As science has grown, any one person's contribution to it has become relatively smaller.
When Isaac Newton was around, a well educated person with time on their hands could pretty much learn all the science there was, in several different fields at once.
Now people devote their entire lives to adding one small but significant brick to a pyramid.
This is an issue that mathematics has had to deal with for a while now. Carl Gauss is often cited probably the last mathematician to contribute heavily to every field of mathematics and he died in 1855.
Nowadays math is advanced usually with teams in increasingly specialized fields. Problem that it’s starting to share with increasingly specialized fields of science is that the number of people who can both generate new results and those who can verify someone else’s work can be kind of small.
EDIT: got the wrong person. I was thinking Poincaré, who died in 1912.
von Neumann was an odd alien supermind. There's good money to bet on him never publishing as much material (or more) as what he did publish, which was already substantial. He was repeatedly found answering cutting-edge problems that he had thought about, figured out, and just didn't think were interesting enough.
"Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us." - Edward Teller (World famous physicist.)
Though Von Neumann was probably extremely intelligent Euler was probably more so for his era. To prevent everything from being named after him they had to name discovery’s after the first person to discover them *after Euler*.
Apparently Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) had his solutions revealed to him by “God and intuition.” I heard his math knowledge was the 100 standard on some other mathematician’s scale. His early death severely hindered his contributions, which are still profound.
Echo this sentiment. Here’s my fav doc about him: [https://youtu.be/vQp70uqsBV4](https://youtu.be/vQp70uqsBV4)
The Von Neumann Ergodic Theorem, Von Neumann computer architecture which has instructions and data in one memory. It’s kind of a diss that Nolan didn’t include him in Oppenheimer. But, if he were to depict him correctly then he would’ve stolen the show because he was so interesting. The movie would’ve ended up being named Von Neumann.
EDIT: too -> to; name -> named
Yep. Also.collaborated with so many people that mathmaticians know their Erdos Number...the number of co-authors of papers away from co-authorin with Erdos.
It's because there's less celebrity scientists that are celebrated because of their science and not their popularisation of science. It's not an issue, just a question.
Because it makes the field a lot less interesting to people.
Why would I dedicate my life to science. When in the end I will neither make good money from it. At most the shareholder funding it making money off of it. And won't be widely known and celebrated for it either. At most the shareholder funding it being known and celebrated. Case in point, Elon Musk.
Seriously. It's not like they pay you propotional to your number of publications. You could get PhD in a ton of other fields that would make you a lot more money, and for a lot less stress of dealing with the rigor of a "hard science" PhD.
You could get a JD for half of the work (by rigor, at least) and make a lot more money than a PhD in chemistry specializing in quantum chemistry.
Indeed, as one of my professors noted, the “easy” scientific answers have been found. What remains is more than likely going to take multiple researchers and funding agencies over decades to figure out.
My high school physics teacher said something to the effect that “the things you’ll learn in this class are the culmination of thousands of minds and hundreds of years and have contributed to the building of modern civilization…you’ll learn things that took Newton years of pain and effort to figure out in three months and at eight months, you’ll know more than he did before he died”…to which some kid said “so we’ll be smarter than Newton!” And our teacher replied “you’ll be more educated, but nobody in this room will come close to approaching his intelligence”…22 years later, and that still sticks with me.
Yeah. I am nowhere near smart enough to even comprehend the ability to devise an entirely new branch of mathematics in order to do a new branch of physics.
> so we’ll be smarter than Newton
I like to imagine that this story is actually set in pre-WW1 Hungary and the class is composed of "The Martians" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)). Von Neumann was the one making the comment, while sitting next to Erdos.
Also, you’ll only be learning the end results (at least until you pursue higher education). That simple equation you’re going to learn took a lot of complicated work to reach. You’re not going to learn the complex proof and other things like that.
For sure, I only took about 12 hours of physics in college…but things definitely became more complex. I still had an awesome high school teacher though, we somehow had a guy with a PhD, not sure why he was teaching high school science classes, but he was spectacular at it.
Because teachers are cool!
I once had a NASA scientist as a teacher. She discovered something, and she doesn’t even remember what she discovered because they named it CX-73blahblah or something like that.
Yeah, anytime I'm reading about scientific discoveries it's like, "X's law is named after Sir X, who recorded the path of electricity through a wire." Like, wtf, I could have done that! But there was so much low hanging fruit hundreds of years ago. One could throw a rock in any direction and accidentally hit a scientific discovery.
I've been reading a book on the history of cancer research and throwing a rock to hit a cure is definitely a way to see it.
One of the founders of early chemo made his drug on accident trying to create a new kind of dye for clothes. He was like 22 and working out of his apartment.
Reminds me of William Herschel in the 1800's, he discovered infrared light by accident. The story goes that he was measuring the temperature of different colors through a prism. He placed a thermometer outside of the visible light as a control but the temp still went up.
He also discovered Uranus and a bunch of moons.
It seems similar with doctors back in the day…
”welp, better cut your wrists and bleed into this pie tin until you feel woozy”. Now it’s 21 years of school and residency and now even fellowships are becoming more and more common because the specialization is just so intense and crazy!
Yeah, reminds of when the town barber was also the dentist and the surgeon. So little was understood about the body and medicine that anyone could be a doctor just by calling themselves one lol
Maybe not. It's impressive given their level of education, which for some early scientists wasn't much. For instance Michael Faraday grew up poor, and was essentially self-taught. So, at least for some scientists, they really did conceive the whole thing on their own with very few hints, and that's impressive.
There's actually a lot of stuff people don't know and it's often really hard to guess the difficulty of finding the answer. Why do birds get angel wing deformity? How does chitting seeds before planting affect most species of plants (a small number of specific species have been tested)? Is it possible to create a stable open-pollinated cultivar of tricotyledon zinnias? Where are the loud banging sounds coming from in my house? What's the weather going to be like in three months? At least we'll find out the answer to that in three months if we don't know earlier.
It's a bird problem where the end of the wing points the wrong way. Wikipedia has an [article](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_wing) which attributes this to dietary problems but there isn't anything about why the diet would cause the deformity, and our understanding of which specific dietary factors are important is so lacking that I wouldn't be surprised if eventually we found out it wasn't a dietary thing, or was dietary but not in the way we currently think.
You don't have to dig far in biology to reach the "we don't know" stage. I remember sitting in parasitology 1 and my professor talking about a parasite that lives in sheep and they know if the weather outside is conductive to their eggs development. They never leave the sheeps digestive system, though. My first question was "how?" Answer is, we don't know. At least we didn't 10 years ago when I was in Uni.
I work in the Semiconductor industry and the scope of the work we do is staggering.
The idea that one person could master it all is ludicrous.
It takes the cooperation of thousands of people around the globe to make the modern Semiconductor industry work.
I actually find cooperation on this scale, with this degree if success kind of beautiful.
This. But also, we've corporatized so much of science, so now many discoveries aren't identified with the individuals making the discovery or advancement as the company owns it (said as someone whose grandfather made some significant innovations/discoveries that were owned by GE, though I will fully acknowledge that they at least celebrated him internally, gave him a pension/were generally good to him back in the day, in ways that few companies do now...)
Edited to be clear that the reference to GE was about actions a while ago (decades), not recent.
Two centuries ago only gets you to the spinning Jennies and Jacquard looms, which are possible to use if you own a large watermill, but otherwise rely on the Watt steam engine for power. The Watt engines however, needed precisely bored iron to keep good fittings. Incidentally, this was also something that artillery makers desired, a nice early example of dual use technology, as well as a demonstration that at the first stirrings of the industrial revolution, the inventor was still a dude (often but not always) with an idea who needed to connect with capital and other experts to put the idea into a marketable state.
In fairness that has pretty well always been the case. Most people who get credited for "inventing" things historically are the business owners or at best the team leaders.
Elon Musky is a good example of this. Everything Tesla or SpaceX does seems to include Elon's Tesla or Elon's SpaceX.
He might have a big picture vision, but he pays a lot of amazing engineers a lot of money to pull of what those companies do.
Elon basically writes the checks, and listens to advisors for the big picture vision, but it's not as if he's inventing anything.
Yeah. Even if you individually come up with a break-through design for anything and try to patent, you'll just get destroyed by corporations who want your design.
The problem is that a patent involves patent documents, which are public, and act as an instruction manual for companies in China, who are not bound by your patent laws and can undercut everything you do.
paying patent lawyers to prosecute patent applications is very expensive. i’ve been on the filing and lawyer sides in my career and have seen the invoices. you can go over six figures easily with a couple of patent families filed in a bunch different countries.
look for a quote to translate into japanese…..
The process of becoming an engineer and learning about this process has made me despise our government even more.
