For example, if Isaac Newton was somehow transported to modern times and dropped off at NASA, could he be brought up to speed and be making contributions to the space program in a year or so.
For example, if Isaac Newton was somehow transported to modern times and dropped off at NASA, could he be brought up to speed and be making contributions to the space program in a year or so.
Of course. The dude invented calculus, after all.
No of course not. it would take him too long to catch up with modern knowledge. He doesn't even know quantum mechanics.
Hello? wrote:
Of course. The dude invented calculus, after all.
Seriously! Think about all the kids that struggled in your intro to calculus class learning calculus out of a book, and then think that Newton didn't learn calculus - he sat down and MADE IT UP (or discovered it, depending on your philosophical views)!
He would want to contribute; unfortunately diversity quotas meant he probably would have been screened out
deluded wrote:
He would want to contribute; unfortunately diversity quotas meant he probably would have been screened out
True most of the giants of the modern scientific age were either jewish or white men, he'd need to apply under a different racial or ethnic origin.
someone posted a very astute comment a while back along the lines of :
"the top guys in the science fields are as smart as your einsteins/newtons/euler/gauss/etc but knowledge is so deep now & so much of the research has been done that these guys are only left to make small advances in knowledge, none of which is going to make newspaper headlines - the einsteins coudn't do any better than what these guys are doing now"
this does sound spot on to me
ventolin^3 wrote:
someone posted a very astute comment a while back along the lines of :
"the top guys in the science fields are as smart as your einsteins/newtons/euler/gauss/etc but knowledge is so deep now & so much of the research has been done that these guys are only left to make small advances in knowledge, none of which is going to make newspaper headlines - the einsteins coudn't do any better than what these guys are doing now"
this does sound spot on to me
Scientific advances make headlines all the time.
i don't see "extra string discovered in superstring theory" appearing on any frontpages...
Concerned Citizen wrote:
Scientific advances make headlines all the time.
95% of the "science" that makes the news is pseudo-science and sensationalism. Real science makes it to publication in scientific journals.
ventolin^3 wrote:
someone posted a very astute comment a while back along the lines of :
"the top guys in the science fields are as smart as your einsteins/newtons/euler/gauss/etc but knowledge is so deep now & so much of the research has been done that these guys are only left to make small advances in knowledge, none of which is going to make newspaper headlines - the einsteins coudn't do any better than what these guys are doing now"
this does sound spot on to me
This is pretty dumb to say. We have no idea of what will be discovered in the next couple hundred years.
Tough to say. Newton and Einstein could spend their time theorizing and making scientific discoveries. They didn't have to worry about writing grants in an ultra-competitive environment and hoping to get funded, dealing with bone-headed peer-reviewers, spending years working for somebody else as a PhD student or post doc, then spending 10 years trying to get tenure.
I think Stephen Hawking is an example of a modern genius who has proven he could do amazing things, despite developing a disabling disease along the way.
You never know what the next issue of Nature holds...
Genius = obscure interests and intense drive
Nah, they would probably get too caught up in Tweeting and Facebook to make any real contributions.
There is always room for another top guy and knowledge in fields like biology is incredibly shallow. Any genius would have no problem making an impact.
i like this thread.
i don't think its fair to say that all top scientists are as smart as the eistein's/newton's/gauss' of the past. thats kinda ridiculous. there are more top scientists now and yes it is harder to make the kind of ground breaking discoveries and contributions to humanity that they did. but that doesn't mean that top scientists today would have done these great things if they had been born 100 or 300 years ago.
geniuses always stand above the rest of the "highly intelligent" crowd. there is more knowledge to acquire today, so it takes longer to catch up with all the knowledge, but still genius will always shine through the rest of the field.
i think if a great scientist of the past were reborn today with the same dedication and whatnot they would rise to the top of their field, they probably wouldn't make the completely revolutionary discoveries that they made in the past, but no doubt they would be breaking new ground. i mean how many scientists today do you think could've have come up with calculus all on their own, or pulled the special and general theory of relativity out of their imagination. it takes a special genius to do such things.
Probably not. In his day with Liebnitz, Newton simplified understanding but like all mathematicians and scientists he relied on numerous past achievements from Persia, Eqypt, Greece, India, Arabia, China, etc.
Yeah for sure
I would be scared to think of what those scientists today would do. Although I agree that the grant writing and bs that goes with it would weigh on them initially (undergrad to early grad), they would break through that due to their shear brilliance and become respected so quickly that their names alone would allow the grants. Newton was crazy smart. Sometimes I can't believe how much those guys did with what little they had. Figuring out the charge of electrons, the gravitational constant, the structure of atoms, all of it with little to no technology. Imagine what those intellects could've done with what we have now, a lot of which wouldn't of been possible without them.
I would most like to see what Tesla would've done with unlimited funding in todays world. Einstein would require a lot more time to come up with his universal theory, which he worked on for so long but never attained. Crazy advances occur every day and we never hear about them, especially in physics. All the quantum entrapment type experiments blow my mind and have implications most lay people would sooner discredit as inaccurate than believe.
N1L N2L N3L wrote:
Probably not. In his day with Liebnitz, Newton simplified understanding but like all mathematicians and scientists he relied on numerous past achievements from Persia, Eqypt, Greece, India, Arabia, China, etc.
North America with the Olmecs and Mayas.
The question is invalid since their achievements were in the context of their respective time periods. A better question would be, if the same individuals were born in modern times, would they be able to make proportionate contributions today? Perhaps not, because as knowledge advances, there's less new knowledge remaining to be discovered. But since intelligence is genetic, they would still be be intellectual giants many standard deviations smarter than average, with the potential to reach the top of their respective fields.