DesertFox
03-05-2006, 02:38 PM
Tony Rothman
American Scientist Online
March/April 2006 edition
Now that the worldwide celebrations marking Einstein's miraculous achievements of 1905 are over, let's take a moment to light a candle to the runners-up, those poor fellows who were hot on Einstein's heels, who almost got it right and perhaps would have, but who've been lost in the shadow of his great triumphs. It is true; Einstein was not the only person at the turn of the last century thinking about molecules and relativity. What's more, he was up on much of their work and, like any scientist, stood on the shoulders of his predecessors.
The central fixture of Einstein lore is that the lowly patent clerk conjured from pure thought not only his theories but also the questions they answered. Not quite: Einstein himself helped foster this myth (more through carelessness than design, one suspects) by being less than fastidious about providing references in his papers, and since then credulous scientists have equated absence of evidence with evidence of absence. Physicists are notorious for taking history on faith, but none is required to prove this point—the evidence is in plain sight if one cares to look. The papers of Einstein and his contemporaries, as well as Einstein's letters, are published. Anyone who reads them quickly realizes that Einstein had a very good sense of the currents of science swirling about him and once or twice relied on the insights of colleagues. ...
Not long ago I had the opportunity to give a colloquium on these and related matters at a major university. Among the 50 or so physicists in the audience, not one had read Einstein's original papers, yet alone Poincaré's. As I said, physicists are notorious for taking history on faith. Such insouciance, though, has not stopped physicists from repeating for several generations the usual platitudes about the history of their field. One might make a case that science is inherently anhistorical—certainly recent editions of undergraduate physics texts are entirely bereft of meaningful history. But if the history of science has any relevance to the doing of it, surely it is to remind us that science is a collective enterprise and to engender in us a humble awareness that the landscape of science would appear very different had the vast unrecognized majority never existed.
More (http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/49611?&print=yes)
American Scientist Online
March/April 2006 edition
Now that the worldwide celebrations marking Einstein's miraculous achievements of 1905 are over, let's take a moment to light a candle to the runners-up, those poor fellows who were hot on Einstein's heels, who almost got it right and perhaps would have, but who've been lost in the shadow of his great triumphs. It is true; Einstein was not the only person at the turn of the last century thinking about molecules and relativity. What's more, he was up on much of their work and, like any scientist, stood on the shoulders of his predecessors.
The central fixture of Einstein lore is that the lowly patent clerk conjured from pure thought not only his theories but also the questions they answered. Not quite: Einstein himself helped foster this myth (more through carelessness than design, one suspects) by being less than fastidious about providing references in his papers, and since then credulous scientists have equated absence of evidence with evidence of absence. Physicists are notorious for taking history on faith, but none is required to prove this point—the evidence is in plain sight if one cares to look. The papers of Einstein and his contemporaries, as well as Einstein's letters, are published. Anyone who reads them quickly realizes that Einstein had a very good sense of the currents of science swirling about him and once or twice relied on the insights of colleagues. ...
Not long ago I had the opportunity to give a colloquium on these and related matters at a major university. Among the 50 or so physicists in the audience, not one had read Einstein's original papers, yet alone Poincaré's. As I said, physicists are notorious for taking history on faith. Such insouciance, though, has not stopped physicists from repeating for several generations the usual platitudes about the history of their field. One might make a case that science is inherently anhistorical—certainly recent editions of undergraduate physics texts are entirely bereft of meaningful history. But if the history of science has any relevance to the doing of it, surely it is to remind us that science is a collective enterprise and to engender in us a humble awareness that the landscape of science would appear very different had the vast unrecognized majority never existed.
More (http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/49611?&print=yes)