Hi.
This section is rarely used, I thought I'd put something in here.
Is it just time and numbers that are important rather than who you have working on science?
Are there some discoveries and theories that are so extraordinary that only one person could have made them?
Let's take Newton as one example. We tend to remember the contributions he made to mathematics such as Newton's laws of motion. We overlook the fact that a lot of his Philosophi? Naturalis Principia Mathematica contained discussions of what can reasonably be described as some philosophy and theology. We have selectively taken out only the most relevant and useful bits of his work and only that bit of it tends to be remembered and highly valued.
If you disregard all the junk that you (the reader) have written over your lifetime and just retain the best bits, then it's very likely that you have created something profound and well worth preserving for future generations. Well done and congratulations to you.
Arguably if we had a million monkeys with typewriters, then all you need to do is disregard the bits of junk in the middle (let's say keep a sentence at a time) and you should be able to find a Shakespearean play in there.
So, is it just a game of applying time and a large number of scientists to a problem before any problem in science would eventually be resolved?
You might think of other famous scientists like Einstein and wonder if you just had to have an extraordinary mind to think of such bizarre things like applying a curvature to spacetime but actually it wasn't just Einstein coming up with these ideas. The mathematician David Hilbert was apparently also developing a theory similar to General relativity. Einstein knew this and was arguably more driven to complete and publish his work faster. I don't know how far Hilbert had progressed but it is commonly thought that Hilbert would have got there and if his version of the theory had been published it might have been even more elegant.
We tend to be aware of mathematicians like Minkowski and Riemann that contributed to Einsteins work but there may well have been others getting involved more regularly but rarely credited. See https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/not-lone-genius where a historian looks into the involvement of Einstein's freinds from college (Besso and Grossman) and also Einstein's first wife Mileva Marić Einstein who was a brilliant physicist but at this sort of time that was never going to be accepted or recognised.
Albert and Mileva were admitted to the physics-mathematics section of the Polytechnic Institute in Zurich (now ETH) in 1896....
By the end of their classes in 1900, Mileva and Albert had similar grades (4.7 and 4.6, respectively) except in applied physics where she got the top mark of 5 but he, only 1. She excelled at experimental work while he did not. But at the oral exam, Professor Minkowski gave 11 out of 12 to the four male students but only 5 to Mileva. Only Albert got his degree. ["The Forgotten Life of Einstein's First Wife", Scientific American.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/ ]
We know that Einstein discussed relativity with his wife, there are letters with evidence of that but most of the discussions were verbal rather than being written down. You should not underestimate how brilliant his wife was.
...nobody made it clearer than Albert Einstein himself that they collaborated on special relativity when he wrote to Mileva on 27 March 1901: ?How happy and proud I will be when the two of us together will have brought our work on relative motion to a victorious conclusion.? ["The Forgotten Life..., Scientific American]
We aren't sure exactly why Mileva's name didn't appear as a co-author on any of Einstein's work, it is suggested (source: Radmila Milentijević: Mileva Marić Einstein: Life with Albert Einstein, United World Press, 2015) that given the prevalent bias against women at the time, a publication co-signed with a woman might have carried less weight.
Whatever the situation may have been, Mileva had much bigger problems to worry about then getting her name on a paper: In 1901 she became pregnant out of wedlock ..(she) tried to persuade Albert to marry her. She gave birth to a girl named Liserl in January 1902. No one knows what happened to her. She was probably given to adoption. "The Forgotten Life...", S.A.
It wasn't a great time for women in science in the 1900's. Recall, for example, that the Nobel prize committee only wanted to recognise Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel for the Nobel prize in 1903, they needed their arm twisted to add Marie Curie's name to that list and it was only the insistence of Pierre Curie that ultimately made it happen.
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Anyway, enough of the sad stuff. I've just recently explained how special relativity could have been discovered by alternative routes if light hadn't been a massless particle, which is partly why this is now on my mind. It's not just that there were other people involved in developing relativity, there are so many different ways in which relativity would have eventually been discovered. It was inevitable.
So, we're back to the original question:
Is any scientific discovery such that only one person could have found it? Is scientific development just about applying numbers of scientists to study the problem and waiting for the problem to be broken with time?
Looking just on the home front: If a forum like this one can motivate a few people to study some science, wouldn't it be worth keeping it? It doesn't matter if it's not discussing the latest developments or hosting the most erudite discussions. Why are there rumours that the site is closing down and what could be done to maintain it?
Best Wishes.
Late Editing: Apologies for not getting all the accents and special symbols like ae to appear. None of that works anymore.