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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The 75th World Science Fiction Convention (commonly known as WorldCon) is being held this weekend in Helsinki, Finland. The convention is where the annual Hugo Awards are presented, and today, the convention announced the latest recipients.
This year, women almost completely swept the Hugo Awards, taking home the top prizes for literature in the science fiction community. That's particularly notable, given how the awards have been increasingly recognizing works from female and minority creators. The trend prompted a counter-movement from two group of fans, the self-described "Sad Puppies," and their alt-right equivalents, the "Rabid Puppies." These groups gamed the awards and forced a slate of nominees onto the Hugo ballot in 2015, prompting widespread backlash within the wider genre community. Another award, the Dragon, faced similar issues earlier this week when several authors asked to pull their nominations over concerns about Puppy interference and the award's integrity.
This year's sweep by female creators seems to be a strong repudiation of anti-diversity groups. 2017 also marked the year the ceremony earned its own award: a representative from the Guinness Book of World Records certified that the Hugos are the longest-running science fiction awards ever.
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(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 16 2017, @04:29PM (3 children)
most of the science work I am familiar with was largely advanced by the crowd of plodders rather than the flashes of brilliance. If Einstein had died in childhood, others would very likely have produced the same work in a similar timeframe.
I seriously doubt it. I think a lot of science and technology really depends on a "flash of brilliance" to get to the next stage, because the plodders are generally content to stick with what they know and not challenge prevailing norms and conventional wisdom too much. But the plodders are needed to take the revolutionary stuff the brilliant people come up with and refine it and develop it into more useful forms. The plodders won't come up with the brilliant ideas, but they'll accept them once they're exposed to them, and do the hard work needed to advance them further. They each serve an essential purpose.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Thursday August 17 2017, @09:56AM (2 children)
With regards to Einstein's relativity theory:
- Galileo already had discussed relativity [tau.ac.il].
- Lorentz had already figured out contraction due to velocity [wikipedia.org] - which strongly suggests a link between time and space.
- The Michelson-Morley experiment [wikipedia.org] had paved the way for Lorentz transformation [wikipedia.org], which paved the way for special relativity (which paved the way for general relativity).
In other words: special relativity was brewing around the start of the 20th century. Add to that:
- The perihelion procession of Mercury was by Einstein's time well-documented, and clearly observations were not in accordance with Newtonian gravity.
- The development of special relativity in 1905
and you start wondering about incorporating gravity into special relativity.
(that feat was much more remarkable than special relativity, by the way. Much less "shoulders of giants" to stand on -- but raising the question was obvious)
With regard to the photoelectric effect (for which Einstein was awarded a Nobel prize):
- it was a clearly defined open problem
- it used Planck's discovery of E = h v (which basically started quantum mechanics) to explain this effect.
Are Einstein's results less remarkable for these reasons? I don't believe so - this is just putting his achievements in (some of) their proper historical context. It's beyond remarkable what he has achieved - but so are the achievements of other scientists from his day, less well-known today.
(Case in point: Wolfgang Pauli explained [wikipedia.org] why you don't fall through a chair, even though there's all this open space in atoms making up the chair and making up you. It also happens to explain why neutron stars aren't black holes.)
Moreover,
At the start of the 20th century, there were a few experiments scientists could perform in a reasonably simple lab that they could not explain. Moreover, it was still possible for an exceptionally smart person to know a lot of/most/all of known physics. Compared to contemporary research, some of the significant questions that arose back then were relatively obvious: "why does Mercury not move the way it should?" "Why does electricity come out of this experiment in the wrong way?" etc.
Right now, a lot of well-publicized physics research involves things happening far in outer space (gamma ray bursts) or in big friggin' machines on Earth (LHC, ITER, NIF). None of which a research team could easily take home and play with.
Oh, and
Depends on your definition of brilliant. Maxwell did brilliant work in electromagnetism. His results were wonderful... and more or less unusable.
Along comes Oliver Heaviside, who reorganises [wikipedia.org] Maxwell's results into the four famous Maxwell equations. That reorganisation may have been "plodding" work, but without that work Maxwell's results would have remained unused by most physicists.
Caveat: At the Dunning-Kruger scale of understanding physics, I'm probably at the bottom. So go out and read about this stuff yourself :)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 17 2017, @01:51PM (1 child)
I think this is going to come down to an argument over who's a "plodder" and who's "brilliant". You mention that several other prominent people were close to discovering what Einstein did; but weren't those people also possibly part of the "brilliant" group? I misworded what I said before with "I seriously doubt it"; what I really meant to dispute is the idea that physics would have developed Einstein's theories without someone as brilliant as Einstein, not Einstein himself. Sure, without him, some other brilliant person could have come up with it before long. But without any brilliant people, I'm not so sure. My claim is that the brilliant ones are necessary to make these big advances.
As for Heaviside, that makes a good case for my prior assertion that both types of people are necessary (if we assume that Heaviside really was a "plodder" and not at all "brilliant").
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Thursday August 17 2017, @02:12PM
Ah, I believe we are actually agreeing :)
I guess I was putting the barrier for "brilliant" a bit high - but if this category encompasses the likes of Pauli, de Broglie, Lorentz, Born, Heisenberg, Bohr, Rutherford, etc, (all of whom were quite impressive) then yes, absolutely, without such folks, scientific progress would grind to a halt.
Just to be clear: I would not want to label Heaviside a plodder in general. His work in cleaning up the Maxwell equations can be considered "plodding" though (as I understand things).