Ludwig Boltzmann > Albert Einstein
Dienstag, November 18th, 2008Seriously!
Einstein taught us that time is just another space dimension. This showed us how gravity works and that our space in reality has 4 dimensions rather than 3. After hearing of this in school smart kids will feel like their eyes have been opened to a whole new world.
Almost unnoticed Ludwig Boltzmann slips by. Years befor Einstein he found the fundamental connection between the speed of the molecules and the temperature of a material. Previously, temperature has always been considered almost a mystical hidden variable. Slowly physicists discovered that temperature and physical work seem to be connected. But it took Boltzmann to find out that temperature of a material is nothing more than the kinetic energy of it’s microscopic parts. This picture seems so simple to us now that it’s kinda hard to understand what revelation this must have been. In my opinion, it’s certainly the least publicized breakthrough in physics.
So for me
Boltzmann > Einstein