"I like to say that Einstein is, if anything, underrated as a physicist, which is hard to imagine given how highly he's rated. When we tell the history of physics, we try to keep things straight, and we can't remember everything, so we kind of give a lot of credit to a relatively small number of individuals, Einstein being one of them."
"Albert Einstein altered the way we think about reality itself, and we often think of him as the most important physicist. But even his breakthroughs were part of a larger, tangled conversation among scientists stretching from Aristotle to Maxwell to Minkowski. Sean Carroll, physicist and philosopher at Johns Hopkins University, traces how the universe emerged not from solitary genius, but from centuries of dialogue, error, and correction."
Scientific progress results from extended, messy interactions among many thinkers rather than isolated acts of genius. Ideas evolve through conversation, debate, error, and correction across centuries. Key developments connect thinkers from Aristotle through Maxwell, Minkowski, and Einstein. Historical narratives often simplify and attribute advances to a small number of individuals, obscuring the collective provenance of ideas. Different people develop different ideas at different times and draw on varied sources. Examining the development of concepts reveals a complex, non-linear process behind the polished final results taught today.
Read at Big Think
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