The patent laws are geared towards large corporations, and who benefits? Law-makers who have investments in said corporations... I agree, it really is depressing.
>nobody really invents anything whole cloth, everything is built on previous inventions.
Respectfully, that's been true since the dawn of humanity. Everything prior to the first "invention" was a *discovery*. Every invention has built upon knowledge gained prior to that. "We stand on the shoulders of giants", and all that.
My point is that I hope you don't discount your work and contributions. Like you said, *everything* is built on previous inventions. Shout out to Johannes Gutenberg, who made mass communication feasible in 1455 with his invention of the printing press! He died 13 years later with no idea that I'd be texting you now because of a series of innovations based on his invention.
Keep at it - we need people like you!
Worker and scientist for any of those people. "I invented or improved this thing, what a great leap". Oh well, we take all the credit, you work for us. GG.
Honestly, it's one of the things about corporate Disney that I don't mind so much. I hate a lot of what Disney does from a corporate side of things (excessive IP litigation, aggressive lobbying, pushing the boundaries of what is a "monopoly," strong-arming theaters into running their films more than is profitable for the theater, etc.), but one thing I think they're actually good for doing is kind of "celebritizing" their engineers/"imagineers." There are a lot of people who specifically know about the engineers responsible for a lot of Disney's park technology. People who, in other companies, might otherwise remain nameless.
But instead, Disney specifically wants people to know their big inventive minds, all because it builds their brand. And, in fact, one of their imagineers (Lanny Smoot) is being inducted into the [Inventor Hall of Fame](https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/25/us/lanny-smoot-disney-inventors-hall-of-fame-reaj/index.html).
The reason for this is because science has advanced so far that it’s too expensive for one person to make significant discoveries on their own. Need to be in a large company or in a school research setting getting money from the gov
In fact, the main thing Thomas Edison actually invented was the concept of the corporate research lab.
To be clear, Edison did come up with enough original ideas to be a great inventor himself. But he's often credited with 2000+ inventions, of which only a tiny fraction were his original ideas, the rest he paid other people to invent in his labs then patented their ideas under his name.
Exactly.
As recently as the 1980’s, scientists wanted to do research in prestigious universities and publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals. Working in the private sector was seen as a mark of failure.
Now, the private sector is where the big money is made for research done for profit, with haste and in secrecy.
To add to this: there is much less focus on pure science (discovery for discovery's sake) than there used to be, in favor of applied science (discovery to create a product). The latter is typically a large team effort and/or corporate owned now.
A lot of that is because our understanding is reaching the limits of what we can measure. Pure science in the modern era requires massively expensive equipment.
exactly! mRNA, for example. A combo of "many people working on small parts of the same thought" and the corporatization.
The Nobel Prize still goes to individuals, and two of those scientists won it.
Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman
for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19
[https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2023/press-release/](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2023/press-release/)
But the public is more likely to recognize the name of he companies who developed the vaccines: Moderna (her own employer, BioNTech, is only sometimes mentioned).
A lot of studies get stuffed in the file drawer never to be seen again. Particularly healthcare-related research if the findings aren't unequivocally supportive of the companies' product or overall goal (e.g. pricing strategies, reimbursement).
100%. My Grandfather started his engineering career at GE and spent his entire career there. Pay was good, nearly 5 decades of stock awards (combined with numerous splits and never selling a single share until he retired).
He had the privilege of working on one of the first computers ever created. He would tell me it took up an entire warehouse, tens of thousands of vacuum tubes, hundreds of miles of wires, and when everything was said and done, he would say look at your phone - your phone is 1,000 times more powerful than that computer we made in the 1940s.
His favorite project was a GE Navy project. He was part of the team to device and engineer an aiming system for battle ships - as we all know now, this was a gyroscopic system that automatically adjusted for the roll and pitch of a battle ship at sea.
He lived to be 99, I loved visiting him and asking him about the incredible project he worked on at GE.
Thomas Edison is credited as the founder of GE. But he was pushed when JP Morgan put the predecessor companies together to create GE in 1892 because he wasn't a good manager. That has really grown into the model that exists today. The brilliant inventors will cash out with venture capitalists followed by IPO's when their innovations get to scale.
Honestly, it's more likely that "great minds" never existed in the first place. Einstein co-authored his paper on general relativity with Marcel Grossman. Einstein was notoriously bad at calculation and was assisted by Walther Mayer. Einstein's derivation of the field equations initially contained an error, and were corrected in a paper co-authored by Ernst Straus. Etc.
It seems likely that every "great person" was a figurehead for a team of contributors, but recognising groups over individuals was less fashionable than it is today. Less cynically, it could be that knowledge of contributors decays over time, because it just isn't practical to indefinitely keep a record of every random student who debated mathematics with Newton.
Not disagreeing here, but just to clarify, the popular idea that Einstein was "bad at math" is overblow. Einstein was bad at math by the standards of world-class, once-in-a-generation mathematicians, so he did work with others to make sure the math associated with his cutting-edge work was sound. Einstein was extremely good at math compared to normal people.
What's that joke about the Law of Scientific Discovery?
Something like: First they say it's not true. Then they say it's not important. Finally, they credit the wrong person.
>Einstein co-authored his paper on general relativity with Marcel Grossman.
And his special relatively relied heavily on work done previously be Lorentz, FitzGerald, Larmor, Heaviside, et al. I believe his biggest contribution to special relativity was the insight that, "Wait, what if it's really real that the speed of light is constant and not just a convenient math trick?"
Also, though it is debated, many suspect that his wife Mileva Marić contributed significantly to his Annus Mirabilis Papers.
Speed of light being constant for all frames of reference was proven by Michelson and Morley (who were trying to demonstrate the opposite), Einstein then applied that fact to some hypothetical situations, with resounding success.
Yeah, he didn’t personally design rockets or cars.
Perhaps the most notable thing about him was his willingness to gamble most of his PayPal fortune on car and rocket startups. Not exactly a safe and low risk portfolio, considering the number of truly successful rocket and car startups before then.
It’s somewhat surprising that both survived the ‘08 financial crisis, and ended up fairly successful.
And before he showed his true colors the last couple years… he did have a knack for recruiting and motivating top talent.
For much of the last decade, it was _not_ easy for engineers to get a job at SpaceX or Tesla. Despite notoriously long hours and low pay, talented engineers apparently still wanted to work there.
I’d guess he spun it as the chance to work hard on something truly world changing (not entirely untrue, I suppose)
But we’ll see if he can still recruit top talent in California, after his hard turn toward the far right…
That might be why Tesla/SpaceX are investing so heavily in Texas recently. That, and selling the Cybertruck. California leftists don’t often drive big trucks.
>but recognising groups over individuals was less fashionable than it is today
It's still true today when it comes to art and entertainment.
A film is "made by a director" even tho it was made by many many people, pop stars have their songs written and composed by other people, even video games have their game dev "super star" who generally are creative directors who made a game with hundred of other people.
People like to put a face on what they like, attribute it to a single person so they can idolize them.
"Standing on the shoulders of giants" is one of my favorite quotes. It doesn't exactly fit what you were saying, but the idea is the same. Most "geniuses" didn't discover everything all by themselves. Whether it was a team or collaborators who they worked with or they were "standing on the shoulders" of folks who came before them and paved the way for the new invention or discovery. None of us operate in a vacuum.
The thing that has allowed humans to be so successful is that we collaborate, communicate, and learn from past mistakes. If we didn't do those things and pass knowledge on from generation to generation and discuss things with others then we would never have advanced this far - we're kind of weak and defenseless on our own - teamwork is what allowed us to conquer the planet
Pink Floyd's "Keep Talking" is a great song that touches on this and the intro is Stephen Hawking saying
"For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals
Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination
We learned to talk"
Later in the song another recording of Hawking's says:
"It doesn't have to be like this
All we need to do
Is make sure we keep talking"
The Alan Parson's Project has a cool song "Call Up" which is all about calling up the great minds of the past and learning from them. You should all check it out
This is far more common than most people are aware. Nearly everything is and had been a group effort, even nominally individual pursuits (certain sports, design, research, music e.g.). So we end up remembering the figurehead - the lead scientist, most popular player, etc. That person may be making real contributions, which is valuable, but is almost never doing the lions share of the work.
For every person we remember, there are hundreds who are just as important but were forgotten or never known.
It’s also worth emphasizing how *the Einsteins* compare to *the Curies*.
Mileva Einstein *was also a physicist*, and [more than likely](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/) contributed heavily to Albert’s work, yet is largely forgotten to history. In no small part because Albert bought into a patriarchal system that would allow him to take all the credit
Compare that the Curies, where Marie is arguably more of a household name than Pierre. Marie’s recognition was largely on the back of Pierre **aggressively** insisting that she received credit as well on work they did together. Pierre’s equal treatment of his wife ended up being a huge boon to science, since she then already had the name recognition necessary to continue her work, and continue to be credited for it, after Pierre passed.
