Physics is stuck — and needs another Einstein to revolutionize it, physicist Avi Loeb says
Harvard professor Avi Loeb says the potential for a great mind to revolutionize physics is greater than ever... Obviously Einstein was very visionary, but also in a sense, he had peers: people like Karl Schwarzchild and Edwin Hubble, who were doing work that would help him test and correlate his theories. I've wondered, say, if Einstein were born 30 years later, would someone else have figured out relativity, and the photoelectric effect, and so on? .. That's a good question. Physics is about nature, right? So we're trying to learn about nature. We're trying to understand nature and you know, so, in that sense, we collect data and eventually someone comes up with the right idea. The question is, how long does that take? What I'm saying is, I believe that the same ideas would have been developed. I don't know how close to the time that Einstein and thought about them, but eventually. . . . it would take maybe a few more decades or something.
But the most important thing is, I think it would have been fragmented. So, you know, many of the things that Einstein personally was responsible for — like there at least 10 touchstones in physics where each of them is a major intellectual achievement — they would be discovered by different people. So the fact that he came up with with all of them illustrates his genius.
But you know, if you look at people that got the Nobel prize, there are many people — examples of people that got it once for one major discovery, that's pretty much what they did for their life. Either they did it early on in their life or late, but doesn't matter. And that's not true about Einstein. So he didn't only deviate from the beaten path and, and come up with original ideas, but he did it multiple times. And by that, you know, it contributed to humanity. A great deal, I should say, like for example, his a general theory of relativity — this idea that space and time and gravity are connected…https://www.salon.com/2020/09/06/physics-is-stuck--and-needs-another-einstein-to-revolutionize-it-physicist-avi-loeb-says/
