Post by m***@hotmail.comHow many famous financiers or business managers will be remembered even 50
years hence as e.g. Green, Schwarz, Witten, Polchinski etc will be?
You think GSW and Polchinski, whoever he is, will be remembered in 100
years? You delude yourself, buddy. How many people on the street can
name the top 50 mathematicians in the 1850?
My guess is that a random person on the street was not exactly the main
judge of the eternal value that the previous contributor had in mind and
cared about. Nothing against the random people on the street in 2105!
Post by m***@hotmail.comAsk your mother who the top mathematician was in 1800. Does she care
at all? Who cares?
Well, who cares about your mother?
Post by m***@hotmail.comBut we do remember Dale Carnegie, alfred nobel, Leland Stanford,
Rockefeller, and other rich tycoons who created lasting corporations
and endowed permanent institutions.
But why do we remember them? I remember Carnegie because the surname
appears in the name of an average university but I have no idea how she or
he looked like; Alfred Nobel was an average inventor who is important
because his money were used to support some truly famous people like
Einstein, Feynman, and many others - in fact, I would not even recognize
Nobel on a photograph even though I believe he looked like Antonin Dvorak;
Leland Stanford is important because at a school that carries his name,
intense research of cosmological and other aspects of string theory takes
place - and his or her first name is important because Lenny Susskind's
computer is named like that. ;-)
And finally, why is David Rockefeller, whom I would not recognize on a
photograph either, famous? It's because the famous David Gross made a talk
at Cornell in 1993 in which he mentioned, on the bottom of page 3,
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9311253
that physics may be funded by people with cash if things of eternal value
are named after them, and the David Rockefeller quark was his key example.
I hope that this clears up your confusions.
All the best
Lubos