Text 26473, 39 rader
Skriven 2012-03-06 13:41:24 av Björn Felten (2:203/2)
  Kommentar till text 26437 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
Ärende: In God We Trust ...
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 MvdV> The irony is that his very own theory of photo emission - the one that
 MvdV> got him the Nobel prize - already had the pointers for the theory of
 MvdV> quantum mechanics in it. But Einstein did not see it, it took the guys
 MvdV> from Kopenhagen to do that.

   Yeah, I know. He, like a lot of other scientists of those days, had all the
dots on the paper in front of him, but his religious belief prevented him from
connecting the dots. Alas, as I said, that's what religious brainwashing can do
even to great minds.

 MvdV> If Einstein had not invented relativity
 MvdV> someone else would have. All the experiments providing the pointer had
 MvdV> been done and Maxwell and Lorentz were very close. The time was ripe for
 MvdV> the idea.

   This cannot be emphasized strongly enough, now that the big, multinational
corporations are putting a blanket of patent trolls over the entire scientific
development of the world -- giving the BRIC countries a huge advantage, since
they refuse to play along with the US controlled alphabet soup.

   Every single idea a human being has, is *always* based on previous ideas. We
all stand on the shoulders of previous generations. No single idea or invention
-- or piece of music, movie, book or whatever for that matter -- has sprung out
of the blue. *That* is why it's so utterly stupid to claim ownership of an
idea.

 MvdV> I rate Niels Bohr way above Einstein.

   And so, I think, do almost every other scientificly interested person.
Bohr's only "problem" was that he was Danish and not USAian, I think. :)

 MvdV> I doubt it would have made much difference.

   Come to think of it, I think I'll have to agree. The ideas were there
already, it was just a matter of who would "publish" the ideas first. A few
months more or less would probably have meant rather little.

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