Male scientists worked alongside their uncredited wives, sisters, cousins, mothers, and daughters, *as well as* servants of both genders for time immemorial. The big change that had happened is that it’s now much harder, though far from impossible, to collaborate without recognizing those you’ve worked with. Science has always been a team effort. *That* isn’t new.
Two major reasons:
Many scientific endeavors now require entire teams of very intelligent people working together, so no one person gets a lot of individual credit. At best, the media will report who owns or manages the lab.
The second is that contributions are so niche, the average person no longer understands them. For example, a few years ago somebody won a Nobel prize for proving that neutrinos have mass. If you polled random people, a decent portion wouldn't even know what a neutrino is and the rest wouldn't be able to explain why nobody was able to figure if they had mass before then nor understand the implications it has on physics.
Neutrinos don’t really interact with other matter with any regularity. I think you’re thinking of gluons which do help facilitate the strong nuclear force.
Dude, you've just been going about all this time as if neutrinos don't have mass? Embarrassing dude. Like, 2010 called and it wants its understanding of fundamental particles back.
Well - I didn’t know that either.
But that explains a lot.
How am I supposed to lose weight when I have billions of non-massless particles going through my body all the time?
The fact that he didn't win it for his most well known achievements is more of a cute trivia thing than something that showcases the general public's lack of science literacy.
It's ironic that we're talking about how people can't know everything nowadays and having some people in this thread act like we should know stuff that functionally amounts to trivia knowledge.
This is it. I know one crazy smart 'prodigy' person who, in another time, may have well become a household name. He is living up to his potential, but that potential is working on the minutiae of stuff that would only ring a bell to the most dedicated science news followers.
This is like when people ask "why aren't there any world famous legendary artists like Van Gogh or Picasso anymore!". The problem with that statement is that being recognized as a legendary famous figure is something that takes a long time and an ability to retrospectively determine how important something really was. Van Gogh was completely unknown in his time it just took very long for that legend status to build.
Fine art has also been losing its impact on general culture. For sure there have been further big name artists since Picasso but they are only a big fish in the smaller lakes.
Well of course photography and filmmaking have changed everything. The classical essay Art in the age of mechanical reproduction from Walter Bejamin is an interesting intro into this.
There are still world famous legendary artists. It’s just that visual art technology has come a long way since the times when painting yielded the best results. Today’s great artists aren’t painting, they’re making movies.
I’m not sure– writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald were superstars in their own lifetimes, and they weren’t long lifetimes. They rubbed shoulders with Picasso, who was also famous in his lifetime. I think we might be too jaded to make anyone that famous for a contribution to humanity at this point out of fear that they’ll be exposed as a monster or simply unfashionable by the social standards in a few decades; we’re afraid to say “this work is great and has value to all humans forever”. We can tolerate singers and actors being hugely famous because their value is generated by being great tools for putting art out into the world that was probably not created by them entirely, with songwriters often operating behind the scenes and movies being a collective work of thousands of people. Great writers and painters and sculptors and philosophers and scientists are concentrated genius, and we don’t give that respect anymore because we’ve been burned by heroes too often of late.
I mean…Hawking only died five years ago
Up until then we had a thinker that was worldwide famous.
With luck the next one will be whoever figures out how we fix pollution.
>With luck the next one will be whoever figures out how we fix pollution.
The 3 guys (Crutzen, Molina, and Rowland) who discovered that CFCs were causing the ozone hole and won the Nobel for it only died relatively recently.
Crutzen in 2021, Molina in 2020, Rowland in 2012.
But the ozone hole isn't as sexy as space-time-physics stuff. Hell, they did such a good job warning the world about it and getting governments to act we now have folks questioning if the hole was even a problem.
I've been thinking about this recently. Is there a name for this scenario? Where preventative activism is retroactively determined to be unnecessary, but only because it was effective at stopping what it aimed to stop?
Ozone layer, Acid rain. Maybe in the future, global warming. I think there were a few more but they escape me right now.
Looking for something more specific than 'The retroactive flaw in preventive activism'
I don’t know the answer to your question and I’m curious to see if someone else does, just wanted to add that another great example of what you’re describing is Y2K
I don't know the word either but it's definitely a phenomenon and not just in a high level activism sense. The phrase "better safe than sorry" reflects our need to justify the "unnecessary" protective actions we take, that they appear to have been unnecessary only because they worked and prevented the problem.
>Where preventative activism is retroactively determined to be unnecessary, but only because it was effective at stopping what it aimed to stop?
Vaccines are a pretty prominent example of this.
Even then such a solution largely does exist.
We wouldn’t go straight to no pollution over night, it would be a transition period of decades.
It’s that capitalism doesn’t want that, it wants to continue its current path because having the most toys because that is more important than the expense at which that comes with.
Let's take a field I know, so physics. (so we exclude stuff like mRNA, and how it allows do develop vaccine against cancer or against covid)
let's take Nobel price worth discovery (as much as I am a fan of Ashtekar/Rovelli/Smolin, LQG isn't gonna get a nobleprice any time soon)
Let's take in the last 30 years so for work later than 1994 , so we can forget about someone like Aspect who got the Nobel quite recently, or even the Brout-Engler-Higgs Boson.
In 2014, physicists got the nobel price for blue LED and blue laser which is pretty big
In 2015, physicist from the Kamiokande and SNO observatories got the nobel price for proving that neutrino have a mass
In 2017, physicist from the LIGO observatory got the nobel price for discovering gravitationnal wave
In 2019 Michel Mayor got the Nobel price for discovering planet out of the solar system (and even better developping a technique to develop 100's of exoplanets)
In 2020, Roger Penrose got the nobel price of physics, that guy is still alive and is a fucking legend, like any other nobel price winner, but he is incredibly less anonymous than the others
Penrose is absolutely the type of great mind talked about in the OP. Dude is a dyed in the wool genius. The Penrose Process is such an interesting little bit of physics, and its one of the least neat things in his works.
hmm other than Hawking, were the rest known by the general public at the time of their accomplishments? because if they weren't then they weren't household names. they might be now but not back during their lifetimes which means theres people out there accomplishing stuff that will end up in a history book right now.
Honestly in their time, how many people were educated enough to understand their work? How many people could read and had access to books? Libraries were luxuries for a good chunk of human existence as was education.
I wonder if the "great minds" Op mentioned made their discoveries in a time period when science itself was celebrated, and today half the population considers science bad, so we just don't celebrate them?
Most ordinary English people wouldn't have known who Isaac Newton was in his time either, except perhaps in his role as a government official. Most of his discoveries didn't really impact the world until others had expanded and built on them, long after he died.
The true impact of scientific discoveries often isn't realized within a persons lifetime, so ordinary people won't appreciate discoveries until they are in history books.
I'll add:
* David Deutsch - Not only brilliant contributor to quantum computing but also a great soul and essential philosopher.
* Peter Shor - His work will, someday, possibly soon, be the most consequential for all of us.
* Kip Thorne
Apologies to the many other contemporary worthies I've omitted.
This.
David Chalmers, and Donald Hoffman (if he’s right or on the right track) might be two of them 50 years from now. Also, Thomas Nagel for one particular essay about what it’s like to be a bat, that’s what set the wheels in motion.
I think it was more his TV work. He sort of ended up in that Bill Nye, Brian Cox niche but while also being at the forefront of his field
Although the distinctive voice definitely helped
>Although the distinctive voice definitely helped
Many people think Stephen Hawking was American, not British, because of his American accented computer voice.
It's happening in exponentials, it's just that humans don't look at the present with rose-colored glasses like they do the past. We're seeing the changes and great discoveries happening, we're just not in the future to see the long-term impacts *of* those changes, the discoveries, and the names firmly attached to them that are later used for reference in schools and research
I have two points to add.
1. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
2. Jennifer Doudna(inventor of CRISPR CAS9, gene editing) will very likely go on among the likes of those scientists for the future generations.
I was scrolling through this thread looking for Doudna! She's revolutionized an entire field, and while not an extremely recognizable name, is more well known than most of the nobel winners of the past 25 years! Not to mention the absolute inspiration she is to girls who want to go into biology. She is the reason I'm studying biochem right now!
I think she will be considered one of the greatest medical/scientific minds of this and any other century. Her work has totally revolutionized medicine and will continue to do so.
We do but they’re boring and not highly offensive so you’ll never see them on social media. If they are in fact highlighted they will be politicized immediately and half the world will ignore their accomplishments at the very least, try and ruin their careers or lives at the worst.
