AMK's Journal

I just finished reading Follow the Story, by James B. Stewart. Stewart is a former editor of the Wall Street Journal (a news editor -- no connection to the wretched op-ed page), and author of several non-fiction books such as an account of the 1980s insider trading scandals and the 1990s scandals involving the Clintons. The book discusses how to develop, structure, and write narrative journalism, and I really enjoyed its discussion of how to organize a narrative.

Stewart uses many different stories from the WSJ as examples in the book. Early on, Stewart mentions:

Reporters reexamined the teachings and writings of Marx, Freud, and Einstein to see how their work had influenced our times and how their theories had held up in the academic community. As with many good story ideas, we didn't know the answers before we started, but had I guessed, I would have said that Marx was thoroughly discredited, Freud was flourishing, and Einstein had been eclipsed. Almost exactly the opposite turned out to be true. Despite the collapse of Communism, Marx still commands great respect and has had enormous influence on modern capitalism; Freud has been largely discredited, though his legacy is important; and Einstein's theories have fared best of all.

Being a science geek, I found his initial guess about Einstein startling. Pretty much any physics popularization that talks about gravity or relativity will talk about how Einstein's theories have stood up superlatively well. In addition to the well-known early tests of general relativity, such as the bending of light and the shift in Mercury's orbit, it's been applied to the orbits of binary neutron stars, predicting a decrease in their orbital period with stunning precision. GPS systems depend so sensitively upon timing that they need to correct for time dilation. I'd bet that if you asked a random person to name a scientist, over 50% of people -- maybe over 75% -- would name Einstein because he's still the paradigmatic scientist.

I wonder why Stewart's impression is so wrong. Does it stem from the impression that science is like technology and everything becomes outdated in 10 years? Einstein's work, being roughly a century old, would be long irrelevant if scientific theories really rose and fell so quickly.