Doesn’t this discussion of who was near to discovering relativity at the time of Einstein really deserve a separate thread?
Hilbert was intrigued with Einstein’s explanation of GR at the lecture and figured he could do the final math that Einstein was working on. The math isn’t the theory, it is the technical language explanation. Hilbert was under no illusion that GR was his idea because he was confident he could finish the math. This would be equivalent to a technical writer writing a user manual for a piece of software he hadn’t thought of or designed. While Einstein was worried that Hilbert might take credit, and I suppose many desperate scientists might try to do so, Hilbert was not that kind of guy. He was trying to help.
The take I got from 1-3 internet cites was that competitiveness was involved, and certainly Hilbert would have received a significant amount of priority credit for prior publication whether or not he himself grasped for it. One can hardly fault AE for wanting to be the one to dot the last i on a theory he had been hard at work on for about eight years, with no significant prioty competition (that I know of) before Hilbert.
OP is concerned with Einstein’s preeminence compared to every figure in recorded history. The question of his preeminence in his own most important life’s work is IMO necessarily relevant to OP.
This reminds me of something my dad overheard years ago. Two people were talking about Albert Einstein, and one of them said, “His name probably wasn’t really ‘Einstein.’ They just called him that because he was smart.”
There’s a logical fallacy there. Einstein was crap at math and had to get other people to help him out.
As for special relativity? Well, he didn’t actually invent it. He basically took Lorenz’s work and repackaged it as ‘Special Relativity’ without adding any value whatsoever other than saying it didn’t need any particular clock - which was a direct outcome of Lorenz’s work anyway.
Lorenz was highly pissed off with Einstein but too much of a gentleman to make a fuss.
The other stuff? He got a Nobel Prize for a paper describing the photoelectric effect with citation “his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect”. Again, he nicked almost all the theory from others, especially Planck.
General Relativity? The jury is still out on that. Einstein’s formulas (worked out with great pain and lots of assistance from real mathematicians) are a reasonable approximation to observed data - and that only relatively recently. For many years experimental error was greater than the predicted effect. There are dozens of other theories of General Relativity, some with very good prospects of being the theory.
How to get labelled as smart? Be a very good self-publicist and nick other people’s work.
Einstein was far better at math than most humans on earth. He was not a world-class mathematician, but that’s hardly the same thing.
Already covered and refuted.
People have been saying that for a hundred years but it never happens. I find that far more meaningful.
And just a nitpick, but Einstein’s work on relativity was related to that of Lorentz. Lorenz was a completely different physicist.
I’ve only just seen this:
In terms of “solving SR”, the maths was all there and mainly due to Lorentz. Poincare for his part had had already taken the maths to a more abstract level by noticing the group properties of the Lorentz transformation.
What Einstein did was to use a starting point that was not similar to ideas previously expressed by Poincare, but taking a more revolutionary view to derive that which had already been derived by Lorentz (it must be noted that Einstein was not aware of Lorentz’s and Poincare’s latest work in 1905 which his work most strongly mirrored).
My point being that the effective theory (as effective theories Lorentz ether theory and SR are equivalent) of SR pre-dates Einstein’s 1905 paper and the different philosophical point of view that Einstein took to re-derive the effective theory had been foreshadowed by Poincare.
Well no: Hilbert was not close to GR , Hilbert presented a few days before Einstein presented the correct form of his field equations, equations of almost identical form. However this is not surprising as Einstein had already framed the problem for Hilbert. Importantly though Hilbert’s equations were presented in a non-covariant framework (covariance is arguably the most important principle in general relativity) which was most definitely not general relativity . In other words in the context of Einstein’s general relativity Hilbert’s equations are the correct equations, however theoretically Hilbert’s work at the time was a blind alley that Einstein had already walked down in 1913 in his search for general relativity which by that time Einstein had finalized anyway.
Fine, go write those books I was talking about, and don’t forget to fully explain why Lorentz and others, many others, more or less immediately elevated Einstein from unknown to a position in the top rank upon perusal of the 1905 papers, definitely including the ones on SR.
No, I take that back, not fine. Your replies are part and parcel of the tendentious dump Einstein movement of the last few decades, a movement at irrational variance with the elite of the theoretical physics world of 1905, which so mysteriously overestimated Einstein’s genius.
Go ahead and write your book, though, and I will be sure to buy a copy of the farty little thing. A used copy.
Where in any of that do you see Asymptotically Fat dumping Einstein? All he’s saying is that one of the three papers of his Miracle Year followed directly from closely related previous work, and that others would likely have gotten there if he hadn’t. Which doesn’t change the fact that Einstein was the one who did get there before those others, nor that he wrote two other profoundly great papers that same year, nor that he went on to develop, very nearly single-handedly, the best theory of gravity we’ve ever had.