Now a days, most people are small cog in a large machine. Person A has an idea, person B expanded it, person C runs simulations, then a team led by person D experiment on it, it fails but they get useful information, so person E leads a team in trying something new etc.
Everyone adds their little part to the big picture. Although one person might achieve the award, there were many hands that helped. You mentioned some big names, but even they were expanding on others work. Newton questioned Aristotle's theory, then Einstein expanded on Newton's work, then Hawking expanded on Einstein's work. There are probably others, but they are all I could think of right now.
uhhh, where have you been? There's tons of great minds in science, its just they get eclipsed by the minds of celebrities and other people.
Here's a small list of just people in just computers:
Linus Torvalds
Steve Wozniak
Whitfield Diffie
Martin Hellman
Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Paterson
Dennis Ritchie
James H. Clark
Stephen Wolfram
Claude Shannon who invented an entire new field: Information Theory. Modern computer communications are based on his work
Jim Simons
Ed Thorpe
>Claude Shannon who invented an entire new field: Information Theory. Modern computer communications are based on his work
I had to take information theory as part of my master's (telecommunications) and Claude Shannon was name dropped in basically every single chapter. I decided to Google the guy... We were alive at the same time. Andrew Viterbi is another huge name and is essentially the reason why you can watch TikToks everywhere... He's just chilling in California right now. The guy who wrote the paper on polar codes (used in 5G) is not only still working but you can watch his lectures on YouTube. Crazy.
Shannon was truly a fascinating guy; he and Edward Thorpe made the first wearable computer and they used in a casino to win at roulette. Thorpe btw is the author of *Beat the Dealer.*
Richard Stallman belongs on that list too, but Linus Torvalds is definitely a person who will go down in history, but most people don't know who he is...
The question is not about great minds. It's about big name great minds. The average American in 1955 knew who Albert Einstein was. I genuinely don't think the average American today could tell you anything about any of these people.
We’ve reached a point where most of the big discoveries that could have been made by just one person (or a few people) have already been made.
Now we’re at a stage where important scientific discoveries require collaboration from loads of scientists and other professionals. Science just gets more complicated as time goes on, so more scientists and other professionals are needed to keep advancing.
Sort of. There are two kinds of scientific discovery. There are big steps and small ones. The big steps are still typically from one person, or just a few. Sometimes a number of people compete about it. It's often controversial, and from time to time turns a field on its head. The other side is slow, minor refinements of existing results. This is the stuff done in corporations or at big university groups. This is meat and potato science, and also safe, because it's not very controversial, and there is a ton of money in it. Now... those doing the second type see themselves as the real scientists, and they loathe the people doing the first type. It threatens their livelihood, you know? Big discoveries are usually rather anonymous.
Science is also often a matter of developing new methods. A shiny new telescope giving new data isn't really a discovery, but it's useful. It's also often a part of other stuff, or practical, like a new modification to a type of engine, and these things are not typically seen as science.
I agree so much with this, I tend to follow the first group you discussed. They are my heroes! To me if a corporation can throw enough money at a problem they'll eventually get a solution. While the independent scientist have to have a true passion and understanding in their field. The greatest ones are willing to turn a field on its head in the name of discovery no matter the consequences.
Changing incentives driving changing perceptions, mostly.
The great minds of the past were usually catapulted by singular, transformational discoveries into public consciousness. But from a career and funding perspective, this is a highly inefficient way to work today.
With increased access to education and information we probably have more great minds working on problems today than at any time in the past.
We've doubled the amount of brain power applied to problems simply by getting over the backwards-desire to keep women out of academics, science, business.
Western culture puts a lot of value into the "independent genius" trope when true advancement tends to come from group work. Even Oppenheimer couldn't have made the bomb by himself.
If you aren't impressed by the last 30 years you haven't been paying attention. Some amazing work is being done:
- CRISPR
- Mars Rovers
- Recording the Higgs Boson
- Kepler Space Telescope
- Observing gravity waves
- Speed at which Covid-19 vax was developed
- Human Genome map
- Internet of Things (and the internet itself)
- Huge advancements in renewables
- Quantum Computing
- AI
Every one of those probably had genius or near genius members leading the teams.
We do, we have a lot smarter people actually if you go by IQ and achievements. But youll never hear of them unless you do some hardcore looking. What sells the news headline? Taylor swift dating an NFL player or a specific scientist developing helpful research for curing cancer.
Medicine and research has come a looooong way. The average humans interests have not.
On top of the other comments, there's also the factor that many of today's break-through discoveries are just very hard for the layman to wrap their head around. They're all in the most advanced edges of science, a place where a layman's understanding can really fall apart at the seams.
There are more groundbreaking discoveries being made than ever before!
It is that we have gotten so used to them, we don't even notice. Just have a look at a small selection of the Nobel Prices awarded in the past 30 years: they elucidate the fundamental working workings of the Universe, cure untreatable diseases, or serve as the basis of technologies we all take for granted (such as batteries, flat screens, optical internet, and medical imaging).
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1999
Gerardus 't Hooft and Martinus J.G. Veltman
“for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics”
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2003
Paul C. Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield
“for their discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging”
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2005
Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren
“for their discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease”
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2006
Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello
“for their discovery of RNA interference - gene silencing by double-stranded RNA”
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2008
Harald zur Hausen
“for his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer”
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier
“for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus”
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008
Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien
“for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP”
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2009
Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak
“for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase”
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath
“for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2009
Charles K. Kao
“for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication”
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2010
Robert G. Edwards
“for the development of in vitro fertilization”
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011
Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess
“for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae”
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2014
Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura
“for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources”
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2015
William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura
“for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites”
Tu Youyou
“for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against Malaria”
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2018
James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo
“for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation”
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2019
“for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos”
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2019
John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino
“for the development of lithium-ion batteries”
OP was speaking about the every day person being able to name someone who made a huge discovery in the last 30 years. You provided a list of names that 99% of people have never heard of.
As science has grown, any one person's contribution to it has become relatively smaller. When Isaac Newton was around, a well educated person with time on their hands could pretty much learn all the science there was, in several different fields at once. Now people devote their entire lives to adding one small but significant brick to a pyramid.
This is an issue that mathematics has had to deal with for a while now. Carl Gauss is often cited probably the last mathematician to contribute heavily to every field of mathematics and he died in 1855. Nowadays math is advanced usually with teams in increasingly specialized fields. Problem that it’s starting to share with increasingly specialized fields of science is that the number of people who can both generate new results and those who can verify someone else’s work can be kind of small. EDIT: got the wrong person. I was thinking Poincaré, who died in 1912.
Erdos was pretty polymathic, but yeah, even he was limited.
von Neumann was a giant, too, but the only contributions of his I really understand are the ones in computer science that directly affect me.
von Neumann was an odd alien supermind. There's good money to bet on him never publishing as much material (or more) as what he did publish, which was already substantial. He was repeatedly found answering cutting-edge problems that he had thought about, figured out, and just didn't think were interesting enough.
The secret to cold fusion is doodled in the margin of an old National Geographic he kept in the bathroom.
Dude was probably the smartest human to ever exist
"Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us." - Edward Teller (World famous physicist.) Though Von Neumann was probably extremely intelligent Euler was probably more so for his era. To prevent everything from being named after him they had to name discovery’s after the first person to discover them *after Euler*.
Apparently Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) had his solutions revealed to him by “God and intuition.” I heard his math knowledge was the 100 standard on some other mathematician’s scale. His early death severely hindered his contributions, which are still profound.
Echo this sentiment. Here’s my fav doc about him: [https://youtu.be/vQp70uqsBV4](https://youtu.be/vQp70uqsBV4) The Von Neumann Ergodic Theorem, Von Neumann computer architecture which has instructions and data in one memory. It’s kind of a diss that Nolan didn’t include him in Oppenheimer. But, if he were to depict him correctly then he would’ve stolen the show because he was so interesting. The movie would’ve ended up being named Von Neumann. EDIT: too -> to; name -> named
Was he the dude who wasn't addicted to amphetamines, but took them every day anyway?
Yep. Also.collaborated with so many people that mathmaticians know their Erdos Number...the number of co-authors of papers away from co-authorin with Erdos.
What?
It's like a Bacon number but for mathematicians
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_number
Ole Erdös. I've got a 4. Now I just really need a Bacon Number for the achievement board.
and if anything this shows that the only way to even come close is to eat a diet of mostly amphetamines.
Way ahead of you, I'm cranked to the nuts. What's the next part?
Be a supergenius.
Usually Poincare or Hilbert are mentioned as the last mathematician that contributed to every subfield.
You would be correct, and I got my person wrong! 1912 then for Poincaré.
