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ZepTepi
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If both Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein are still alive today, imagine the world we will be living in and the impact on all theories of physics! Can you imagine what the world will be like with them still around?
It's difficult to guess how they would have performed in different circumstances.ZepTepi said:Can you imagine what the world will be like with them still around?
I think you probably worded that wrong...HallsofIvy said:I'm reminded of what a historian said when asked, "What if Stonewall Jackson had been at Gettysburg":
"He'd have smelled really bad, because he'd have been dead for two months!"[edited by Russ]
It's "would have".Raizy said:the oil company would of assassinated him.
waht said:Newton wrote more on religion than on science...
It was Tesla/Westinghouse vs. Edison.russ_watters said:Unlikely since nothing Tesla did would have had any direct impact on the oil companies. You're falling for a crackpot legend that defames a man who really was a great scientist.
That said, his feud with Edison/Westinghouse was a big issue at the time...
zoobyshoe said:Was this published? I've never heard about this.
Oops.zoobyshoe said:It was Tesla/Westinghouse vs. Edison.
No, I mean did Newton ever publish Principia Religiosa, or some such work?waht said:“Newton’s religious writings constitute more than half of his entire written work” (2004, 430:819)
Brumfiel, Geoff (2004), “Newton’s Religious Screeds Get Online Airing,” Nature, 430:819, August 19.
The fact that you have no interest in a particular field of study does not make it nonsense.waht said:Newton wrote more on religion than on science, and later in life turned to deciphering bible code. If he were alive today would have written volumes of nonsense.
zoobyshoe said:No, I mean did Newton ever publish Principia Religiosa, or some such work?
Someone should alert Dan Brown.waht said:I'm not sure how much of his religious work he published, he wasn't a famous theologian. But he did manage to predict the end of the world in 2066
http://www.christianpost.com/Education/General/2007/06/papers-show-isaac-Newton-s-religious-side-predict-date-of-apocalypse-19/index.html
Or are you saying the current geniuses make Newton and Einstein look like drops in the ocean, or do you mean the opposite?Werg22 said:What a silly thread. The likes of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein still exist. Today's scientific scene is much richer and wider however, making the contributions of those people seem like drops in the ocean.
zoobyshoe said:Or are you saying the current geniuses make Newton and Einstein look like drops in the ocean, or do you mean the opposite?
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
rootX said:I don't think there's any distinction between "current geniuses" and "Newton and Einstein". Both had excellent contributions but there wouldn't have been any change in science without their existence. Newton himself said:
So, there would have been no change at all if they existed now. They would have been living lives like all other dedicated researchers.
arunbg said:Me neither.
Which also seems to imply that the human race is getting smarter(comparing people with the two greatest physicists before the 21st century)!
This is exactly my point of view too. I was just being sarcastic in the part you quoted.No, but physics is getting more and more complicated and today it would be impossible to be active in as many different areas as e.g. Newton was. It has nothing to do with intelligence, there just wouldn't be enough time.
Simply because the field of physics has grown significantly, does not validate comparisons of today's physicists with Einstein and Newton. We can never know unless we could resurrect the two of them in their prime today and see what they do with modern technology.The likes of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein still exist. Today's scientific scene is much richer and wider however, making the contributions of those people seem like drops in the ocean.
arunbg said:This is exactly my point of view too. I was just being sarcastic in the part you quoted.Simply because the field of physics has grown significantly, does not validate comparisons of today's physicists with Einstein and Newton. We can never know unless we could resurrect the two of them in their prime today and see what they do with modern technology.
What bubble? I am not saying that I am Einstein or Newton!Sorry to burst your bubble, but if it hadn't been Newton or Einstein, it would have been someone else. They aren't gods. It's common sense that with the advent of better and more widespread education that people like those two are even more common today than in their time. People aren't getting any dumber, and the far larger number of physicists today make the last claim almost certain.
Probably not. It was 2000 years between Aristotle and Newton during which time there was nothing preventing anyone from seeing and explicating what we know as Newton's Three Laws of motion. Why didn't, for instance, Archimedes arrive at the equivalent of these? Newton's 3 laws can be read, understood, and accepted by any reasonably bright person in a few minutes, so they seem trivial and even obvious, but that is deceptive: failure to arrive at this way of analyzing motion lingered, literally, for millenia, with only parts of it cropping up rarely here and there.Werg22 said:Sorry to burst your bubble, but if it hadn't been Newton or Einstein, it would have been someone else.
arunbg said:What bubble? I am not saying that I am Einstein or Newton!
Again all I am saying is that there is no way you can prove that people like Einstein and Newton exist today. Also bear in mind these two didn't have the best education, as say compared to most of their peers.
I have heard arguments that Special Relativity would have been discovered quite soon, even if Einstein had not come up with it. But General Relativity was at least several decades ahead of its time. I agree that education has made people "smarter" in some sense, but the fact that a large number of physicists exist today does not convince me that even a few of them may be as good as Einstein or Newton. There is no way to know.
zoobyshoe said:Probably not. It was 2000 years between Aristotle and Newton during which time there was nothing preventing anyone from seeing and explicating what we know as Newton's Three Laws of motion. Why didn't, for instance, Archimedes arrive at the equivalent of these? Newton's 3 laws can be read, understood, and accepted by any reasonably bright person in a few minutes, so they seem trivial and even obvious, but that is deceptive: failure to arrive at this way of analyzing motion lingered, literally, for millenia, with only parts of it cropping up rarely here and there.
Has modern education really generated huge numbers of people making such massive cognitive leaps all over the place that we just don't know about because their field is too narrow and specialized to get public attention? It's obvious there are more educated people, and it can be argued that people aren't getting any dumber, but are people actually getting smarter, such that there are considerable numbers of Newtons and Einsteins today? I don't think so. What we have are far greater numbers of educated people each contributing much smaller insights to the pool.
True in principle, but what is "Bible code"?Hurkyl said:The fact that you have no interest in a particular field of study does not make it nonsense.
tribdog said:If Einstein were alive today he'd still be getting nowhere on his Theory of Everything.