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.
I disagree. Most of the modern "stuff" we use every day is due to something called Quantum Mechanics.
From a purely practical, day to day standpoint Newtonian physics is more important than Einstein’s relativistic physics.
Albert Einstein
The Bomb probably saved a million lives that would have been lost during the invasion of Japan. And countless more that might have been lost in conventional battles that never happened during the nuclear stalemate of the Cold War. If you're going to rate these guys on such extraneous grounds, you gotta give the contest to Einstein.
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?"
I've often thought about these things, too. But I have come to the conclusion that when the time is ripe, the discoveries will be made. I think this for Gallileo, Newton and Einstein. Even without these men the discoveries would happen, probably by the combined works of many, but still made. Calculus was invented by Leibnitz and Newton simultaneously. His laws would have become obvious, eventually. Gallileo's works had roots in several other's. Someone would have made these discoveries if they hadn't existed.
Einstein, I think is the greatest, simply because there was incredible pressure and competition 100 years ago. He was the one with the vision to make the leap. Newton and Gallileo worked by themselves and without significant competition.
I also think that Einstein's work, while we see little of it in daily life, will have the greatest impact on the future.
So chalk one up for old Al.
I've read that while special relativity was "in the air," so that someone else would have come up with it, general relativity was so theoretical, and so austere, that it might have taken another century for others to piece together all the clues (which came later) and produce that theory. But I'll leave this to those who know more than I do.
It seems to me there are at least two crowns in contention here: who made the most inherently impressive technical contribution, and who had the the greatest social impact. For the former, I'd have a tough time putting either Maxwell or Gauss behind the current contenders, and for the later, I'd nominate Plato, for inventing the idea that governments should pay certain people to sit around thinking all day, and Roger Bacon, for pushing the idea into a modern context, and selling the snot out of it.
"But I have come to the conclusion that when the time is ripe, the discoveries will be made."
And how do you know the "time was right"? --Because the discoveries were made.
Kind of tautological. (Like survival of the fittest. LOL)
"I've read that while special relativity was "in the air," so that someone else would have come up with it, general relativity was so theoretical, and so austere, that it might have taken another century for others to piece together all the clues (which came later) and produce that theory."
You've got it backwards.
General relativity was Einstein's attempt to "unify" Special Relativity with Newtonian mechanics, especially universal gravitation.
In fact, Special Relativity purposefully and obviously ignored gravity -- so there is nothing surprising about Einstein addressing it in a later effort. If he hadn't somebody else would have tried to.
Special Relativity was far more out of left field. But of course it didn't arise fullblown out of nowhere (cf. Maxwell's equations, etc.).
From a Christian theological perspective, one would say that God quite obviously chose St Paul for this Mission to the Gentiles. Ergo, my statement applies perfectly well from a Christian standpoint: It was St Paul who transformed an obscure Jewish messianic sect into a universal creed because God chose him to do so. From the perspective of the historian, it is irrelevant that God could've just as well chosen someone else or that Jesus would've prevailed in any event, as a Christian would say, because in the actual course of history it was not someone else, it was St Paul.
So, from the historian's perspective and from the theologian's perspective St Paul was the most influential man ever to have lived, because without the influence of St Paul there would be no influence of Jesus Christ, even if in the absence of St Paul someone else would've achieved the Mission to the Gentiles. No one else tried though, according to the New Testament. In fact, they opposed Paul's Mission and wanted to preserve the Jewish law. Had the Jewish law been preserved, Christianity wouldn't even exist, because it would then a priori be merely one Jewish sect among many, all of which were stamped out with the rise of rabbinic Judaism.
True fact: Newton-John is the granddaughter of Nobel-prize winning physicist Max Born, of the Born-Einstein letters fame.
And might I add that the Greco-Roman world rightly regarded circumcision as a perverse barbarity. If nothing else, it was Paul's steadfast rejection of circumcision that made it possible for Christianity to spread amongst the Gentiles. It was not until the Victorians went nuts that circumcision was reinflicted on the Christian world.
But, there was a whole lot of "else" to Paul's mission as well. From a historical standpoint, St Paul is absolutely indispensable to the emergence and triumph of Christendom.
My top ten physicists, in chronological order: Archimedes, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Rutherford, Einstein, Fermi, Heisenberg.
Gibbs is probably the greatest American-born scientist of all time.
(I donno if the threads pulled during the Luddite War are included in that total.}
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