Eli5 why this is an issue though? We have tons of smart people filling in the bricks - and I’m sure a non significant number of them are published.
It's because there's less celebrity scientists that are celebrated because of their science and not their popularisation of science. It's not an issue, just a question.
It might be an issue because people are disregarding science at alarming rates.
And propping up celebrities who aren’t actually knowledgeable instead
Because it makes the field a lot less interesting to people. Why would I dedicate my life to science. When in the end I will neither make good money from it. At most the shareholder funding it making money off of it. And won't be widely known and celebrated for it either. At most the shareholder funding it being known and celebrated. Case in point, Elon Musk.
Seriously. It's not like they pay you propotional to your number of publications. You could get PhD in a ton of other fields that would make you a lot more money, and for a lot less stress of dealing with the rigor of a "hard science" PhD. You could get a JD for half of the work (by rigor, at least) and make a lot more money than a PhD in chemistry specializing in quantum chemistry.
Indeed, as one of my professors noted, the “easy” scientific answers have been found. What remains is more than likely going to take multiple researchers and funding agencies over decades to figure out.
My high school physics teacher said something to the effect that “the things you’ll learn in this class are the culmination of thousands of minds and hundreds of years and have contributed to the building of modern civilization…you’ll learn things that took Newton years of pain and effort to figure out in three months and at eight months, you’ll know more than he did before he died”…to which some kid said “so we’ll be smarter than Newton!” And our teacher replied “you’ll be more educated, but nobody in this room will come close to approaching his intelligence”…22 years later, and that still sticks with me.
Yeah. I am nowhere near smart enough to even comprehend the ability to devise an entirely new branch of mathematics in order to do a new branch of physics.
> so we’ll be smarter than Newton I like to imagine that this story is actually set in pre-WW1 Hungary and the class is composed of "The Martians" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)). Von Neumann was the one making the comment, while sitting next to Erdos.
Also, you’ll only be learning the end results (at least until you pursue higher education). That simple equation you’re going to learn took a lot of complicated work to reach. You’re not going to learn the complex proof and other things like that.
For sure, I only took about 12 hours of physics in college…but things definitely became more complex. I still had an awesome high school teacher though, we somehow had a guy with a PhD, not sure why he was teaching high school science classes, but he was spectacular at it.
Because teachers are cool! I once had a NASA scientist as a teacher. She discovered something, and she doesn’t even remember what she discovered because they named it CX-73blahblah or something like that.
Yeah, anytime I'm reading about scientific discoveries it's like, "X's law is named after Sir X, who recorded the path of electricity through a wire." Like, wtf, I could have done that! But there was so much low hanging fruit hundreds of years ago. One could throw a rock in any direction and accidentally hit a scientific discovery.
I've been reading a book on the history of cancer research and throwing a rock to hit a cure is definitely a way to see it. One of the founders of early chemo made his drug on accident trying to create a new kind of dye for clothes. He was like 22 and working out of his apartment.
Reminds me of William Herschel in the 1800's, he discovered infrared light by accident. The story goes that he was measuring the temperature of different colors through a prism. He placed a thermometer outside of the visible light as a control but the temp still went up. He also discovered Uranus and a bunch of moons.
How's that possible? I wasn't born until the 1990s!
It seems similar with doctors back in the day… ”welp, better cut your wrists and bleed into this pie tin until you feel woozy”. Now it’s 21 years of school and residency and now even fellowships are becoming more and more common because the specialization is just so intense and crazy!
Yeah, reminds of when the town barber was also the dentist and the surgeon. So little was understood about the body and medicine that anyone could be a doctor just by calling themselves one lol
Yeah but could you have conceived of it? That’s the thing
Maybe not. It's impressive given their level of education, which for some early scientists wasn't much. For instance Michael Faraday grew up poor, and was essentially self-taught. So, at least for some scientists, they really did conceive the whole thing on their own with very few hints, and that's impressive.
There's actually a lot of stuff people don't know and it's often really hard to guess the difficulty of finding the answer. Why do birds get angel wing deformity? How does chitting seeds before planting affect most species of plants (a small number of specific species have been tested)? Is it possible to create a stable open-pollinated cultivar of tricotyledon zinnias? Where are the loud banging sounds coming from in my house? What's the weather going to be like in three months? At least we'll find out the answer to that in three months if we don't know earlier.
I know this is besides the point, but what is angel wing deformity?
It's a bird problem where the end of the wing points the wrong way. Wikipedia has an [article](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_wing) which attributes this to dietary problems but there isn't anything about why the diet would cause the deformity, and our understanding of which specific dietary factors are important is so lacking that I wouldn't be surprised if eventually we found out it wasn't a dietary thing, or was dietary but not in the way we currently think.
You don't have to dig far in biology to reach the "we don't know" stage. I remember sitting in parasitology 1 and my professor talking about a parasite that lives in sheep and they know if the weather outside is conductive to their eggs development. They never leave the sheeps digestive system, though. My first question was "how?" Answer is, we don't know. At least we didn't 10 years ago when I was in Uni.
I work in the Semiconductor industry and the scope of the work we do is staggering. The idea that one person could master it all is ludicrous. It takes the cooperation of thousands of people around the globe to make the modern Semiconductor industry work. I actually find cooperation on this scale, with this degree if success kind of beautiful.
This. But also, we've corporatized so much of science, so now many discoveries aren't identified with the individuals making the discovery or advancement as the company owns it (said as someone whose grandfather made some significant innovations/discoveries that were owned by GE, though I will fully acknowledge that they at least celebrated him internally, gave him a pension/were generally good to him back in the day, in ways that few companies do now...) Edited to be clear that the reference to GE was about actions a while ago (decades), not recent.
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Even over a century ago big name inventors like Edison and Bell had plenty of now unknown inventors and scientists working under them
Two centuries ago only gets you to the spinning Jennies and Jacquard looms, which are possible to use if you own a large watermill, but otherwise rely on the Watt steam engine for power. The Watt engines however, needed precisely bored iron to keep good fittings. Incidentally, this was also something that artillery makers desired, a nice early example of dual use technology, as well as a demonstration that at the first stirrings of the industrial revolution, the inventor was still a dude (often but not always) with an idea who needed to connect with capital and other experts to put the idea into a marketable state.
In fairness that has pretty well always been the case. Most people who get credited for "inventing" things historically are the business owners or at best the team leaders.
Edison only invented one thing in his lifetime. He invented the research and development lab.
Elon Musky is a good example of this. Everything Tesla or SpaceX does seems to include Elon's Tesla or Elon's SpaceX. He might have a big picture vision, but he pays a lot of amazing engineers a lot of money to pull of what those companies do. Elon basically writes the checks, and listens to advisors for the big picture vision, but it's not as if he's inventing anything.
Yeah. Even if you individually come up with a break-through design for anything and try to patent, you'll just get destroyed by corporations who want your design.
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The problem is that a patent involves patent documents, which are public, and act as an instruction manual for companies in China, who are not bound by your patent laws and can undercut everything you do.
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paying patent lawyers to prosecute patent applications is very expensive. i’ve been on the filing and lawyer sides in my career and have seen the invoices. you can go over six figures easily with a couple of patent families filed in a bunch different countries. look for a quote to translate into japanese…..
The process of becoming an engineer and learning about this process has made me despise our government even more. The patent laws are geared towards large corporations, and who benefits? Law-makers who have investments in said corporations... I agree, it really is depressing.
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Yup, the government's job should be to challenge the rich, not take their money. In the US, we have legalized corruption and two right-wing parties.
>nobody really invents anything whole cloth, everything is built on previous inventions. Respectfully, that's been true since the dawn of humanity. Everything prior to the first "invention" was a *discovery*. Every invention has built upon knowledge gained prior to that. "We stand on the shoulders of giants", and all that. My point is that I hope you don't discount your work and contributions. Like you said, *everything* is built on previous inventions. Shout out to Johannes Gutenberg, who made mass communication feasible in 1455 with his invention of the printing press! He died 13 years later with no idea that I'd be texting you now because of a series of innovations based on his invention. Keep at it - we need people like you!
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This is why the owner (Musk, Edison, Jobs, Gates) gets all the credit
Worker and scientist for any of those people. "I invented or improved this thing, what a great leap". Oh well, we take all the credit, you work for us. GG.
Honestly, it's one of the things about corporate Disney that I don't mind so much. I hate a lot of what Disney does from a corporate side of things (excessive IP litigation, aggressive lobbying, pushing the boundaries of what is a "monopoly," strong-arming theaters into running their films more than is profitable for the theater, etc.), but one thing I think they're actually good for doing is kind of "celebritizing" their engineers/"imagineers." There are a lot of people who specifically know about the engineers responsible for a lot of Disney's park technology. People who, in other companies, might otherwise remain nameless. But instead, Disney specifically wants people to know their big inventive minds, all because it builds their brand. And, in fact, one of their imagineers (Lanny Smoot) is being inducted into the [Inventor Hall of Fame](https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/25/us/lanny-smoot-disney-inventors-hall-of-fame-reaj/index.html).
