[prng2021]

“We’re all just memetic LLMs, remixing stuff with mildly differing levels of variance.”

Einstein upended every other human beings notion of space and time. Copernicus also proposed something preposterous for his time. Would you say they just remixed stuff with mild variance?

[adrian_b]

Copernicus has only revived a theory first proposed millennia before him (in Ancient Greece), but initially rejected for insufficient evidence. Even for Copernicus, his theory was based more on faith than on evidence, because it became possible to measure the stellar parallaxes only much later.

When Einstein published his theory of Special Relativity, it did not contain any fact or formula that had not already existed previously in the works of Lorentz, Poincaré and many others. It was just a new and original point of view about which is the meaning of those known relationships (i.e. that it is the speed of light which is constant in all reference systems, while other quantities are variable, instead of making other choices about which quantities are constant and which are variable).

His contribution is actually very similar with that of Copernicus, who also did not provide any new fact or relationship, but just a new choice about which position should be considered constant, Sun's or Earth's. Both changes were very small compared with the existing knowledge, but they were very important for enabling further progress.

Every progress is really incremental and it adds very little over the existing body of knowledge, even if the addition is essential for any further progress and for improving the practical applications.

[LadyCailin]

This might be confirmation bias to a degree, because of something called “the adjacent possible”. That is, that ideas that are too far ahead of their time, simply don’t catch on, and so no one has ever heard of them. However, the individuals inventing these things would be extraordinary individuals, I would argue. Clive Sinclair might be one example of this.

[prng2021]

What’s stopping you from making an incremental contribution like Einstein and earning yourself a Nobel like he did?

[cma]

I don't think we are LLMs, but was it a coincidence something like ricci calculus had just been developed?

[adrian_b]

The Ricci calculus has influenced Einstein only more than a decade later, in the development of the General Relativity (1917), for which tensor calculus was indispensable.

It had no influence on the theory of Special Relativity (1905).

Einstein is the one who changed the meaning of the word "tensor" to the meaning used today in most cases, when tensor means a general multi-dimensional quantity. I could not find any information about the reason why Einstein has chosen to make this change in terminology.

Before Einstein, "tensor" (a term introduced by Hamilton) was applied only to symmetric matrices (because general matrices can be decomposed into "versors", i.e. rotation matrices that rotate vectors and a "tensor", i.e. a symmetric matrix that stretches vectors).

While Ricci has invented the concept of tensor, he has not used the word "tensor". Nevertheless, because Einstein's theory had become extremely fashionable at the end of WWI, when Ricci's work has been translated and published in USA, the American editor has introduced the word "tensor" everywhere in the book and they added on the covers that this is the book needed to understand Einstein's tensor theory, in order to promote the sales of the book.

Thus, Ricci's calculus became known as tensor calculus, first in USA, then everywhere.

[cma]

He didn't specify general vs. special but there were lots of developments leading to special relativity too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativit...

[adrian_b]

Those developments had no relationship whatsoever with the Ricci calculus that had been published a few years before, which was my point.

When the General Relativity was developed in 1917, the Ricci calculus was no longer recent, but it was 17 years old.

Therefore what the OP supposed, that there was an immediate causal relationship between these lines of work, is not true.

[cma]

I wasn't saying Ricci calculus was related to special relativity discovery. OP didn't say whether talking about special or general relativity.

17 years old I think is quite recent given the gap between special and general (would you say no immediate connection between them because of the length of that gap?), and there were presumably other pieces involved.