My inclination is to adhere to Einstein’s famous quote: Genius is 1% inspiration and 99$ perspiration.
Thus, I’d go with Darwin.
True, the great concept attributed to him was scooped by Wallace and the great phrase attributed to him was actually stated by an overtly racist Sociologist (Spencer) and it certainly seems “obvious” in hindsight. However, he did get out there in the field and do the work – I can even imagine him perspiring in the afternoon sun on a Galapagos island while sketching a tortoise.
One problem nobody else has mentioned is that Einstein’s concepts are fully accepted and voluntarily used by a majority of the modern population – anyone who uses a GPS is leveraging principles of general and special relativity – comparing atomic clocks on earth against those on satellites (or cell phone towers, depending on your carrier and – well, don’t get me started on a Verizon rant…). In contrast, the concept of Evolution is actively rejected by a lot of modern people (but let’s not derail this thread to debate Creationism).
And a part of me has a lot of faith in the power of math. [Ironically, that’s probably the same part of me that is unable to grasp and utilize it.]
Einstein’s work seems (to me, at least) to be the successful culminations of brilliant mathematical explorations. As long as one comprehends the language of math (algebra, calculus, etc.) one can eventually get to Energy is the product of mass accelerated to the speed of light. In contrast, Darwin’s work seems (to me, at least) to be the result of a lot of abstract ideas – geological drift, heredity, predation – that don’t seem quantifiable and therefore don’t seem quite so easy to wrap the brain around [“grok”?] or, for that matter, explain to the world. In fact, even with several clear and concise explanations, there is still a substantial portion of the world that still refuses to believe it.
–G!
There are times
When All the World’s asleep
The questions run so deep
for such a simple mind
…–Davies & Hodgson (Supertramp)
…The Logical Song
…Breakfast in America
Most of the people who posted on this site seem to be aware of Einstein in connection with special relativity. That was brilliant, as was his work on brownian motion and the photoelectric effect. Brilliant but someone else would have come up with then sooner or later, probably sooner. Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction was close, although it seems to have been thought of as a computation device rather than reflecting reality. On the other hand, general relativity was an extraordinary insight and I will conjecture that without Einstein it might have eluded discovery even today. Well, maybe not, GPS satelites would drift by 8 miles a day if general relativity were not taken into account in their design.
Darwin’s contribution is harder to characterize. Evolution had been in the air a long time. Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather was a firm believer and it was a widespread idea. What was missing was a mechanism. Variation and selection were Darwin’s answer and it was brilliant. But Wallace had come to the same conclusion and the idea was inevitable. A lot of people were opposed–and still are–on religious grounds and even Darwin was reluctant to make his ideas public. Wallace forced his hand.
But I believe that Einstein was an order of magnitude above Darwin.
His publishers should be shot. (They didnt want anyone of his wonderful books as they were “hard to classify” and “BH: *The Master Li books were a tightrope act and hard to write, but not, alas, very remunerative. Still, I would have continued as originally planned if I’d had a supportive publisher: seven novels ending with my heroes’ deaths in the battle with the Great White Serpent, and their elevation to the Great River of Stars as minor deities guaranteed to cause the August Personage of Jade almost as much trouble as the Stone Monkey. Unfortunately I had St. Martins, which didn’t even bother to send a postcard when I won the World Fantasy Award; Ballantine, which was dandy until my powerhouse editor dropped dead and her successors forgot my existence; and Doubleday, which released The Story of the Stone three months before the pub date, guaranteeing that not one copy would still be on the shelves when reviews came out, published the hardcover and the paperback of Eight Skilled Gentlemen simultaneously, and then informed me they would bring out further volumes in paperback only, meriting, of course, a considerably reduced advance.”
*
I think someone mentioned it, at least obliquely, but I don’t see how that figures in the argument of who was the greater scientific genius.
Wow do I see that differently.
Einstein’s first 3 papers were remarkable because of their lack of math, first of all. Secondly, it’s not that “Energy is the product of mass accelerated to the speed of light” (squared, I presume you meant to add). It’s that those aren’t just number games. His insight that all this ‘stuff’ physicists were noting weren’t just parlor tricks - they were reality. Energy is not just numerically equivalent to a simple formula involving mass - it *really *converts. We don’t need local clocks as a fudge around ‘absolute, real time’ - absolute time is bs. It doesn’t exist. Same with lengths, of course, and everything else he said was relative.
I also think that heredity is quantifiable and grokkable (even before the genetic mechanism was understood).
Darwin shook the world in a way that even Einstein didn’t. But he sat on it for decades because he feared the shaking and only finally published when Wallace was about to scoop him. He really did amazing work, and the legwork to prove it. Biology today stands on the shoulders of Darwin and Mendel.
Einstein came up with so many revolutionary ideas, that he has to be the choice here. Relativity is Big Al’s baby, and no one else was going to come up with the ideas and proposed proofs in the first part of the 20th century. General relativity is anything but obvious. And Einstein had about 20 other world changing ideas.
Einstein was the supreme physicist, and would be even if his famous Special Theory were ignored. He was the key early pioneer of quantum theory, drawing conclusions from Planck’s work no one else dared to. Believe it or not, there were still hold-outs from the atomic theory as recently as 1905, finally convinced by Einstein’s paper on Brownian motion. The General Theory of Relativity was a supreme creation.