Albert Einstein may have made the discoveries that led to nuclear and solar power, lasers and even a physical description of space and time, but Sir Isaac Newton had a greater impact on science and mankind, according to a poll published Wednesday.
Posted on 11/23/2005 6:04:12 PM PST by PatrickHenry
Newton, the 17th-century English scientist most famous for describing the laws of gravity and motion, beat Einstein in two polls conducted by eminent London-based scientific academy, the Royal Society.
More than 1,300 members of the public and 345 Royal Society scientists were asked separately which famous scientist made a bigger overall contribution to science, given the state of knowledge during his time, and which made a bigger positive contribution to humankind.
Newton was the winner on all counts, though he beat the German-born Einstein by only 0.2 of a percentage point (50.1 percent to 49.9 percent) in the public poll on who made the bigger contribution to mankind.
The margin was greater among scientists: 60.9 percent for Newton and 39.1 percent for Einstein.
The results were announced ahead of the "Einstein vs. Newton" debate, a public lecture at the Royal Society on Wednesday evening.
"Many people would say that comparing Newton and Einstein is like comparing apples and oranges, but what really matters is that people are appreciating the huge amount that both these physicists achieved, and that their impact on the world stretched far beyond the laboratory and the equation," said Royal Society president Lord Peter May.
Pro-Newton scientists argue he led the transition from an era of superstition and dogma to the modern scientific method.
His greatest work, the "Principia Mathematica", showed that gravity was a universal force that applied to all objects in the universe, finally ruling out the belief that the laws of motion were different for objects on Earth and in the heavens.
Einstein's supporters point out that his celebrated theory of relativity disproved Newton's beliefs on space and time and led to theories about the creation of the universe, black holes and parallel universes.
He also proved mathematically that atoms exist and that light is made of particles called photons, setting the theoretical foundations for nuclear bombs and solar power.
Exactly! Mathematics can be very closely related to philosophy. Liebnitz was also a philosopher. I'll bet they were all very colorful characters!
I got hooked the day we looked at limit theorems to describe infinity.
Correct :)
The concept of infinitesimal and infinitely large values had of course been around (Archimedes is the best example) but not the idea of ratios of such quantities limiting to a fixed quantity - which is the essence of calculus. Also the method of fluxions wasn't a group effort. Newton by in large developed and kept it to himself. That was the problem!
You're kidding, right?
Well Turing didn't stick around long but the guy did well while he was here. His problem was that he was distracted in a rather different direction. Too bad.
Just because we don't live in a vacuum doesn't mean we can't think about it. Ah, but using Newton's Laws, we CAN live for some time in space or on the moon in a vacuum and we can have astronauts drop the feather and a hammer on the moon and do that experiment. And we can use TV cameras incorporating Einstein's work to beam it back to us on earth using an extrapolation of Hertz's discoveries. And we can videotape it and watch it over and over. In fact, here is a link to it:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/image/featherdrop_sound.mov"
Would Aristotle deny this could happen?
And, of course, we can jump out of planes and drop bricks. I recall a news item about two skydivers playing catch with a pumpkin that was lighter than they were. One of them missed. It went through the roof of some poor guy's house long before those heavier guys reached the ground. Would Aristotle deny this coulc happen?
"Newton related his ideas to Leibnitz in letters. Leibnitz developed the ideas, and published, but neglected to give Newton proper credit. That was the source of the conflict."
You're wrong. The claim is that Leibnitz may have seen some of Newton's unpublished manuscripts -- that while not spelling out calculus, would have given direction, hints.
Leibnitz admitted he had seen some of N's MS. And recently, IIRC, one of N's MS was found amongst L's possessions. But that still doesn't prove Leibnitz plagiarized. There was not enough in the MS for it to be plagiarism.
Leib published his calculus 20 years before Newton's came out (in the Optiks). It's hard to believe L got it all out of some MS that wasn't even on that subject, but at best suggestive of the subject.
No, it's far more likely that it was in the air--the zeitgeist. A lot of other people had been and still were working on the same stuff at the same time. These things happen.
Jesus Christ without any doubt has by far the most influence in history of mankind. No one before Him had and no one after Him would have an impact that will even come close to His. Even history itself is divided before and after Him: History before Christ (BC) and History after Christ (AD, Anno Domni, year of the Lord), this is power beyond belief, power that no other person would ever have.
Actually, on second thought, St Paul should be first, since it's quite likely no one today would've ever heard of Muhammad, Newton, or Jesus were it not for St Paul. Maybe they'd be footnotes in some obscure text.
Yes and no. When Aristolte developed concepts of matter, energy, form, space etc he was approaching things from very different perspective. He meant subtly different things that Newton or Einstein meant by same words. Actually these words themselves often were badly translated from Greek into late Latin.
And he was the giant on whose shoulders later scientists stood. And in many disciplines!
OK, I missed your post #77. Except for air resistance (which is very minor) they both fall at the same rate. (Grade school physics experiment. Drop a penny and a ball from the roof of the school.)
OK, I missed your post #77. Except for air resistance (which is very minor) they both fall at the same rate. (Grade school physics experiment. Drop a penny and a ball from the roof of the school.)
You can say that again...
and again
and again ;~D
Truth be told, even to the point of being a fruitcake about it. By modern Christian standards, Newton would most likely be considered a cultist.
More recently, Kurt Godel, one of the greatest logicians of all time, was also a religious believer.
Yeah, so?
The notion that religious belief necessarily cramps the intellect,
...is a straw man. That's not the argument that is made.
that atheism is essential to thinking clearly and accurately,
...is a claim that I've never seen anyone actually make. Perhaps you should deal with people's actual arguments.
is a modern superstition and conceit.
So is the belief that faith is somehow a great enhancer of scientific ability or a special boon to the acquisition of scientific knowledge. On average, it seems to me to be rather a wash.
Taking the current subject for example: If anything, Newton's obsession with fringe religious research (and alchemy, but that's another subject) wasted valuable intellect and time that would have been far more profitably spent doing further work in mathematics or science.
How many discoveries were lost to mankind, or delayed by decades or centuries, because Newton spent a significant fraction of his life noodling around with Revelations (producing nothing of vaule) instead of doing more productive research?
One must assume that the Berlin Academy of Science wasn't included in the poll.
This is my favorite book on the subject - every chapter has a backround story then a proof of a "great theorom" with the idea that you have to understand the math to get the history - in addition to be so well written it gets the math just right I think for just a layperson or someone with more of a backround -
www.amazon.com/gp/product/014014739X/002-2754988-0717616?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance
If you're at all interested and need someting to read it this is great book.
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