, and Gell-Mann should all be recognized as offered more or less equally important (if not as revolutionary in the common consciousness) contributions, and yet the average person will at best recognize only one or two of those names. And there are no doubt many unnamed others who labored and provided invaluable insight, but whose named did not grace a set of equations or fundamental principle and have been forgotten by all but a few graduate students doing their literature readings. It’s a hard field to be noteworthy in.
Stranger