Let googlefight decide

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=einstein&word2=newton

Minutes of endless amusement.

Googlefight? Most probably it shows a fight between einstein bagels and fig newtons, not between titans of physics. :-)

Let's wait for Simon - he'll tell who won.

The dabate was on "Who had made the greatest contibution, given the state of knowledge and society at the time", or there-abouts.

Very interesting, well worth attending.

I come out for Newton I think, given the caveat-ed statement above.

Of course, what about the very very ancient Greek and Chinese, etc, people who did much the same?

But the dabate was supposed to be in good natured fun, and not so worldly-serious and was.

My vote, in the wider historical context, goes to this person: Hypatia of Alexandria
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Hypatia.html
http://cosmopolis.com/people/hypatia.html

I went there rooting for Newton and came out undecided. Interestingly, the show-of-hands vote in the main room gave it to Einstein I think, but the public on-line poll and the Royal Society poll were both for Newton.

As someone in the audience put it though - it's more of a relay race, so perhaps we (in the rhetorical sense) will be better placed to judge after Einstein's theories have been bashed about for a couple of hundred of years.

It was only ever a game - I don't think that anyone was *seriously* suggesting that you can compare people of that importance as if you were just playing Top Trumps. (Well, maybe that historian...) Of course it's more of a relay race than anything else.But it's just a game, and in a game, yoiu play by the rules, whether they make real-world sense or not.

Me, I plumped for Newton. He *invented* science as it's done today.

I did think there was a ghost at the banquet, though - Darwin. Include him, and you have the big three incomparable minds.

Wish I'd known about that debate in time to go.
If you learn of any online summary of the thing please post.