by RickTaylor » Fri 29 Apr 2005, 16:23:18
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('eastbay', '
')I'm really fascinated by the idea that Einstein may have stolen his ideas, as the book claims. Inquisitive minds... I suppose that's why many of us are here in the first place, because we question much of the stuff rammed down our throats every day.
Thanks,
EastBay
I think the problem here is that people have a distorted view of what science is about. They imagine scientists inventing whole new world views out of nothing. It almost never works that way. Darwin was not the first to come up with the ideas of natural selection and evolution for example, but that hardly lessens his accomplishment.
Einstein wasn't the first to write down the equation E=mc^2, or to talk about Lorentz contraction (which is why it's named after Lorentz). Most physicists and all historians of physics are perfectly aware of this, but because the general public has a distorted idea of how science works ('oh yeah, Einsten's famous because he came up with e=mc^2'), they feel Einstein must have done something wrong when things didn't occur they way they think they did.
All scientists build on the work of others. Even Newton, perhaps the greatest physicist who ever lived, said that if he saw further than others, it was because he stood on the shoulder's of giants. Is Newton a plagiarist because he wasn't the first to assert that gravity might obey an inverse square law, and that his could account for the planets moving in ellipses for example? It's certainly false to say Newton discovered gravity.
What Einstien did was very similar to Newton. He took a number of observations that other people had made in the context of electromagnetism, and put them all together into a coherent whole; in the process, he went beyond electromagnetism to rebuild the foundations of physcis from the ground up. It's a gross oversimplification to say that he's famous because he came up with the equation "e=mc^2".
If you're interested in this, I'd recommend reading a book on the history of science. "E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation" by David Bodanis looks like it might be good.
--Rick Taylor