Who is smarter feynman and einstein

Down the hall from me, Albert Einstein's electric-haired visage beamed from a poster for the "World Year of Physics As wound down with no miracles in sight, the poster took on an increasingly poignant cast. Passing the office of a physics professor who made the mistake of leaving his door open, I stopped and asked the question implicitly posed by the "Year of Physics" poster: Will there ever be another Einstein?

The physicist scrunched up his face and replied, "I'm not sure what that question means. Let me try to explain. Einstein is the most famous and beloved scientist of all time. We revere him not only as a scientific genius but also as a moral and even spiritual sage.

Abraham Pais, Einstein's friend and biographer, called him "the divine man of the 20th century. I doubt it. In Genius , his biography of physicist Richard Feynman, James Gleick pondered why physics hadn't produced more giants like Einstein. The paradoxical answer, Gleick suggested, is that there are so many brilliant physicists alive today that it has become harder for any individual to stand apart from the pack.

In other words, our perception of Einstein as a towering figure is, well, relative. Gleick's explanation makes sense.

In fact, physicist Edward Witten has been described as the most mathematically gifted physicist since Newton. However, I would add a corollary: Einstein seems bigger than modern physicists because--to paraphrase Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard --physics got small.

For the first half of the last century, physics yielded not only deep insights into nature--which resonated with the disorienting work of creative visionaries like Picasso, Joyce and Freud--but also history-jolting technologies like the atomic bomb, nuclear power, radar, lasers, transistors and all the gadgets that make up the computer and communications industries. Physics mattered.

Over the past few decades, many physicists have gotten bogged down pursuing a goal that obsessed Einstein in his latter years: a theory that fuses quantum physics and general relativity, which are as incompatible, conceptually and mathematically, as plaid and polka dots. Seekers of this "theory of everything" have wandered into fantasy realms of higher dimensions with little or no empirical connection to our reality.

Over the past few decades, biology has displaced physics as the scientific enterprise with the most intellectual, practical and economic clout. All three are seen as distinctive, characterful and preternaturally smart men with an endearing playfulness and a readiness to not take themselves too seriously.

This practice forces science into a constant, awkward dance with its past as times and mores change. Even the apparently uncontroversial physics Nobel laureate Peter Debye was at the centre of a row a decade ago when he was accused of having colluded with the Nazis during his prewar career in Germany, and even of being antisemitic.

This article is more than 3 years old. Philip Ball. I did want to ask him something, though, which had plagued me since reading up on the history of quantum mechanics while in high school. See, in classical physics, once the state of a system is precisely known, all future behavior can be calculated. The clockwork universe depicted by Newton was disrupted terribly by quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, knowing the exact state of a system is not possible.

Therefore, it is not possible, no matter how hard you try, to predict the future behavior of quantum systems exactly. Rather, QM predicts only probabilities, or likely outcomes. Like shooting craps, the way an atom behaves is random every time it is observed. It is only the averages that can be predicted with precision.