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Comment by madaxe_again

5 hours ago

But this is what we do. Nobody ever invented or discovered anything in a vacuum - all discovery is synthesis of existing ideas and concepts applied to a novel domain. We laud Einstein for instance, but his work was a logical extension of Riemann - Riemann had a neat mathematical toy, Einstein described the universe with it - should we say Einstein was incapable of unique work?

The difference is that Einstein didn't literally have someone prompting him towards his result.

  • Uh, he did. Marcel Grossmann.

    “It was Grossmann who emphasized the importance of a non-Euclidean geometry called Riemannian geometry (also elliptic geometry) to Einstein, which was a necessary step in the development of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Abraham Pais's book on Einstein suggests that Grossmann mentored Einstein in tensor theory as well. Grossmann introduced Einstein to the absolute differential calculus, started by Elwin Bruno Christoffel and fully developed by Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro and Tullio Levi-Civita. Grossmann facilitated Einstein's unique synthesis of mathematical and theoretical physics in what is still today considered the most elegant and powerful theory of gravity: the general theory of relativity.”

    • Grossmann collaborated with Einstein on GR, supplying quite a bit of the mathematical capacity required (which initially didn't come easily to Einstein). They published jointly, until Einstein was competent enough to work independently [1]. That's not equivalent to the situation being claimed here.

      [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4068

    • Yeah and we get a nice list of attributions for who developed which idea, while OpenAI just takes credit for everything its model spits out.

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    • Sounds like you just copy-pasted from AI without even understanding what you're talking about.

      Based on what you're saying, you're claiming this is Grossman's work, not Einstein's. Why don't we rewrite scientific history too based on your copy-pasted AI slop?

      It's so pointless talking to idiots who don't what they're talking about when they use AI, just because they think AI does everything, that reflects their own experience, not the experience of people who actually do real work. Some people are driven by AI, others drive it. As for those who are driven by it, they don't have sufficient imagination to think otherwise.

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