Newton was important, but I think it’s still a bit over-inflated. Leibnitz doesn’t seem to get anywhere near the same amount of love (by the public – math history people adore him), and I think that while you could argue Newton was “more important” it’s not like he was a one of a kind luminary compared to contemporaries like Leibnitz.
I don’t know enough about Max Born to comment, however.
I agree with Stranger that there are a few stand-out, truly revolutionary scientists/mathematcians, Newton among them (Liebnitz was no where nearly as accomplished as Newton in so many fields). I’d put Galileo, Archimedes, Maxwell, and Leonardo Da Vinci in this category easily.
I don’t know if Max Born belongs but he’d be in close contention at the very least.
Hawkings is not among those giants.
It’s Leibniz - no “T”…
Enjoying reading this - as always, Stranger sums things up nicely. I am too much of a layman to add comment of value, but found A Brief History of Time kinda meh at best. Many other Physics for Civilians books I prefer ahead of that one.
Stranger - you mention a few game-changers. What about Niels Bohr? His atomic model was a bold leap, connecting a bunch of thinking and an essential step on the way to many avenues of science. And his approach to atomic power in the face of politics and war was consistent and honorable.
True, but “how good a popular science writer is he?” wasn’t the question asked.
I’d say about 50/50. At a certain point the book’s own popularity gave it a boost and people bought it not because they wanted to read it but because it was popular.
This is an important thing to remember. Hawking is going to be terse. He doesn’t have a choice. Anyone incapable of normal speech or using their hands is going to be sharply limited in speed.
We’ve seen that here with the poster blinkie - intelligent guy, but writes in a very terse manner due to communication limitations.
He gets asked his opinion on all sorts of things, but outside of his field of expertise these opinions tend to be quite half-baked.
…which you can say about most celebrities of course. But it did annoy me when he said philosophy was dead, given that he often engages in (flawed) philosophical arguments himself.
Within his field it can’t be disputed that he has made a substantial contribution.
Maybe not as much of a “game-changer” as Newton was, but Leibniz was pretty damn impressive his own self.
And, yes:
Also, “Hawking,” not “Hawkings.”
I thought it was included in “what do you think of him as a scientist and author?”
Both Gottfried Leibnez and Isaac Newton made multiple, wide-ranging, and fundamental parallel contributions to mathematics (most notably infinitesimal calculus) and “natural philosophy” (e.g. what we now call the physical sciences, including physical mechanics, optics, chemistry, et cetera). However, the two had very different fundamental approaches. Newton was essentially an applied mathematician and physical empiricist, i.e. he was very focused on finding mathematical models and descriptions of physical phenomena, including gravitation, optics, and chemistry. Leibnez, on the other hand, was more of an abstract mathematician and philosophy. Many of Leibnez’s innovations, aside from the notation and tools in calculus, were in areas of discrete mathematics and the ontology of systems of thought and action (which presages computation theory used in modern computers along with machine intelligence and heuristics), whereas Netwon was generally more concerned with describing the behavior of the world as observed. In more prosaic terms, Leibnez was concerned more with the “Why?” and “Who?” of physics and its underlying language (mathematics) whereas Newton cared more about “How?”, “When?”, and “Where?”. Of course, Leibnez also anticipated (in crude form) the essential relativity of the underlying plenum of what we would now term space-time whereas Newton assumed it to be a static and invariant background, but given the crude state of knowledge about the world it is hard to fault or reward either on that basis.
Bohr’s assumption of a quantized model was a leap, but honestly, if he hadn’t made it someone else would have; the groundwork for the stochastic nature and discrete energy levels was already in place due to the work of Ludwig Boltzmann and Max Planck, even though neither of those men fully appreciated or accepted the consequences of their discoveries. This is not to slight Bohr, who shares at least an equal degree of credit for the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (which, despite its incomplete nature, is the only presently fully workable interpretation that doesn’t make unverifiable and speculative claims about the nature of quantum mechanics. And Bohr certainly mentored and promoted many of the physicists who came after him and matured the field. But I don’t think Bohr by himself should be considered a prime mover; if you want to go to that point in QM, it would have to be Boltzmann (for his work on establishing the stochastic approach to thermodynamics and physical mechanics) and Planck (in his stunning, if reluctant, discovery that fundamental interactions happen at discrete energy levels.).
Stranger
All makes sense - thanks!
His newest study does away with event horizons, and in the classic sense, even with black holes. Hawking was black-hole guy.
He may be cool (not for me), but lots of people fawn over his every word like he was inventing the wheel.