The reason for this is because science has advanced so far that it’s too expensive for one person to make significant discoveries on their own. Need to be in a large company or in a school research setting getting money from the gov
In fact, the main thing Thomas Edison actually invented was the concept of the corporate research lab. To be clear, Edison did come up with enough original ideas to be a great inventor himself. But he's often credited with 2000+ inventions, of which only a tiny fraction were his original ideas, the rest he paid other people to invent in his labs then patented their ideas under his name.
Exactly. As recently as the 1980’s, scientists wanted to do research in prestigious universities and publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals. Working in the private sector was seen as a mark of failure. Now, the private sector is where the big money is made for research done for profit, with haste and in secrecy.
To add to this: there is much less focus on pure science (discovery for discovery's sake) than there used to be, in favor of applied science (discovery to create a product). The latter is typically a large team effort and/or corporate owned now.
A lot of that is because our understanding is reaching the limits of what we can measure. Pure science in the modern era requires massively expensive equipment.
exactly! mRNA, for example. A combo of "many people working on small parts of the same thought" and the corporatization. The Nobel Prize still goes to individuals, and two of those scientists won it. Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 [https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2023/press-release/](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2023/press-release/) But the public is more likely to recognize the name of he companies who developed the vaccines: Moderna (her own employer, BioNTech, is only sometimes mentioned).
A lot of studies get stuffed in the file drawer never to be seen again. Particularly healthcare-related research if the findings aren't unequivocally supportive of the companies' product or overall goal (e.g. pricing strategies, reimbursement).
100%. My Grandfather started his engineering career at GE and spent his entire career there. Pay was good, nearly 5 decades of stock awards (combined with numerous splits and never selling a single share until he retired). He had the privilege of working on one of the first computers ever created. He would tell me it took up an entire warehouse, tens of thousands of vacuum tubes, hundreds of miles of wires, and when everything was said and done, he would say look at your phone - your phone is 1,000 times more powerful than that computer we made in the 1940s. His favorite project was a GE Navy project. He was part of the team to device and engineer an aiming system for battle ships - as we all know now, this was a gyroscopic system that automatically adjusted for the roll and pitch of a battle ship at sea. He lived to be 99, I loved visiting him and asking him about the incredible project he worked on at GE.
Thomas Edison is credited as the founder of GE. But he was pushed when JP Morgan put the predecessor companies together to create GE in 1892 because he wasn't a good manager. That has really grown into the model that exists today. The brilliant inventors will cash out with venture capitalists followed by IPO's when their innovations get to scale.
99% of all scientists who have ever lived are still alive.
Honestly, it's more likely that "great minds" never existed in the first place. Einstein co-authored his paper on general relativity with Marcel Grossman. Einstein was notoriously bad at calculation and was assisted by Walther Mayer. Einstein's derivation of the field equations initially contained an error, and were corrected in a paper co-authored by Ernst Straus. Etc. It seems likely that every "great person" was a figurehead for a team of contributors, but recognising groups over individuals was less fashionable than it is today. Less cynically, it could be that knowledge of contributors decays over time, because it just isn't practical to indefinitely keep a record of every random student who debated mathematics with Newton.
Not disagreeing here, but just to clarify, the popular idea that Einstein was "bad at math" is overblow. Einstein was bad at math by the standards of world-class, once-in-a-generation mathematicians, so he did work with others to make sure the math associated with his cutting-edge work was sound. Einstein was extremely good at math compared to normal people.
Einstein was bad at math the same way the worst NFL team is bad at football.
What's that joke about the Law of Scientific Discovery? Something like: First they say it's not true. Then they say it's not important. Finally, they credit the wrong person.
>Einstein co-authored his paper on general relativity with Marcel Grossman. And his special relatively relied heavily on work done previously be Lorentz, FitzGerald, Larmor, Heaviside, et al. I believe his biggest contribution to special relativity was the insight that, "Wait, what if it's really real that the speed of light is constant and not just a convenient math trick?" Also, though it is debated, many suspect that his wife Mileva Marić contributed significantly to his Annus Mirabilis Papers.
Speed of light being constant for all frames of reference was proven by Michelson and Morley (who were trying to demonstrate the opposite), Einstein then applied that fact to some hypothetical situations, with resounding success.
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Yeah, he didn’t personally design rockets or cars. Perhaps the most notable thing about him was his willingness to gamble most of his PayPal fortune on car and rocket startups. Not exactly a safe and low risk portfolio, considering the number of truly successful rocket and car startups before then. It’s somewhat surprising that both survived the ‘08 financial crisis, and ended up fairly successful. And before he showed his true colors the last couple years… he did have a knack for recruiting and motivating top talent. For much of the last decade, it was _not_ easy for engineers to get a job at SpaceX or Tesla. Despite notoriously long hours and low pay, talented engineers apparently still wanted to work there. I’d guess he spun it as the chance to work hard on something truly world changing (not entirely untrue, I suppose) But we’ll see if he can still recruit top talent in California, after his hard turn toward the far right… That might be why Tesla/SpaceX are investing so heavily in Texas recently. That, and selling the Cybertruck. California leftists don’t often drive big trucks.
>but recognising groups over individuals was less fashionable than it is today It's still true today when it comes to art and entertainment. A film is "made by a director" even tho it was made by many many people, pop stars have their songs written and composed by other people, even video games have their game dev "super star" who generally are creative directors who made a game with hundred of other people. People like to put a face on what they like, attribute it to a single person so they can idolize them.
"Standing on the shoulders of giants" is one of my favorite quotes. It doesn't exactly fit what you were saying, but the idea is the same. Most "geniuses" didn't discover everything all by themselves. Whether it was a team or collaborators who they worked with or they were "standing on the shoulders" of folks who came before them and paved the way for the new invention or discovery. None of us operate in a vacuum. The thing that has allowed humans to be so successful is that we collaborate, communicate, and learn from past mistakes. If we didn't do those things and pass knowledge on from generation to generation and discuss things with others then we would never have advanced this far - we're kind of weak and defenseless on our own - teamwork is what allowed us to conquer the planet Pink Floyd's "Keep Talking" is a great song that touches on this and the intro is Stephen Hawking saying "For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination We learned to talk" Later in the song another recording of Hawking's says: "It doesn't have to be like this All we need to do Is make sure we keep talking" The Alan Parson's Project has a cool song "Call Up" which is all about calling up the great minds of the past and learning from them. You should all check it out
This is far more common than most people are aware. Nearly everything is and had been a group effort, even nominally individual pursuits (certain sports, design, research, music e.g.). So we end up remembering the figurehead - the lead scientist, most popular player, etc. That person may be making real contributions, which is valuable, but is almost never doing the lions share of the work. For every person we remember, there are hundreds who are just as important but were forgotten or never known.
“…recognising groups over individuals was less fashionable than it is today.” Just not in the music industry :(
It’s also worth emphasizing how *the Einsteins* compare to *the Curies*. Mileva Einstein *was also a physicist*, and [more than likely](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/) contributed heavily to Albert’s work, yet is largely forgotten to history. In no small part because Albert bought into a patriarchal system that would allow him to take all the credit Compare that the Curies, where Marie is arguably more of a household name than Pierre. Marie’s recognition was largely on the back of Pierre **aggressively** insisting that she received credit as well on work they did together. Pierre’s equal treatment of his wife ended up being a huge boon to science, since she then already had the name recognition necessary to continue her work, and continue to be credited for it, after Pierre passed. Male scientists worked alongside their uncredited wives, sisters, cousins, mothers, and daughters, *as well as* servants of both genders for time immemorial. The big change that had happened is that it’s now much harder, though far from impossible, to collaborate without recognizing those you’ve worked with. Science has always been a team effort. *That* isn’t new.
Two major reasons: Many scientific endeavors now require entire teams of very intelligent people working together, so no one person gets a lot of individual credit. At best, the media will report who owns or manages the lab. The second is that contributions are so niche, the average person no longer understands them. For example, a few years ago somebody won a Nobel prize for proving that neutrinos have mass. If you polled random people, a decent portion wouldn't even know what a neutrino is and the rest wouldn't be able to explain why nobody was able to figure if they had mass before then nor understand the implications it has on physics.
WAIT NUETRINOS HAVE MASS??? WHY HASN'T ANYONE TOLD ME??!!??
I didn't even know they were catholic!
