I get really tired of Einstein being portrayed as if he’s the greatest scientist who ever lived, when he doesn’t even belong in that conversation. If Einstein never existed, the fields he was in were already moving strongly in the directions of his conclusions. If Maxwell or Newton had never existed, the world today would be quite different.
Yeah, once you dig into economics, technology and science of the era it often feels like the big discoveries were inevitable. That doesn't make these people any less great, it's just to say there are many more great thinkers that people are forgetting about.
But I'd like more explanation as to why Maxwell or Newton are any less replaceable: all 4 of "Maxwell's equations" have other names attached to them (the exception is Ampere-Maxwell law [1] which Maxwell contributed an important term to), and Newton had a number of contemporaries who were making similar discoveries but are often forgotten.
Einstein did a lot, he not only published the special and general theories of relativity, he also contributed to quantum physics and was the first to deduce the size of an atom using statistical arguments, essentially proving the existence of atoms.
The size of an atom was computed for the first time 40 years earlier, in 1865, by Johann Josef Loschmidt, who was an Austrian scientist.
Loschmidt had determined the value of what today is called "Avogadro's number", despite the fact that Avogadro had no idea about how one could find the value at that number. The contribution of Avogadro had been the law that ideal gases have the same number of molecules per volume when the pressure and the temperature are the same, but he did not know how that number might be determined.
Based on the results of Loschmidt, which were also used by Maxwell in his works on statistical physics, a few years later, in 1874, George Johnstone Stoney computed the value of the elementary electric charge, which he later named "electron".
Loschmidt was the one who first measured and weighed the atoms, establishing their existence beyond any reasonable doubt. Before him, many believed that the hypothesis of Dalton about the existence of atoms is just a convenient theory for explaining the laws of chemistry, but some other better explanation might be discovered in the future.
Einstein published an explanation of the Brownian motion, which verified that everything fits in the known theories and it matches the expected values. It did not contain any novel number or law, but it was a useful confirmation of the current theories.
In my opinion, the greatest achievement of Einstein has been the paper published by him in which he revealed the existence of the stimulated emission of electromagnetic waves by hot bodies, besides their well known absorption and spontaneous emission.
This paper had tremendous practical applications, leading to the discovery of masers and lasers, without which the modern technology would have never existed.
While Einstein's theory of gravitation was more intellectually challenging, its practical applications are minor, almost negligible. Moreover, even after more than a century we do not know exactly how adequate it is for describing gravitation.
What is certain is that Einstein's theory of gravitation cannot be anything else but an approximation, as it is based on averaging the distribution of matter in space, without taking into account the concentration of matter into elementary particles.
Another contribution of Einstein that is more important than his most frequently cited works is his support for Satyendra Nath Bose, which lead to the recognition of the Bose-Einstein statistics, which together with the Fermi-Dirac statistics plays an essential role in quantum physics.
I don't understand all this dismissal of Einstein. What you just described is that he published a unified theory of Brownian motion, developed a new way of conceptualizing scientific theories via principles with which he derived special and general relativity, contributed foundational work to quantum mechanics, and more, but no, he was not one of humanities' greatest scientists.
What I have written is not a dismissal of Einstein. On the contrary, I have said that Einstein is the source of a few extremely important discoveries, but those are not the theories cited by most people, who have never read the original work of Einstein but speak about him from hearsay.
As I have written above, when speaking about Einstein, almost nobody mentions the discovery of stimulated emission, which has been far more important than anything else done by Einstein. Einstein did not discover special relativity, the photoelectric effect or Brownian motion. He just provided alternative explanations for them, which did not include any new formula or quantity.
On the other hand, stimulated emission was a surprise, even if it is one of those things that appears to be obvious in retrospect, but for decades nobody who studied the blackbody radiation had noticed that something is missing in the equations.
This discovery eventually lead to the invention of masers and lasers and today there exists almost nothing that incorporates modern technology and which could exist without lasers.
Already for decades, no modern integrated circuits, no CPU and no memory can be fabricated without using lasers. Even many purely mechanical things, but which require great precision, cannot be fabricated without using measurement instruments that depend on lasers.
So the contributions of Einstein are very important, but they are not those that most people associate with him. Besides stimulated emission his most original work was his theory of gravitation, a.k.a. general relativity, but if he had not developed it that might have changed nothing, because Hilbert had developed an equivalent theory almost simultaneously, so had Einstein not published first, Hilbert would have become its discoverer.
After stimulated emission, the most important in practice research of Einstein is the Bose-Einstein statistics. But again, here like for special relativity, the statistics had been discovered by someone else, i.e. by Bose. Einstein has nonetheless the great merit of understanding its value. He demonstrated that the statistics was much more generally applicable than initially believed by Bose and his authority convinced everybody about its importance.
Thus there is no doubt that Einstein is one of the most important physicists of the 20th century. Nevertheless, there are dozens who made similarly important discoveries, e.g. Sommerfeld, Dirac, de Broglie, Schroedinger, Fermi, Rutherford and many others.
That voting has obviously been done by people who have never read the original texts of the people for whom they have voted.
Einstein is indeed one of the most important physicists of the 20th century, but it is really meaningless to try to establish a hierarchy between physicists, because their works are like open-source programs, each work is based on the works of the predecessors and it would have been impossible to do without those previous works.
In any case, Einstein was good, but Maxwell seems really superior in the sense that he could extract the essential information from the much more confuse sources that were available at his time.
The Treatise of Electricity of Magnetism of Maxwell and his collected papers are very instructive lectures even now and there are fragments of them that remain better than the equivalent fragments in many modern textbooks, despite the huge additional information that we have today.
Most of the original texts written by Einstein are now of interest only for understanding the details of how his thinking and that of the contemporaneous physicists have evolved during those important years, but those texts have little other importance except for history, because later better expositions of the same material have appeared. Nonetheless, it is important to also read Einstein's originals, because in many later books there are some inappropriate interpretations attributed to Einstein, but in reality Einstein had said something else and which was more correct than what some later author misunderstood.
> he could extract the essential information from the much more confuse sources that were available at his time
Wasn't this the case with Einstein's relativity as well? From what I understand the maths for it was already developed for many years, but Einstein was the first to tie it all together into a cohesive theory. Ideas like there being no absolute time, speed of light being constant in all frames, seem like a pretty big conceptual leap. I don't know how scientists at the time reacted to it, but defying Newtonian laws at a time when it was considered absolutely sacrosanct, must have been a big deal.
We see the same with general relativity, with ideas like saying gravity and acceleration is the same thing. I think what really impresses people is the radical nature of these ideas, which completely upheaval long-standing, prevailing notions. To do something like that once would be pretty remarkable by itself. But to do it twice, and in both cases, resulting in a new framework that will become the basis for nearly everything else, surely must put them in the conversation for the greatest at the very least.
Calling my comment a “temper tantrum” is the exact kind of behavior you’d expect of a Redditor. You may be projecting.
Einstein’s fame isn’t the problem. It’s the narrative that he is somehow the greatest scientist ever, when it’s just transparently false when you look at his actual contributions and the historical momentum of the fields he contributed to. There’s nothing wrong with his fame, the problem is that it overshadows actual juggernauts, like Maxwell and Newton. Maxwell not being famous at all among the ordinary public is a great tragedy, when he genuinely is in the conversation as having have been the most important physicist to have ever lived.
