We seem to get our best ideas when we are young. Most of them are corralled or cut down by the experts as “simple naïveté with a lack of knowledge.” Yet, for a few, those earliest ideas abide:
- Einstein was 26 in 1905 when he first proposed his relativity theory. I didn’t know that his first published work in 1901 was in the most prestigious journal, Annalen der Physik: Conclusions from the Capillarity Phenomena. Max Planck was a most-prestigious editor of the journal.
- Niels Bohr was 27 years old in 1913 when he introduced the theory of the quantum structure of atoms.
- Georges Lemaître was 33 years old in 1927 when he proposed the big bang.
- Who would you add to this list?
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- Three postdocs, Andrea Di Biagio (La Sapienza), Marios Christodoulou (Oxford), Pierre Martin-Dussaud (Aix-Marseille Univ., Université de Toulon), proposed to measure the discreteness of time using Planck Time. I encouraged their work.
- Young scholars, Job Feldbrugge and Jean-Luc Lehners came to the conclusion that the big bang was wrong with Neil Turok then they backed off of that position a few years later. I suspect that they encountered too much criticism.
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