Quote:
Originally Posted by sjastro
Riemann commit suicide? That's news to me.
Gauss was supposedly asked what was his greatest mathematical discovery, to which he replied the brilliant mind of his pupil Riemann.
Steven
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Yeah, in the process of investigating and back-checking stuff that I was being fed from my tutor, I have seen two versions of almost everything. I have seen a more publicly touted version, and a little know, internally kept version.
I'll give you a simple example; Einstein was referred to by one of his teacher's as a lazy old dog right? And this is often used as a type of "under-dog' story, you know, some misunderstood student, told he would amount to nothing, then becomes the most famous scientist in history and changes the way we look at space and time, right? But what these 'folk tales' conveniently leave out, as in this case, was that Einstein's math teacher was Hermann Minkowski. His comments were accurate, at the time Einstein was lazy with his math, he was disenchanted and felt everything was explainable within much simpler calculations...along the line of what Maxwell had done.
Also, that Einstein was a supportive member of Princeton University...he wasn't, he hated the people there, and visited the math science faculty on only one occasion in the 40 or so years that he lived there...and that was only to talk briefly with Feynman. Einstein would write to the queen of Holland, and in his letters he spoke quite bluntly.
An example of a more complex one is; there is a kind of cold war going on. In that the old school (Cambridge, Oxford etc) support a ‘Field’ type structure of existence, whereas the new school (Princeton, Stamford etc) are endorsing higher dimensionality; the old Cosmic Ether’ (since higher dimensional space theories are essentially a type of ether). This argument stems way-back to the wave or corpuscular nature of light. So it’s an old fight, but it is still being waged even today.
There are hundreds of examples like these. The public are told whatever they need to know, while the truth, whether a large or small deviation from the truth, circulates internally.
Things like this are not openly made known to the public; much of the history has been given a gloss finish, but the truth is far from this.
I think it's all a case of vying for budgets and public support. A quote from the move 'The Right Stuff', "no bucks-no Buck Rogers".