Jitterbug;190619 Wrote: > Actually, it took some several years for Einstein's (1905) ideas to be > accepted within the physics world, largely because he was an unknown. > His fame came 14 to 15 years later when solar eclipse gave scientists > an opprtunity to test his theory of general relativity.
Einstein had gone from junior patent officer to assistant professor at the university of Bern within three years of the publication of his seminal papers in 1905 (which was the same year he got his Ph.D). Two or three years after that he was a full prof. in Zurich (which at the time was one of the best, if not the best, technical universities in the world - it's like being a full professor at Harvard at age 31). That's hardly a slow acceptance within the community, especially given how slowly communications moved then. And his reputation among his peers outstripped even that, as you'll discover if you read any biography. Cases where a significant scientific advance was suppressed or ignored for more than a short period are so rare as to be non-existent, as far as I know - but if anyone has an example I'd be glad to hear it (not counting the pre-Enlightenment era, naturally, and even then the church wasn't very effective at stifling good science). I think there's a kind of Darwinian selection of ideas, given any kind of remotely level playing field (such as the one provided by modern academia) - the good ones (and hopefully those that promote them), usually win, and the bad ones are relegated to crackpots and the fringes. -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=33547 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
