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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.

somenameforme an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You are mistaken on Einstein's past. He went from taking a 4 year teaching program to searching for an academic position for [literally] years. Nobody wanted him. He'd independently published one paper that he himself would describe was rubbish, and that was the extent of his academic experience. Even with his position at the patent office - he only managed to get that job through a friend, and even there was passed up for promotion due to apparent lack of competence. If you were to rank people who were likely to influence, let alone revolutionize science, he absolutely would not have been on the list.

And you can't really compare Einstein's achievement to anybody else, literally. The reason is not even because of the science itself, which really isn't that complex in hindsight, but a mixture of him solving such a pressing question that nobody else had "seen" as a possibility, alongside with its impact expanding far outside the academic world. Before Einstein our understanding of the universe was one of relative normality. He made it clear that the universe is unimaginably weird.

I do think the comparison with dark energy/matter is appropriate. Imagine a complete unknown, outside of academia, came out with something that not only completely cleanly explained these mysteries, but did so in a way that essentially required discarding everything we thought we knew about the universe. And by we I don't mean some people working in an abstract esoteric field that 99.999% of people have no idea even exists, but humanity. That is literally the level of what Einstein achieved, and it may not even be possible again - because it's sort of a 'right time, right place' type combination.

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And this gets back to the point. Science, so far as persisting in the public mind, isn't about pushing some esoteric field forward, but about advancing humanity. If Einstein instead lived today, it's entirely possible he'd be just another competent academic making some advances, mostly of academic value, in some abstract and esoteric field. And people in 100 years would be none the wiser he even existed. The only way to escape this fate is to engage extensively in outreach. E.g. - Carl Sagan lives on not because of his achievements, but because of his public outreach. To a lesser degree the same is true of Feynman.

philipallstar 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> because, let's face it, she was a woman

I don't think this is at all true. The reason you've heard of Grace Hopper or Ada Lovelace is precisely because they're women. No man who achieved similar levels of significant work is remembered outside of some niche publications.

> 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

It just seems unlikely that Noether has several times done what Newton and Einstein did and she's so unknown. Why do I know about much less prolific women and not her, if sexism is the actual reason, and not just a thought-terminating word?

sfn42 a few seconds ago | parent [-]

Maybe the people who decide which woman to hype haven't heard of her yet?