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The life’s work that proved Einstein right

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Re: The life’s work that proved Einstein right

#11

Post by zepto »

Artoemius wrote: post #9
maxander wrote: post #5

Man, the days when a kid without particular academic accomplishment could just be "guided" to MIT by a teacher impressed by his intelligence and passion. Or when a dropout could just wander into a physics lab and land a job as a research assistant. Neither sounds remotely feasible in 2016- these days, the available human potential and ambition outstrips society's resources to actualize it, by an order of magnitude. C…

On the other hand, there were the days when you had to be born into the right social caste to have any chance for an interesting life at all, otherwise being doomed to a lifetime of menial labor. I really do prefer our current situation to 99% of the history of mankind.

Those days are today: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/recruitm...

Re: The life’s work that proved Einstein right

#12

Post by tobinfricke »

I worked on LIGO as a graduate student, where I had the privilege of interacting with Rai Weiss. He is a role model for us all: brilliant, hard-working, and human. After he retired from his teaching duties at MIT, he could often be found late at night in the electronics shop of our Louisiana lab, working to eek out a little more sensitivity in the detector, a half decibel by a half decibel. As a graduate student, I appreciated his sincere concern and advocacy for our dissertation work.

He also has wonderful stories from a long career in physics: inventing atomic clocks, launching balloons to map out the cosmic microwave background radiation, being pitched the proposed Space Shuttle program by Werner von Braun himself, serving on the JASON committee... He is probably too modest to write an autobiography, but it would be a captivating tale.

Re: The life’s work that proved Einstein right

#14

Post by tobinfricke »

jessriedel wrote: post #6

I wonder if "proving Einstein right/wrong" will still be the #1 clickbait headline for physics articles 100 years from now.

Of course -- it would be much more exciting to prove Einstein wrong.

Also, all the press about the detection of gravitational waves "proving Einstein right" is a bit funny in light of the fact that Einstein himself did not initially believe in the existence of gravitational waves.

Re: The life’s work that proved Einstein right

#15

Post by drdeca »

kmote00 wrote: post #8
CamperBob2 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why reward the paper (or its advertisers) for abusive practices?

Did somebody hit you over the head with a tent-pole, CamperBob? What abuse are you possibly talking about? This story is a tremendous work of journalism, crafted by an author who really ought to get paid for his work. Or do you work for free too?

If one believes that allowing pop-up ads (in particular, as opposed to ads in general) on one's site to be unethical, then what they said does not seem that unreasonable?

I'm not really agreeing with them, but I don't think their viewpoint is absurd.

It may be overestimating how harmful pop-up ads are, but , it doesn't seem /that/ unreasonable?

Re: The life’s work that proved Einstein right

#16

Post by venomsnake »

jessriedel wrote: post #6

I wonder if "proving Einstein right/wrong" will still be the #1 clickbait headline for physics articles 100 years from now.

I never got the reasons for the whole idolization/obsession with Einstein. Seeing all the guys that were his contemporaries - discovering fundamental stuff about the universe was a favorite pastime back then. I guess he was probably the first to break out as a celebrity.

Re: The life’s work that proved Einstein right

#17

Post by NhanH »

maxander wrote: post #5

Man, the days when a kid without particular academic accomplishment could just be "guided" to MIT by a teacher impressed by his intelligence and passion. Or when a dropout could just wander into a physics lab and land a job as a research assistant. Neither sounds remotely feasible in 2016- these days, the available human potential and ambition outstrips society's resources to actualize it, by an order of magnitude. C…

I thought about that the other day. Then I realized that the world is changing very fast these days, more likely than not the places that will become influential currently does NOT have any gatekeeper. It's just very tough to realize what they are if you're not used to ignoring social signals.

Think of YC back then in 2006. The main problem is that we only read and know about the path of people 50 years in the past, and nowadays, even 10 years could be too long of a timeframe for that to be applicable.

You still need to be lucky, but I hope it's easier (to be lucky) than we perceive

Re: The life’s work that proved Einstein right

#18

Post by deepnet »

venomsnake wrote: post #16
jessriedel wrote: post #6

I wonder if "proving Einstein right/wrong" will still be the #1 clickbait headline for physics articles 100 years from now.

I never got the reasons for the whole idolization/obsession with Einstein. Seeing all the guys that were his contemporaries - discovering fundamental stuff about the universe was a favorite pastime back then. I guess he was probably the first to break out as a celebrity.

Einstein's modification of Classical Newtonian Physics is still unparalled today.

Re: The life’s work that proved Einstein right

#19

Post by goldenkey »

deepnet wrote: post #18
venomsnake wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never got the reasons for the whole idolization/obsession with Einstein. Seeing all the guys that were his contemporaries - discovering fundamental stuff about the universe was a favorite pastime back then. I guess he was probably the first to break out as a celebrity.

Einstein's modification of Classical Newtonian Physics is still unparalled today.

But this infallible picture of Einstein almost discounts all the work the man put in. Yes, he was extremely intelligent but he also worked hard as hell to learn the mathematics necessary for his work in physics. And it took him years before he dropped the stubborn idea of a static universe because Hubble was able to see the galaxies outside our local group getting further away, an expanding universe no doubt. [1] It does everyone a favor these days, to actually know that Einstein's accomplishments are in reach for many fields like number theory and physics. Intelligence and creativity, an intuition and desire to understand what makes ones' heart/brain/physical body tick. I hate the bastardization of the immense work that Einstein undertook, he didn't just genius out these ideas. He worked for them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant

Re: The life’s work that proved Einstein right

#20

Post by venomsnake »

deepnet wrote: post #18
venomsnake wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never got the reasons for the whole idolization/obsession with Einstein. Seeing all the guys that were his contemporaries - discovering fundamental stuff about the universe was a favorite pastime back then. I guess he was probably the first to break out as a celebrity.

Einstein's modification of Classical Newtonian Physics is still unparalled today.

In his time we also had Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger - whose contributions are as foundational and unparallel too.

But nobody is the media is obsessed with proving Max Planck wrong. Or Schrodinger.

"Will scientists finally prove XXX wrong", XXX is always Einstein.

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