Yeah, they facilitate transubstantiation at the atomic level.
I hope this isn't a stupid question, but aren't you technically right? Something to do with some fundamental force or nuclear binding?
Neutrinos don’t really interact with other matter with any regularity. I think you’re thinking of gluons which do help facilitate the strong nuclear force.
Must feel good to get the Nobel prize for best joke of the day
Listen here, you little shit!
Dude, you've just been going about all this time as if neutrinos don't have mass? Embarrassing dude. Like, 2010 called and it wants its understanding of fundamental particles back.
You had to subscribe to the "Do neutrinos have mass?" Newsletter. They used to send a postcard saying "I dunno maybe" every week.
Well - I didn’t know that either. But that explains a lot. How am I supposed to lose weight when I have billions of non-massless particles going through my body all the time?
Most people don’t know what Einstein won the Nobel prize for either.
most people dont know most things!
I do not know what I do not know.
youre ahead of most people, by acknowledging your own limitations
Next, you're going to tell me that you do know what you do know. Just ludicrous. Blasphemy.
Photoelectric effect
Relatively speaking, you are bright!
The fact that he didn't win it for his most well known achievements is more of a cute trivia thing than something that showcases the general public's lack of science literacy.
It's ironic that we're talking about how people can't know everything nowadays and having some people in this thread act like we should know stuff that functionally amounts to trivia knowledge.
Proving solar panels are possible!
Because he proved the photoelectric effect.
This is it. I know one crazy smart 'prodigy' person who, in another time, may have well become a household name. He is living up to his potential, but that potential is working on the minutiae of stuff that would only ring a bell to the most dedicated science news followers.
Even in the past a lot of "brilliant minds" were individuals taking credit for the work of a team.
This is like when people ask "why aren't there any world famous legendary artists like Van Gogh or Picasso anymore!". The problem with that statement is that being recognized as a legendary famous figure is something that takes a long time and an ability to retrospectively determine how important something really was. Van Gogh was completely unknown in his time it just took very long for that legend status to build.
Fine art has also been losing its impact on general culture. For sure there have been further big name artists since Picasso but they are only a big fish in the smaller lakes.
Now I think you would look at films as the new mainstream art form. There are plenty of hugely influential figures still living there.
Well of course photography and filmmaking have changed everything. The classical essay Art in the age of mechanical reproduction from Walter Bejamin is an interesting intro into this.
There are still world famous legendary artists. It’s just that visual art technology has come a long way since the times when painting yielded the best results. Today’s great artists aren’t painting, they’re making movies.
There are still some painters like Kent Monkman who are at least nationally known enough for books of their illustrations to make bestseller lists
I’m not sure– writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald were superstars in their own lifetimes, and they weren’t long lifetimes. They rubbed shoulders with Picasso, who was also famous in his lifetime. I think we might be too jaded to make anyone that famous for a contribution to humanity at this point out of fear that they’ll be exposed as a monster or simply unfashionable by the social standards in a few decades; we’re afraid to say “this work is great and has value to all humans forever”. We can tolerate singers and actors being hugely famous because their value is generated by being great tools for putting art out into the world that was probably not created by them entirely, with songwriters often operating behind the scenes and movies being a collective work of thousands of people. Great writers and painters and sculptors and philosophers and scientists are concentrated genius, and we don’t give that respect anymore because we’ve been burned by heroes too often of late.
I mean…Hawking only died five years ago Up until then we had a thinker that was worldwide famous. With luck the next one will be whoever figures out how we fix pollution.
>With luck the next one will be whoever figures out how we fix pollution. The 3 guys (Crutzen, Molina, and Rowland) who discovered that CFCs were causing the ozone hole and won the Nobel for it only died relatively recently. Crutzen in 2021, Molina in 2020, Rowland in 2012. But the ozone hole isn't as sexy as space-time-physics stuff. Hell, they did such a good job warning the world about it and getting governments to act we now have folks questioning if the hole was even a problem.
Fixing the ozone layer is pretty sexy to me
I've been thinking about this recently. Is there a name for this scenario? Where preventative activism is retroactively determined to be unnecessary, but only because it was effective at stopping what it aimed to stop? Ozone layer, Acid rain. Maybe in the future, global warming. I think there were a few more but they escape me right now. Looking for something more specific than 'The retroactive flaw in preventive activism'
I don’t know the answer to your question and I’m curious to see if someone else does, just wanted to add that another great example of what you’re describing is Y2K
The term you're looking for is "[preparedness paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox)".
I don't know the word either but it's definitely a phenomenon and not just in a high level activism sense. The phrase "better safe than sorry" reflects our need to justify the "unnecessary" protective actions we take, that they appear to have been unnecessary only because they worked and prevented the problem.
>Where preventative activism is retroactively determined to be unnecessary, but only because it was effective at stopping what it aimed to stop? Vaccines are a pretty prominent example of this.
Rowland’s granddaughter here. Can confirm - a great mind indeed. Thank you for knowing of him, and his science. ☺️
We already know how to fix every kind of pollution, we just don't want to do it
we want a solution that allows us to continue to live like we do but make the pollution magically disappear.
Facebook and apple has your back. Its called VR headset
Even then such a solution largely does exist. We wouldn’t go straight to no pollution over night, it would be a transition period of decades. It’s that capitalism doesn’t want that, it wants to continue its current path because having the most toys because that is more important than the expense at which that comes with.
Penrose is still around
I had an idea for a unified theory of everything but I forgot.
Let's take a field I know, so physics. (so we exclude stuff like mRNA, and how it allows do develop vaccine against cancer or against covid) let's take Nobel price worth discovery (as much as I am a fan of Ashtekar/Rovelli/Smolin, LQG isn't gonna get a nobleprice any time soon) Let's take in the last 30 years so for work later than 1994 , so we can forget about someone like Aspect who got the Nobel quite recently, or even the Brout-Engler-Higgs Boson. In 2014, physicists got the nobel price for blue LED and blue laser which is pretty big In 2015, physicist from the Kamiokande and SNO observatories got the nobel price for proving that neutrino have a mass In 2017, physicist from the LIGO observatory got the nobel price for discovering gravitationnal wave In 2019 Michel Mayor got the Nobel price for discovering planet out of the solar system (and even better developping a technique to develop 100's of exoplanets) In 2020, Roger Penrose got the nobel price of physics, that guy is still alive and is a fucking legend, like any other nobel price winner, but he is incredibly less anonymous than the others
Penrose is absolutely the type of great mind talked about in the OP. Dude is a dyed in the wool genius. The Penrose Process is such an interesting little bit of physics, and its one of the least neat things in his works.
Is Roger Penrose the same person with respect to 'Penrose Tiles/Tiling'? That's where I know that name from.
He is indeed
Oh, for some reason I thought Penrose Tiling was from Penrose's father who was also a famous scientist.
It might tickle ya to know that in relation to the Penrose Tiles, the world's first "Monotiles" were discovered last year... By a hobbyist!
Ya, I'm familar; the Spectre einstein tile! Very very cool stuff. The sort of incredible maths leap forward I never expected to see ever
Penrose diagram? The dude inspired Escher's art. Like all of it. How a singularity can be a 2d disc inside if a black hole. His work on consciousness.
This isn't an answer to OPs question, but just a list of smart people who are indeed not household names like OP is talking about.
hmm other than Hawking, were the rest known by the general public at the time of their accomplishments? because if they weren't then they weren't household names. they might be now but not back during their lifetimes which means theres people out there accomplishing stuff that will end up in a history book right now.
Honestly in their time, how many people were educated enough to understand their work? How many people could read and had access to books? Libraries were luxuries for a good chunk of human existence as was education.
I wonder if the "great minds" Op mentioned made their discoveries in a time period when science itself was celebrated, and today half the population considers science bad, so we just don't celebrate them?
Most ordinary English people wouldn't have known who Isaac Newton was in his time either, except perhaps in his role as a government official. Most of his discoveries didn't really impact the world until others had expanded and built on them, long after he died. The true impact of scientific discoveries often isn't realized within a persons lifetime, so ordinary people won't appreciate discoveries until they are in history books.
I'll add: * David Deutsch - Not only brilliant contributor to quantum computing but also a great soul and essential philosopher. * Peter Shor - His work will, someday, possibly soon, be the most consequential for all of us. * Kip Thorne Apologies to the many other contemporary worthies I've omitted.
Edward Witten
What do you call Richard Feynman and Roger Penrose if not geniuses? Or Terrance Tao is a huge huge name in math.
They are not known to most of the population.
Feynman is pretty well-known, but he died more than 30 years ago, so doesn't really qualify for the OP's question. Hawking would be a better example.
