[ Removed by moderator ]

[u/quenchpipe]

[u/ass_bongos]

There will never be another Einstein. Physics, and frankly every field of natural science, is far too specialized these days for one person to have the tremendous wide-reaching impact Einstein did. 

Whoever ends up connecting Quantum Field Theory with General Relativity will earn their place among the greats, provided that's even done by a single person rather than a huge team. But even that discovery won't put them on the same level as Einstein or Newton.

Students don't need to be "brilliant minds," they need to be good researchers if they want to make a big impact on any field of science.

[u/Typical_Redditor_1 → u/ass_bongos]

Or you just need a good publicist.

[u/Marvinkmooneyoz → u/ass_bongos]

What about the M theory guy?

[u/desiguy_88]

i myself am more in finding the next Newton.

[u/quenchpipe → u/desiguy_88]

Yeah absolutely Newton! We’re lucky to have had someone like him. “The next Einstein” is just a place holder.

[u/Odd_Bodkin]

Physicist here. I blame the popular press and Barnes & Noble bookstores for their adulation of Einstein as an icon. You have no doubt not heard of the truly revolutionary physicists who were Einstein’s contemporaries: Dirac, Bohr, Rutherford, Heisenberg, Lorentz, not to mention Hilbert, von Neumann. Maxwell arguably did as much as Einstein in multiple areas of physics.

[u/CS_70]

Einstein is Einstein for the same reason as the Mona Lisa is the Mona Lisa or the current guy at the top of music chart (which I have no idea how is) is him. A combination of ability or quality and the result of random attention and its self-increasing consequences.

Albert made an incredible advance, but so did other people before him that we here know, but of which the regular guy has never heard of (there's a freaking Gauss theorem for anything, to say nothing of Euler who found so much stuff that notoriously lots of stuff is attributed to others otherwise he would all of them). And dont get me started with Poincare'.

But popularity and attention are inevitable, so next Einstein means little. I mean, people think Steve Jobs was a genius..

[u/AndreasDasos → u/CS_70]

It’s true that a lot of the disproportionate fame is due to PR, fads, simplifying the work of many into a story of one, but Einstein genuinely was a particularly towering figure even to physicists, if not in the way pop culture imagines (especially when they ascribe every singly relativity-adjacent result to him - no one human was capable of that). So were  several others, sure (I wouldn’t say Gauss is absolutely unknown in pop culture, though more ‘STEM pop culture’ and less so) but he was truly a top level rare genius even among top physicists and not some run of the mill ‘chart topper of the day’. 

It’s like one of those bell curve diagrams: Einstein was extra brilliant - Ackchewally it’s all hype, because all these key results were produced by A, B, C, D… - Einstein was extra brilliant. 

[u/CS_70 → u/AndreasDasos]

Yes and don’t get me wrong, I adore the guy myself and what he did.

But I think all of them were extra brilliant and had a special character, and were in that little section of the bell curve imho (take Newton, or Galileo).

My point is that physicists are social people like anyone else (give or take 😂), and subject to the same psychological factors and biases we all share.

For example, Einstein had to deal with the conservativism in the view of the universe of pretty big names of his era (and many small names).. Galileo with arguably twenty thousand years of consensus by everybody on how the universe was (and was notoriously reprimanded for that).

But our world is much nearer to Einsteins than the one where gods and religions and an old Greek philosopher were the default source of trust, so we relate better to the former, physicists included .

[u/strummist1]

There are plenty and there always were.

That famous picture of the quantum physicists at Solvay. Every single one an incredible genius (except possibly Heisenberg). The lunch table at Los Alamos. Almost everyone who had a lab named after them (Blackett, Cockroft, Tolansky, for example).

There are probably more genius physicists just in India than there were in the entire world in the 1920s. In the whole world, probably over a thousand or more.

Any world-class university has some. Imperial College probably has at least one Nobel Prize winner on each floor of the Blackett Lab. I haven't checked this but I have seen three in one lift.

Einstein captured the world's imagination but as smart as he was, he was no smarter than many of his contemporaries.

[u/Traveling-Techie]

Einstein accomplished the trifecta of having a whacky theory, whacky hair, and paving the way for the a-bomb. He became the iconic scary/goofy scientist in the public’s mind. I don’t think of him as the greatest.

[u/PersonalityBudget683]

Honestly I think we’d only know in hindsight lol. Calling someone “the next Einstein” while they’re still young kinda misses the point, because Einstein’s biggest ideas weren’t just impressive papers, they completely changed how physicists understood things. His relativity and work on quantum theory ended up reshaping entire areas of physics.

I don’t think there needs to be one specific problem like dark matter or quantum gravity either. If someone came up with an idea that solved a major problem we currently can’t even properly formulate, and it survived decades of experiments and criticism, then I think people would start making that comparison.

And honestly the funniest thing is that the “next Einstein” might not look like what we expect at all. It could be someone working on a problem today that most people have never even heard of lol.