Relativity comes to mind.
You could nitpick a rebuttal, but no matter how many people you give credit, general relativity was a completely novel idea when it was proposed. I'd argue for special relatively as well.
Relativity comes to mind.
You could nitpick a rebuttal, but no matter how many people you give credit, general relativity was a completely novel idea when it was proposed. I'd argue for special relatively as well.
I am not a scientific historian, or even a physicist, but IMO relativity has a weak case for being a completely novel discovery. Critique of absolute time and space of Newtonian physics was already well underway, and much of the methodology for exploring this relativity (by way of gyroscopes, inertial reference frames, and synchronized mechanical clocks) were already in parlance. Many of the phenomena that relativity would later explain under a consistent framework already had independent quasi-explanations hinting at the more universal theory. Poincare probably came the closest to unifying everything before Einstein:
> In 1902, Henri Poincaré published a collection of essays titled Science and Hypothesis, which included: detailed philosophical discussions on the relativity of space and time; the conventionality of distant simultaneity; the conjecture that a violation of the relativity principle can never be detected; the possible non-existence of the aether, together with some arguments supporting the aether; and many remarks on non-Euclidean vs. Euclidean geometry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity
Now, if I had to pick a major idea that seemed to drop fully-formed from the mind of a genius with little precedent to have guided him, I might personally point to Galois theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois_theory). (Ironically, though, I'm not as familiar with the mathematical history of that time and I may be totally wrong!)
Right on with special relativity—Lorentz also was developing the theory and was a bit sour that Einstein got so much credit. Einstein basically said “what if special relativity were true for all of physics”, not just electromagnetism, and out dropped e=mc^2. It was a bold step but not unexplainable.
As for general relativity, he spent several years working to learn differential geometry (which was well developed mathematics at the time, but looked like abstract nonsense to most physicists). I’m not sure how he was turned on to this theory being applicable to gravity, but my guess is that it was motivated by some symmetry ideas. (It always come down to symmetry.)
Your argument really makes the claim that since there are others pursuing similar directions that this means it is in distribution. I'll use a classic statistics style framing. Suppose we have a bag with n red balls and p blue balls. Someone walks over and says "look, I have a green ball" and someone else walks over and says "I have a purple one" and someone else comes over and says "I have a pink one!". None of those balls were from the bag we have. There are still n+p balls in our bag, they are still all red or blue despite there being n+p+3 balls that we know of.
I think this is probably why you don't have the resolution to see the distinctions. Without a formal study of physics it is really hard to differentiate these kinds of propositions. It can be very hard even with that education. So be careful to not overly abstract and simplify concepts. It'll only deprive you of a lot of beauty and innovation.To be clear, I don't think coming up with relativity was "in distribution" based on the results of the time. I would be exceedingly surprised if an LLM trained on all of the physics up until that point and nothing else would come up with the framework that Einstein did, from such elegant first principles at that. Without handholding from a prompter, I expect an LLM (or non-critical human thinker) would only parrot the general consensus of confusion and non-uniformity that predominated in that era.
I only believe that (1) if it hadn't been Einstein, it would very soon have been someone else using very similar concepts and evidence, (2) "completely novel idea" is a stricter criterion than "not in distribution," and (3) better examples of completely novel ideas from history exist as a benchmark for this sort of things.
> Without a formal study of physics it is really hard to differentiate these kinds of propositions. It can be very hard even with that education. So be careful to not overly abstract and simplify concepts. It'll only deprive you of a lot of beauty and innovation.
I agree, but with the caveat that I think ancestor worship is also an impediment to understanding our intellectual and cultural heritage. Either all of human creativity deserves to be treated sacredly, or none of it does.
From that article:
> The quintic was almost proven to have no general solutions by radicals by Paolo Ruffini in 1799, whose key insight was to use permutation groups, not just a single permutation.
Thing is, I am usually the kind of person who defends the idea of a lone genius. But I also believe there is a continuous spectrum, no gaps, from the village idiot to Einstein and beyond.
Let me introduce, just for fun, not for the sake of any argument, another idea from math which I think it came really out of the blue, to the degree that it's still considered an open problem to write an exposition about it, since you cannot smoothly link it to anything else: forcing.
Newton himself wrote that we usually deal with relative space and time, but we can imagine absolute time and space.
Yes, the principle of relativity was known to Newton, but the other idea, that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames, was new, counterintuitive, and what makes special relativity the way it is.
In my view, another example would be Gautama Buddha, with Dependent Origination. It’s basically a super early realisation of Process Philosophy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da https://iep.utm.edu/processp/
Edit: but even it likely relied on his prior experience with nondualistic Hinduisms, of course.
Agreed.
General relativity was a completely novel idea. Einstein took a purely mathematical object (now known as the Einstein tensor), and realized that since its coveriant derivative was zero, it could be equated (apart fron a constant factor) to a conserved physical object, the energy momentum tensor (except for a constant factor). It didn't just fall out of Riemannian geometry and what was known about physics at the time.
Special relativity was the work of several scientists as well as Einstein, but it was also a completely novel idea - just not the idea of one person working alone.
I don't know why anyone disputes that people can sometimes come up with completely novel ideas out of the blue. This is how science moves forward. It's very easy to look back on a breakthrough and think it looks obvious (because you know the trick that was used), but it's important to remember that the discoverer didn't have the benefit of hindsight that you have.
Even if I grant you that, surely we’ve moved the goal posts a bit if we’re saying the only thing we can think of that AI can’t do is the life’s work of a man who’s last name is literally synonymous with genius.
That's not exactly true. Lorentz contraction is a clear antecedent to special relativity.
It isn't an anteceent, it's part of special relativity, discovered by Lorentz. It's well known that special relativity is the work of several people as well as Einstein.
Not really. Pretty sure I read recently that Newton appreciated that his theory was non-local and didn't like what Einstein later called "spooky action at a distance". The Lorentz transform was also known from 1887. Time dilation was understood from 1900. Poincaré figured out in 1905 that it was a mathematical group. Einstein put a bow on it all by figuring out that you could derive it from the principle of relativity and keeping the speed of light constant in all inertial reference frames.
I'm not sure about GR, but I know that it is built on the foundations of differential geometry, which Einstein definitely didn't invent (I think that's the source of his "I assure you whatever your difficulties in mathematics are, that mine are much greater" quote because he was struggling to understand Hilbert's math).
And really Cauchy, Hilbert, and those kinds of mathematicians I'd put above Einstein in building entirely new worlds of mathematics...
Are you saying Newton was aware of quantum entanglement? Because that's what the "spooky action at a distance" quote refers to.
Newton wrote, "That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it."
Source: https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THE...
Agree with you everywhere. Although I prefer the quote:
"Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore."
:)