▲ | somenameforme 12 hours ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||
Einstein's discovery explained a centuries old mystery that people, including every major mind of the time, were completely and fundamentally on the wrong track towards. All without being able to find any academic position that would have him - he was working as a low ranking patent inspector at the time. And that discovery completely reshaped physics, which many at the time thought had been mostly 'solved' and was down to a measuring game. I think a parallel would be if some random guy, outside of academia, completely and cleanly solved the dark energy/matter mystery in his spare time, with a revolutionary way of thinking, and it completely reshaped our understanding of not only the cosmos but of physics itself. Becoming well known for advanced works in science requires a once in many centuries type level of achievement - which is what Einstein was. Feynman is a great example of this. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest physicists of all time and made many important contributions to science, yet he would probably be relatively unknown if not for his excessive public outreach and his exceptional ability to explain complex concepts in an extremely intuitive and clear fashion. A talent which he put to extensive use. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
▲ | Wololooo 10 hours ago | parent [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||
Noether was one of a kind communicator and scientist and she should be more widely known because she is a role model for everyone. Einstein was just not a random person doing something, it was an academically trained person, still in contact with people from academia, with extreme talent and found himself in a situation with a lot more free time and in an environment that was promoting his thinking. Mind you it does not take anything away from the achievements because the overall work was astounding, but it is disingenuous to present him as "a random outside of academia". Noether was just not correctly widely recognized outside of the field, as much as she should have been at the time, because, let's face it, she was a woman. Her achievements are on par with Einstein's in term of scope and range. Noether's theorem alone is a huge cornerstone of modern physics and guiding the design of Quantum Field Theory and pinning symmetries as the way to tackle the building of physical Lagrangians that lead to the expression of the current standard model. Her work on algebra is so massive, it is hard to wrap your head around it, the contributions especially to rings and topology are to be mentioned. She has shaped so many parts of mathematics that it boggles the mind and her achievements are well within the once in a several centuries type of scope. I will not try to compare people because it is pointless because circumstances and "importance of achievements" is a difficult to measure metric, especially for people working outside of the fields where those achievements have been made, but subtly painting Noether as not widely known because she has not achieved "once in many centuries type level of achievement" or that she was not great at communicating, is blatantly false, because she has, in fact, several times over done both of those things. She was known to be gentle and gracious and always there to offer help and or advice or explanations, sharing her knowledge, and wisdom. She is one of those model scientist that any scientist, regardless of gender or ethnicity, should look up to as a role model, and she embodies what most of us think that science could and should be. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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