Tony Erikson Posted August 3, 2011 Share Posted August 3, 2011 I remember once discussing with a friend the cleverness of Einstein and my friend came out with the line that if Einstein hadn't come up with his theories then eventually someone else would have. We never discussed what time frame so I guess for the point of this thread we would say within 50 years. Was my friend right? Is genius sort of inevitable? Not just Einstein either. Are there examples of a theory or something we know that no other person would have figured out? Is it just a case of necessity is the mother of invention/ideas? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
*_ash_* Posted August 3, 2011 Share Posted August 3, 2011 Was my friend right? Is genius sort of inevitable? Not just Einstein either. Are there examples of a theory or something we know that no other person would have figured out? Is it just a case of necessity is the mother of invention/ideas? Probably not, since most theories aren't just plucked out of thin air - they are continuing work of others, creating new theories from this, and working on proving or disproving theories of the time. I don't think there is much difference with Einstein. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Smithster Posted August 3, 2011 Share Posted August 3, 2011 Well, the term 'relative theory' was first used by Max Planck some years before Einstein published his first 'Theory of Relativity', and there were other quantum physicists working at the time, such as Niels Bohr, who had equally ground-breaking ideas about the nature of the universe. Fast forward a few years to Stephen Hawking. Now it could be argued that he was only able to produce his own theories based on the previous work of others, such as Einstein, and this is very common throughout the history of science - new theorists come forward and expand on the ideas of their predecessors. But I imagine it is likely that he could well have come up with the ideas that Einstein did, had he not already done so I believe it was Edgar Cayce who put forward the notion of a subconscious 'idea land' (though I could well be wrong) - the premise that once one person has dreamed up an idea, it then becomes much more likely that another person can arrive at the same idea completely independently, anywhere else in the world. Personally I would say yes. If Einstein hadn't pioneered physics in the way that he did, somebody else would have come along and produced the same theories eventually. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HeadingNorth Posted August 3, 2011 Share Posted August 3, 2011 Asimov posited that if Einstein hadn't come up with the Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, someone else almost certainly would have within a very few years because the time was ripe. Michelson and Morley's experiments didn't make sense without assuming that the speed of light was a fixed constant regardless of whether you were moving relative to the light source. The General Theory, including gravity into the mix, he considered quite different. Writing in the early 80s, he said that if Einstein hadn't come up with it we may well have still been waiting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tony Erikson Posted August 3, 2011 Author Share Posted August 3, 2011 Great posts. So are we saying that things are simply a product of our time? I guess in reality we can't even attempt to understand something until we have discovered it. I suppose that would be the true genius, something completely unique which perhaps leads to a discovery. The general theory and gravity bit seems to fit with that. I don't know the most about physics but the gravity part seems so out there. Yes of course I know he didn't discover it but it just seems to have allowed so much more understanding of the workings of the "Big" Universe. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
*_ash_* Posted August 3, 2011 Share Posted August 3, 2011 Great posts. So are we saying that things are simply a product of our time? ... a product of our knowledge at the time - and building on that by disproving the theories of others, and creating more theories until they can't be disproved (which isn't necessarily the same as proving something). I guess in reality we can't even attempt to understand something until we have discovered it. I suppose that would be the true genius, something completely unique which perhaps leads to a discovery. hmm. Not sure about that. Complications occur with that statement - i.e things like 'Gods' create an exception. No one has discovered god, yet many people claim to understand it. The general theory and gravity bit seems to fit with that. I don't know the most about physics but the gravity part seems so out there. Yes of course I know he didn't discover it but it just seems to have allowed so much more understanding of the workings of the "Big" Universe. I wonder if we survive and live for another 2000 years [and keep up with current research], whether they will look at our knowledge today about the universe and consider it primitive. My guess would be yes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andyofborg Posted August 3, 2011 Share Posted August 3, 2011 Great posts. So are we saying that things are simply a product of our time? I guess in reality we can't even attempt to understand something until we have discovered it. I suppose that would be the true genius, something completely unique which perhaps leads to a discovery. The general theory and gravity bit seems to fit with that. I don't know the most about physics but the gravity part seems so out there. Yes of course I know he didn't discover it but it just seems to have allowed so much more understanding of the workings of the "Big" Universe. the great theories are products of their time, they require a set of observations which can't be explained by the current theory and someone to make the intellectual leap and produce a new theory which explains all the observations. the turn of the last century must have been an awesome time to be a scientist, what we teach kids as basic science in school today was new and unexplained to these people. for all its brilliance, einstein's theories of relativity aren't compatible with quantum theory, attempts to unify the two gives us string theory and its associates and the lhc at cern and the real exciting times will come when it doesn't find the higgs boson Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andyofborg Posted August 3, 2011 Share Posted August 3, 2011 On god - i think most religions say something along the lines of "we can't know the mind of god" so tony is right even if you apply it to gods. but striving to know it, forces us to understand his/her/its/their creation which, perhaps, is the intention..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
*_ash_* Posted August 3, 2011 Share Posted August 3, 2011 On god - i think most religions say something along the lines of "we can't know the mind of god" so tony is right even if you apply it to gods. But auto, did that come from one great theorist? - or did that become the work of people who were using the same concept; using current knowledge [at the time] - and using 'proving' and 'disproving' until no one could question it? And that creates the answer to why there is so much religious diversity in the world? (even within particular religions) - because no one HAS discovered god. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
barleycorn Posted August 4, 2011 Share Posted August 4, 2011 Scientists all stand on the shoulders of those who came before them. New theories arise because they are a better explanation for the observations of the old ones. For example Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity owes its origins to the works of many scientists going as far back as 1632 and Galilean Invariance, Newtonian physics, Lorentz transformations which Einstein used to describe space time, Maxwell, Henri Poincare and many others. jb Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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