BTW Millikan is certainly one of the more intiguing figures of early 20th Century physics. For those who are interested here is a link to a sort of scientific biography of the man.

http://eands.caltech.edu/articles/Millikan%20Feature.pdf

Quote:

"Undoubtedly Millikan’s biases [about Jews]were typical at the time of a man of his upbringing and background. It should be said that, regardless of whatever prejudices he harbored, they never interfered with his judgment of scientists. His hero A. A. Michelson was Jewish, as were many of the stars Millikan personally recruited to Caltech: Paul Epstein, Albert Einstein, Theodore von Kármán, and Beno Gutenberg among others."

thanks for the correction steve
here is the link...
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/articles/ekspong/

the..'no'..was my bad..
i just presumed the reward/prize..would go to the one did the work
not the einstein..who added a p to planks formula
also the result of a lot of work

but guess middle men..make the most of what they done

but the rest is cut/edited straight from the link
my main point being
i knew he got a reward for a formula

but it wernt e=mc2...but much like it...
except then it was re ...light energy..then just energy

clearly he loved a good read...reading others patents/articles...you just happen to get ideas...despite mainly being a commic..clowing it up to the media...needing to make legands/heroes/idols..for the goyam

The two giants of applied mathematics were Newton and Einstein.

Both of their works provided tools for practical and scientific work for many generations. I personally would be hard put to choose.

Darwin's work was ground breaking and original, but with the work that other scientists were doing, survival of fittest was becoming self evident.

Steven,

I should of course say that Einstein was a genius scientific thinker. The point of my earlier post is that the people who paved the way for him are all too often forgotten in the history. What I liked about the TV documentary I saw was that it gave equal weight and import to chronicling all the steps that were involved in the evolution to the scientific baseline of knowledge that Einstein was able to build on.

Where Einstein is strong is in his ability to understand the Earth as only a small part of the cosmos which is governed by universal laws. Where he was weak (so far at least) is in the applicability of his ideas to benefit mankind. While it's great to see experiments that prove that gravity waves exist and that the Theory of General Relativity holds true, what do these actually do for anyone?

In the end, who is voted as the greatest ever is open to subjective interpretation. My view is that Tesla was greater because he was genuinely interested in helping mankind live a less physically exhausting life of sheer drudgery. It was this feeling, brought about by debilitating events early in his life, that drove him to wanting his discoveries commercialised. Hence his great partnership with Westinghouse was born.

RobP,

The point of general relativity was not to show the Earth as only a small part of the cosmos, but to show matter, energy, light and time were all tied together.

Tessla showed that magnetism was generated by electricity, Relativity showed that magnetism was an relativistic effect of electricity.

In the last 100 years, in spite of all the massive focus on string theory, trying to find a unified field theory, general relativity is still without equal.

Without relativity none of the satelite or mobile systems could work efficiently.

As an electrical engineer, I am in awe of what Tessla achieved, however, as far as pure depth of understanding Tessla was not in the same league.

Sir Isaac Newton.