Einstein was an amazing physicist nearly beyond compare, but that doesn’t mean that each and every piece of work he ever did was beyond compare.
The whole point of the initial question was I think started by me trying to make the point that some ideas are those whose time has come, and some are those that seem to come before their time. I suggested that SR was an idea whose time had come, and that GR was an idea that came long before its time. Does anyone seriously think that if Einstein had not been born that SR would not have been worked out by 1910? That was my initial point. OTOH, there is good reason to suspect that GR may have waited until vastly later, and may still be being disputed. In another old thread it was noted that the pathfinder GPS satellites in the 1970s were used to explicitly confirm that GR would be needed to correct the results, as there were still residual (somewhat crackpot) voices disputing GR. Had Einstein not lived I would not have been surprised that history would have shown the first big hints would have come from problems in the GPS system. Other results, ie Mercury’s orbit, may well have been languishing with a host of ad-hoc arguments and fiddle factors that no-one really believed, but didn’t care enough about to dig deeper.
The question about how smart Einstein was is not dependant upon the order of discovery. His paper on Brownian motion essentially captured the essence of statistical mechanics, and was an intellectual feat of serious worth. However, it paralleled work by Gibbs, who had spent a huge amount of time, and built on the work of Boltzman. Statistical mechanics to this point would have been identical without Einstein. But does that make his paper any less astounding? No it doesn’t. For someone to have built the entire theory in a couple of years, whilst also working on other major projects is evidence of extraordinary intellect.
Intelligence can be defined in a number of ways, but for the sake of comparisons, we could limit them to quantifiable values. It could be measured as problem solving and learning ability: how quickly someone can absorb, use and make inferences from data / how quickly someone can solve a problem. In my experience, this is generally what IQ measures. Secondly, we could say that intelligence is the quantity of knowledge known. It’s true that having a large knowledge base would help one make more educated decisions, but this is the sort of intelligence that computers can easily beat us at because it doesn’t require any processing, just storage. We could define “intelligence” as the impact that a person makes on society / the number of novel thoughts or ideas they generate. The first two approaches represent the potential for a person to achieve something whereas this looks at their actual achievements. From here, Einstein’s theories become important, but we could additionally compare people like Leonardo da Vinci or Thomas Edison who both pioneered numerous fields in their lifetimes. It might also be best to examine all three areas simultaneously. It’s likely that the second criterion is beneficial to people with the first as they have more resources to work with and the third criterion seems to be the application of the first two. I think any time something of this nature is discussed it is important to explicitly define all terms used and rationalize a system for equal comparison.
Hey, don’t diss my grandfather! (My first grad adviser was one of von Neumann’s students at Princeton.)
I’d vote for Newton myself, since he invented the math he needed to do the physics. But I’d also like to offer Claude Shannon. Shannon was the first to propose the use of relays to implement Boolean logic, which is the origin of all digital electronics today. And he did it for his Masters thesis. Then he invented information theory, and when I took it 20 years later my professor said that work since then was mostly refining Shannon’s proofs. He also was a pioneer in AI, in the form of computer chess, and was quite a juggler.
I pointed out a number of fairly well-known facts about the time, which you have not mentioned and which if we go back was just to correct your assumption that no-one was near discovering relativity. In fact your initial justification for this was your belief that Poincare was not on the verge of discovering the relativity of simultaneity, when in actuality Poincare in 1898 was the first person to note this consequence of Lorentz’s nascent ether theory.
Some theories are simply ripe to be discovered at a particular time, this is obvious when you look at the number of theories that have been discovered in parallel. There is nothing novel about this. Einstein recognized this about special relativity himself.
And no I’m not getting into the continued tedious attempts you’re making into trying to make this about something else in order to deflect away from the mistakes you have made (everyone makes mistakes). Einstein deserves credit for setting everything out into an axiomatic basis which recognized the fundamental nature of the symmetries Lorentz had discovered, but that does not mean there are not others who deserve a large share of the credit for getting to Maxwell’s electromagnetism to this point, not least of all Lorentz and Poincare, and it doesn’t mean there weren’t others who were very close to doing this.
Instead of answering this you have given me the rather bizarre instruction to “go write a book”.
I don’t remember dumping on Einstein and I find it a little ironic you say this when you reference , the almost certainly spurious (and certainly not widely accepted) idea that Einstein “copied off” Hilbert in support of the idea (again not a widely accepted idea) that Hilbert was close to discovering GR.
I am not going to pretend I am always the model of politeness, but “farty” - really?