Animals & Nature2 mins ago
Einstein vs Newton
The Royal Society have a little vote going on as to who the greatest scientist was Einstein vs Newton
http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=3848
Not to sway anybody of course - but are you kidding!? Newton's work was unbelievable when you consider what was there before hand.
OK he acted like a spoilt teenager all his life but nobodies perfect!
Or am I wrong?
Answers
No best answer has yet been selected by jake-the-peg. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.Now Gallileo vs Newton is a fight.
Gallileo was starting from a much lower baseline in established scientific though and (almost) had the guts to stand up to the church to say it.
OK he didn't invent the telescope but he made a version that was usable. Sunspots, craters on the moon imagine being the first human to see Saturn's rings!. Pendulums and canon-balls falling at the same speed as pebbles - they must have thought he was mad with that one.
JCM 's a fine candidate CT but I think you have to ask if these people had not lived how long would it have been before the world caught up an I have to say with some of the people who were about at the tail end of the nineteenth century I don't think he'd have been missed long
Einstein didn't understand _why_ the speed of light is constant, he just agreed that it is, and hence you get all your weird SR effects like time dilation. still, no-one really knows _why_ c is constant.
then you could also say that Einstein used the mathematical tools of Riemann, or Lorentz. all sorts of things like that. and Maxwell took other people's work (Faraday, Gauss, etc.) and just made them nice and incorporated them into one single theory. Still a bit of a genius, but I think its important to stress that no one man can be attributed to the discovery of any one thing. Its a process over time, with several people making jumps.
Dirac is also high up there too; his work on quantum mechanics is the only stuff that made Einstein consider QM seriously (despite the fact he helped partially to discover it, with his photoelectric effect).
Cue screams of rage from all and sundry.