Einstein vs Newton

[jake-the-peg]

The Royal Society have a little vote going on as to who the greatest scientist was Einstein vs Newton

http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=3848

Not to sway anybody of course - but are you kidding!? Newton's work was unbelievable when you consider what was there before hand.

OK he acted like a spoilt teenager all his life but nobodies perfect!

Or am I wrong?

[Loosehead]

I think you're probably right Jake, after all Newtonian physics explaines 99.9% of observable phenomena. That's taking nothing away from Einstiein who really added to Newton's work.

[CT]

Jams Clark Maxwell. Where is he in this vote? A total unknown compared to the other two.

[fo3nix]

or Paul Dirac. Or Richard Feynman.

But yes, Newton wins this round.

[jake-the-peg]

Now Gallileo vs Newton is a fight.

Gallileo was starting from a much lower baseline in established scientific though and (almost) had the guts to stand up to the church to say it.

OK he didn't invent the telescope but he made a version that was usable. Sunspots, craters on the moon imagine being the first human to see Saturn's rings!. Pendulums and canon-balls falling at the same speed as pebbles - they must have thought he was mad with that one.

JCM 's a fine candidate CT but I think you have to ask if these people had not lived how long would it have been before the world caught up an I have to say with some of the people who were about at the tail end of the nineteenth century I don't think he'd have been missed long

[Gef]

Sounds like the scientific version of pop idol - pointless! As jake implies if Mr. X did not make the discovery then in time Mr.Y would have done. However, I agree with CT, James Clark Maxwell's work was incredible. Isaac Asimov considered him to be the best - enough said.

[einsteinsdog]

Have to say imho James Clerk Maxwell is way up with Einstein et al . In fact Einstein it could be said interpreted Maxwells equations to get his special relativity. The reason is Maxwells equations show the speed of light to be a constant .At the time no one could understand it until Einstein. In fact if the speed of light is a constant then space must be distorted .It was obvious from Maxwell but for over 30 years no one had the vision to state the obvious. The fact that Maxwells equations have remained in their original form is testament to his genius

[fo3nix]

Einstein didn't understand _why_ the speed of light is constant, he just agreed that it is, and hence you get all your weird SR effects like time dilation. still, no-one really knows _why_ c is constant.

then you could also say that Einstein used the mathematical tools of Riemann, or Lorentz. all sorts of things like that. and Maxwell took other people's work (Faraday, Gauss, etc.) and just made them nice and incorporated them into one single theory. Still a bit of a genius, but I think its important to stress that no one man can be attributed to the discovery of any one thing. Its a process over time, with several people making jumps.

Dirac is also high up there too; his work on quantum mechanics is the only stuff that made Einstein consider QM seriously (despite the fact he helped partially to discover it, with his photoelectric effect).

[trundler]

There's no real comparison between Newton and Einstein. Newton was a genuine experimenter whereas Einstein was a theorist. We know that Newton's conclusions are correct because we can test them but, until someone builds an engine that can drive a vehicle up to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, Einstein's work is just conjecture. Even the infamous 'bent light' experiment could have plenty of other explanations that don't involve Einstein being right.

Cue screams of rage from all and sundry.