In the post below there is a lot of talk about genius that might rival Newton. I didn't throw down a list of criteria for why I esteem Newton, a lot of this is gestalt intuition anyway, and I'm probably not reflectively totally aware of why I feel the way I do. That being said, someone threw down Aristotle. Instead of Aristotle, or Plato, or any of the other numerous ancients I mentioned Archimedes. Why? Aristotle certainly had, and has, more influence than Archimedes.
The reason is simple: Aristotle had superhuman intellect, but Archimedes had inhuman intellect. Aristotle had beefed up hard disk space, lots of RAM and top of the line CPU, but Archimedes had incredible applications that you just didn't see on any other box. Aristotle took the vector that was humanity and extended incredibly across the length and breadth of human space, but Archimedes shifted orthogonally outside of the plane of known space. I believe that Frederick Gauss, Isaac Newton, and their kind were aliens amongst us. While superhuman intellectuals can aid us in accelerating faster across the ocean of the unknown, the unhumans can cast a spell which magically parts the waters and exposes dry land.
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If that's the definition, then Leibniz belongs up there too. It's just that his magic had to await the development of boolean logic, abstract algebra, computer science, etc. Newton was "lucky" in that his obsessions were explicable by known math (calculus), whereas Leibniz' were not, though he foreshadowed most of what came afterward. Leibniz also thought about all sorts of things Newton didn't, especially if you're granting Archimedes inhuman status for inventing & dreaming up stuff no one else would've (Leibniz developed far more bizarre applied devices than Newton).
1) i agree about leibniz
2) please, about the 'known math' part, he did have to invent a lot of it.
Richard Westfall, the leading biographer of Newton, has said that whereas in studying other scientists their achievement becomes more intelligible, in studying Newton he just seems more alien than ever (or words to that effect).
By "known math," I should've said "the math he had at his disposal" -- Leibniz invented much of the same stuff, but it wasn't suitable to his more digital obsessions.
Maybe Aristotle and Archimedes were not such standouts. maybe we just don't know what level other ancients had already achieved, such as the Antikythera Mechanism.
And the intersection of genius and genetics holds special fascination for sure. Eugenics, gattaca type reproductive technologies, even drugs and gene therapies can light the match.
Also, where's Tesla in all this? Is electrical engineering not abstract and alien enough?
This reminds me of the quote in Gleick's Feynman biography, on the difference between geniuses and "magicians". The example given was watching Fermi do physics on the blackboard - he was so fast, and you'd think, well, I'm never going to run a four-minute mile, and I'm never going to be able to do math as quickly as Enrico Fermi.
But watching someone like Feynman or Dirac (the examples given) was different - it wasn't that things were just going too fast, because slowed down, they didn't make sense either.