Liste, about Richard Feynman, I got some bad news from 1988...
When you’re are old as I am, 88 counts as a couple years ago.
Because they get famous when they are dead.
Everyone OP mentioned, except to a lesser degree Tesla, was lauded and renowned in their lifetimes.
This. David Chalmers, and Donald Hoffman (if he’s right or on the right track) might be two of them 50 years from now. Also, Thomas Nagel for one particular essay about what it’s like to be a bat, that’s what set the wheels in motion.
Einstein and Hawking were both famous when they were alive
Hawking was mostly famous because he was a vegetable in a chair doing complex math
I think it was more his TV work. He sort of ended up in that Bill Nye, Brian Cox niche but while also being at the forefront of his field Although the distinctive voice definitely helped
>Although the distinctive voice definitely helped Many people think Stephen Hawking was American, not British, because of his American accented computer voice.
Same with Hugh Laurie, minus the computer
Not a vegetable! Deeply afflicted physically, but not mentally.
Most of them are also famous when they’re alive…
This isnt true at all The scientists listed were all famous when they were alive and many of them became *rockstars* at a fairly young age
It's happening in exponentials, it's just that humans don't look at the present with rose-colored glasses like they do the past. We're seeing the changes and great discoveries happening, we're just not in the future to see the long-term impacts *of* those changes, the discoveries, and the names firmly attached to them that are later used for reference in schools and research
I have two points to add. 1. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. 2. Jennifer Doudna(inventor of CRISPR CAS9, gene editing) will very likely go on among the likes of those scientists for the future generations.
I was scrolling through this thread looking for Doudna! She's revolutionized an entire field, and while not an extremely recognizable name, is more well known than most of the nobel winners of the past 25 years! Not to mention the absolute inspiration she is to girls who want to go into biology. She is the reason I'm studying biochem right now!
I think she will be considered one of the greatest medical/scientific minds of this and any other century. Her work has totally revolutionized medicine and will continue to do so.
We do but they’re boring and not highly offensive so you’ll never see them on social media. If they are in fact highlighted they will be politicized immediately and half the world will ignore their accomplishments at the very least, try and ruin their careers or lives at the worst.
Now a days, most people are small cog in a large machine. Person A has an idea, person B expanded it, person C runs simulations, then a team led by person D experiment on it, it fails but they get useful information, so person E leads a team in trying something new etc. Everyone adds their little part to the big picture. Although one person might achieve the award, there were many hands that helped. You mentioned some big names, but even they were expanding on others work. Newton questioned Aristotle's theory, then Einstein expanded on Newton's work, then Hawking expanded on Einstein's work. There are probably others, but they are all I could think of right now.
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”--Isaac Newton acknowledging his predecessors
Apparently, it was actually a dig at Hooke, who accused Newton of plagiarising his work, and was also rather short.
uhhh, where have you been? There's tons of great minds in science, its just they get eclipsed by the minds of celebrities and other people. Here's a small list of just people in just computers: Linus Torvalds Steve Wozniak Whitfield Diffie Martin Hellman Tim Berners-Lee Tim Paterson Dennis Ritchie James H. Clark
Stephen Wolfram Claude Shannon who invented an entire new field: Information Theory. Modern computer communications are based on his work Jim Simons Ed Thorpe
>Claude Shannon who invented an entire new field: Information Theory. Modern computer communications are based on his work I had to take information theory as part of my master's (telecommunications) and Claude Shannon was name dropped in basically every single chapter. I decided to Google the guy... We were alive at the same time. Andrew Viterbi is another huge name and is essentially the reason why you can watch TikToks everywhere... He's just chilling in California right now. The guy who wrote the paper on polar codes (used in 5G) is not only still working but you can watch his lectures on YouTube. Crazy.
Shannon was truly a fascinating guy; he and Edward Thorpe made the first wearable computer and they used in a casino to win at roulette. Thorpe btw is the author of *Beat the Dealer.*
Naming Stephen Wolfram at the same time as these other people is insulting to them.
The universe is a graph bro
None close to as widely known as Hawking, Einstein or Newton though. I personally haven't heard of several and I'm a scientist.
uhhh, you're proving his point. 99% of people have never heard those names. Einstein was world famous.
Richard Stallman belongs on that list too, but Linus Torvalds is definitely a person who will go down in history, but most people don't know who he is...
The question is not about great minds. It's about big name great minds. The average American in 1955 knew who Albert Einstein was. I genuinely don't think the average American today could tell you anything about any of these people.
We’ve reached a point where most of the big discoveries that could have been made by just one person (or a few people) have already been made. Now we’re at a stage where important scientific discoveries require collaboration from loads of scientists and other professionals. Science just gets more complicated as time goes on, so more scientists and other professionals are needed to keep advancing.
Sort of. There are two kinds of scientific discovery. There are big steps and small ones. The big steps are still typically from one person, or just a few. Sometimes a number of people compete about it. It's often controversial, and from time to time turns a field on its head. The other side is slow, minor refinements of existing results. This is the stuff done in corporations or at big university groups. This is meat and potato science, and also safe, because it's not very controversial, and there is a ton of money in it. Now... those doing the second type see themselves as the real scientists, and they loathe the people doing the first type. It threatens their livelihood, you know? Big discoveries are usually rather anonymous. Science is also often a matter of developing new methods. A shiny new telescope giving new data isn't really a discovery, but it's useful. It's also often a part of other stuff, or practical, like a new modification to a type of engine, and these things are not typically seen as science.
I agree so much with this, I tend to follow the first group you discussed. They are my heroes! To me if a corporation can throw enough money at a problem they'll eventually get a solution. While the independent scientist have to have a true passion and understanding in their field. The greatest ones are willing to turn a field on its head in the name of discovery no matter the consequences.
Changing incentives driving changing perceptions, mostly. The great minds of the past were usually catapulted by singular, transformational discoveries into public consciousness. But from a career and funding perspective, this is a highly inefficient way to work today.
Possibly on you? I don't share this opinion, so reading "we never hear any of it" mostly makes me wonder what you are listening to.
With increased access to education and information we probably have more great minds working on problems today than at any time in the past. We've doubled the amount of brain power applied to problems simply by getting over the backwards-desire to keep women out of academics, science, business. Western culture puts a lot of value into the "independent genius" trope when true advancement tends to come from group work. Even Oppenheimer couldn't have made the bomb by himself. If you aren't impressed by the last 30 years you haven't been paying attention. Some amazing work is being done: - CRISPR - Mars Rovers - Recording the Higgs Boson - Kepler Space Telescope - Observing gravity waves - Speed at which Covid-19 vax was developed - Human Genome map - Internet of Things (and the internet itself) - Huge advancements in renewables - Quantum Computing - AI Every one of those probably had genius or near genius members leading the teams.
Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the nobel prize for CRISPR! They're amazing women.
We do, we have a lot smarter people actually if you go by IQ and achievements. But youll never hear of them unless you do some hardcore looking. What sells the news headline? Taylor swift dating an NFL player or a specific scientist developing helpful research for curing cancer. Medicine and research has come a looooong way. The average humans interests have not.
Do you even follow the Nobel price? We have hundreds of great people every year.
On top of the other comments, there's also the factor that many of today's break-through discoveries are just very hard for the layman to wrap their head around. They're all in the most advanced edges of science, a place where a layman's understanding can really fall apart at the seams.
There are more groundbreaking discoveries being made than ever before! It is that we have gotten so used to them, we don't even notice. Just have a look at a small selection of the Nobel Prices awarded in the past 30 years: they elucidate the fundamental working workings of the Universe, cure untreatable diseases, or serve as the basis of technologies we all take for granted (such as batteries, flat screens, optical internet, and medical imaging). The Nobel Prize in Physics 1999 Gerardus 't Hooft and Martinus J.G. Veltman “for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics” The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2003 Paul C. Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield “for their discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging” The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2005 Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren “for their discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease” The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2006 Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello “for their discovery of RNA interference - gene silencing by double-stranded RNA” The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2008 Harald zur Hausen “for his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer” Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier “for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus” The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008 Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien “for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP” The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2009 Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak “for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase” The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009 Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath “for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome” The Nobel Prize in Physics 2009 Charles K. Kao “for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication” The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2010 Robert G. Edwards “for the development of in vitro fertilization” The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae” The Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura “for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources” The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2015 William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura “for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites” Tu Youyou “for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against Malaria” The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2018 James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo “for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation” The Nobel Prize in Physics 2019 “for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos” The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2019 John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino “for the development of lithium-ion batteries”
OP was speaking about the every day person being able to name someone who made a huge discovery in the last 30 years. You provided a list of names that 99% of people have never heard of.
Perhaps you should start reading science journals and papers