{"id":21890,"date":"2017-09-04T10:13:00","date_gmt":"2017-09-04T09:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=21890"},"modified":"2017-09-04T10:13:00","modified_gmt":"2017-09-04T09:13:00","slug":"who-have-you-heard-of-albert-einstein-or-david-hilbert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=21890","title":{"rendered":"Who have you heard of? Albert Einstein or David Hilbert?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For as long as I can remember, I&#8217;ve always known of the German-born physicist and humanitarian <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Albert_Einstein\">Albert Einstein<\/a> but, until a few days ago, I&#8217;d never heard of the German mathematician <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/David_Hilbert\">David Hilbert<\/a>. I came across Hilbert in the book I am currently reading: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Reality-Not-What-Seems-Journey\/dp\/0141983213\/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1504516242&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=rovelli+reality+is+not+what+it+seems\">&#8220;Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey To Quantum Gravity<\/a>&#8221; by the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli.<\/p>\n<p>In his explanation of the origins of the theory of relativity, Rovelli presents the exposition of the theory as a race that could have gone either way: <em>&#8220;The sprint to the finish between the two giants was a nail-biting affair, eventually decided by a matter of just a few days&#8221;<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Now, in the case of many scientific discoveries, there are rival claims to being first and\/or questions about how far the discoverer used the work of others. In the case of the theory of relativity, you can see the discussion <a href=\"https:\/\/en.m.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Relativity_priority_dispute#General_Relativity_3\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For as long as I can remember, I&#8217;ve always known of the German-born physicist and humanitarian Albert Einstein but, until a few days ago, I&#8217;d never heard of the German mathematician David Hilbert. I came across Hilbert in the book I am currently reading: &#8220;Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey To Quantum Gravity&#8221; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21890"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21897,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21890\/revisions\/21897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}