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It's hard to contextualize it for people, because there are a lot of people, tens of thousands out there right now, who do work in physics that would seem incredible and/or incomprehensible to the uninitiated. So it's hard to really communicate *why* his work was so special.
He's like the Shakespeare of physics. There are a lot of serious writers, essentially all of whom do work that I couldn't ever fathom doing. But (at least in a standard popular conception), there will only ever be one Shakespeare.
Just like with Shakespeare, the overall "quality" of Einstein's work stands out, but we also remember him for his particular "voice." He thought about things in a certain way, a way that helps the rest of us to understand things better. Even things that he never worked on.
>Are we really just figuring out stuff that he proposed 100
>years ago?
I wouldn't say we're just figuring out gravitational waves. We've known about the phenomenon for quite a while, and even had indirect evidence of it. This is just the first time we've been able to experience it directly.
Gravitational waves have an interesting history, though, and they had a relatively long gestation as an idea. Einstein discovered them in his general theory of relativity in 1916, and he very quickly worked out many of the mathematical tools that we use to understand them today. However, in order to do this, he had to make some simplifying mathematical assumptions, which some worried weren't entirely justified. Also, when we're talking about space being "stretched" and "twisted", subtle questions can quickly arise about what that really means. Couldn't we just relabel all of the points in space and time, adjust our mental meter sticks and stopwatches, to undo this stretching? It turns out the answer is no, but it took us about 50 years to be sure of that. In particular, Einstein wrote, and attempted to publish, a paper in 1936 that claimed to have *disproven* the physical reality of gravitational waves. He thought he'd shown that they were entirely a mathematical phantom, that we thought we were predicting them because we were understanding the theory wrong.
It turns out, in 1936, HE was misunderstanding HIS OWN mathematical theory, and it led him to this flawed conclusion. Luckily for him (and for the modern gravitational wave community), the referee at this journal where he was trying to make this claim, saw the errors in Einstein's logic, and eventually convinced him that his new argument was wrong, and that gravitational waves really were still a real, physical thing.
So, if not for the fact that Einstein listened to reason and realized that he'd been right in the first place, then what was demonstrated yesterday would have been a *refutation* of Einstein in 1936.
>Why was he so brilliant?
It should be noted that physics is a field in which some people have talent, but it's also something that we *learn* how to do. People sometimes seem to think that physicists just sit at a desk and ideas pop into their heads. "Ah, E=mc^2. Of course!" "Hmm, maybe space and time are dynamical and can stretch and squeeze. Call the Nobel committee."
Our pop culture doesn't help with this. In the Stephen Hawking movie (The Theory of Everything, which I generally loved), there was an infamous scene where Hawking stared into a fireplace, and the sparks make him think that maybe black holes give off radiation. And then he goes to present his idea in a talk, which lasted all of 25 seconds and contained no detailed arguments at all. And someone stands up in the audience and says "It's brilliant!" or something like that. That's not how it works. Hawking worked for weeks and weeks and weeks on the calculations that led to Hawking radiation. That work was largely manipulating mathematical equations, which most people just can't imagine, so they just skip it in the movies.
When people ask "How was Michael Jordan so good?" The answer makes more sense to people. He had innate talent, and he put a hell of a lot of work into maximizing it. People can roughly imagine working in a gym for hours on end to maximize your basketball skills. They have a harder time imagining sitting at a pad of paper for hours on end and doing math. But that's really what it is, at least for a theoretical physicist.
So the answer to the question "How was Einstein so good", I think, is the same as the answer to the question "How was Jordan so good." Talent, and a hell of a lot of hard work.
>Would someone else have thought up the stuff he did if he
>didn't get around to doing it?
Some things, yes (Poincare was right on his heels with special relativity, including E=mc^2). Other things: yes, but we don't know how long it would have taken. General relativity, in particular, which is the theory that provides for gravitational waves, came from a set of ideas that were WAY outside the realm of what other people were thinking, and it took a huge amount of time for him to justify those ideas. Einstein called it "the most laborious decade of my life," just to write down the equations that define the theory in their completed form. It took another fifty years or so before they were generally accepted.
If Einstein hadn't come up with special relativity, the quantum-mechanical explanations of the photoelectric effect or Brownian motion, his theory of heat capacities at low temperature, the theory of Bose-Einstein condensation, I would bet that someone else would have come up with those ideas within about a decade or less. (Though likely in less elegant ways.)
But general relativity? I think most people agree, if not for Einstein, the amount of time we'd have to wait for that discovery would have been measured in the centuries.
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