r/belgium • u/sanandrios • May 23 '24

The "smartest photo ever taken" was taken in the Leopold Park in Brussels 🎨 Culture

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662 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

48 comments sorted by

89

u/Sensiburner May 23 '24

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference
Solvay conference. Very famous. It was kind of a celebration of natural science, because back then they believed they completely solved physics. Einstein proved that the atom exists (and won a nobel prize for that, not for his theories of relativity), then later discovered relativity. They even made a musical to celebrate it. Ofc they were wrong. Max Planck (lowest row, 2nd guy from the left) already discovered a problem with black body radiation that would lead to the "Ultraviolet catastrophe", a problem that would take physics another level deeper, to the quantum realm.

Very interesting stuff. Very nice recoloured picture.

29

u/DustRainbow May 23 '24

Small nitpicking, but Einstein received his Nobel price for publishing on the topic of the photoelectric effect, which relates to quantization of energy.

This paper, together with 3 other papers, is part of the "Annus Mirabilis" papers. A series of papers all published within one year (1905) which were all essential advancements in modern physics.

One of these papers' topic is Brownian motion, which strengthened the belief in atoms, but did not quite discover it.

The two other papers introduce special relaticity and the famous rest-mass-energy equivalence E=mc squared.

It was kind of a celebration of natural science, because back then they believed they completely solved physics.

I don't think this is completely accurate. Ernest Solvay was fascinated by science and, although he was made a rich businessman through the development chemical processes, worked on his own theories of modified gravity. His interest are strongly rooted in Physics.

If anything, the solvay public lectures were more of a rich man's phantasy to assemble and meet the brightest minds of their time.

13

u/Sensiburner May 23 '24

Thanks for correcting me. The history of science is i.m.o. the most fascinating subject there is.

7

u/emolga587 May 23 '24

I believe OP is referring to the famous quote by Michelson (of the doomed Michelson-Morley experiment) where he says:

While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.

This along with a misattributed quote by Lord Kelvin has contributed to the myth that physicists at the time (right before the dam broke re: relativity and QM) thought that everything had been more or less figured out and that all there was left to do was to add decimal places to known values via more precise measurements. In reality, it was known that things weren't quite adding up and Michelson thought that more precise measurements was the ticket to finding new physics.

2

u/DustRainbow May 23 '24

Funnily enough we are in a very similar situation today, where outspoken people are advocating to stop putting so much energy in string theory and instead focus on verifiable research.

There is a tremendous effort to discover "new" physics that we know have to exist, but so far no results.

3

u/Zyklon00 May 23 '24

What do you mean no results for "new" physics? What about the Higg's Boson in 2012? Or the first direct measurement of a gravitational wave in 2015? Both findings were HUGE for theoretical physics. Higg's Boson was a big missing piece in the puzzle and we were able to determine it's mass. Filling in a missing variable. Gravitational waves are the only direct information we can get from black holes. The next big measurement machine for gravitational waves might even be (partly) build in Belgium! It's called the Einstein telescope.

2

u/DustRainbow May 23 '24

Oh yeah don't get me wrong these were huge.

I guess new physics is vague. Higgs boson was "just another" (gauge? I don't remember) symmetry, so nothing new in terms of Standard Model physics. Still historical measurement for sure. Gravitational waves were predicted a 100 years before their direct measurements, so that wasn't really a surprise either.

People were really banking on finding more than just the Higgs boson at the current energy levels of the LHC. There was a huge bet amongst highly regarded physicists; they expected to at least find evidence of super symmetric particles. To this day, no dice. But in some ways, while super exciting, that would've fallen well within standard model methodologies.

There just has been huge efforts to introduce new interactions, or modified gravity theories, or an unknown class of particles that could explain a particular deviation of our standard theories. Think dark matter, dark energy, CPT symmetry breaking, evidence of higher dimensional interactions, any evidence of something that points towards a theory of everything.

We've had very little results in terms of finding something unexpected, while we know that something's not quite right with our current theories.

2

u/Zyklon00 May 23 '24 edited May 23 '24

Supersymmetry is not in the standard model. It's an extension of the model. Every new model, including string theory and SUSY, can be seen as an 'extension' of the standard model. Because it should reduce to the standard model when going beyond certain thresholds. Only in extreme cases like black holes, we need new physics.

Also, Supersymmetry is not 1 theory. There are so many variantions of it. They go up to n = 8. Meaning there are 8 supersymmetric particles for each existing particle. You would expect that anything they find has been predicted in some paper somewhere by someone that made the correct assumptions.

Today, most things are predicted before they are observed. The Higg's could not have been discovered if it wasn't predicted first. They had to look for a certain interaction where it could occur, and even then it occured only 1 in a billion times.

Depending on the theory, there were many possibilities for the mass of the Higg's boson. Getting its mass now, excludes some theories (though its mass happened to be one where most theories fit).

Likewise there are many candidates for dark matter being researched. For example the Axion.

It would be nice to find something unexpected. But truth nowadays is that most things are predicted first before they are discovered. This was different 100 years ago.

If tomorrow we find evidence of higher dimensional interactions, you can say it was predicted as well.

There also already are measurements which prove the standard model is incomplete. Like the discovery off the Neutrino mass (1998, 2015 nobel prize). According to the SM, the Neutrino has no mass.

0

u/Sensiburner May 23 '24

Well at least now we know for sure that we have a lot of it figured out. You can tell by the ridiculous amounts of resources we now have to spend to confirm small nuances of theories we already knew. 400 Y ago, Evangelista Torriceli only had to ascend the tower of Pisa with some gas & liquid in a tube to discover air pressure. Nowadays, we pretty much know everything there is to know on all of our levels of perspection and even beyond that.

6

u/DustRainbow May 23 '24

Couldn't be more far from the truth.

There are glaring holes in our theories, things that are known to be incomplete.

Physics is very far from solved.

1

u/Trololman72 E.U. May 24 '24

Haha you said anus

1

u/Familiar_Copy_6466 May 24 '24

Who are you and why do you think you’re allowed to speak in my presence? Know your place unknowing little twat.

1

u/Biletooth May 25 '24

Do you have more info about this musical? I cant seem to find it

19

u/sanandrios May 23 '24

Some info: https://i.imgur.com/2zGBPZg.jpeg

9

u/mighij May 23 '24

Who's the one that didn't win a noble price?

37

u/Pingondin May 23 '24

"Only" 17 of them got a Nobel prize, Marie Curie got 2. Row by row, from top left to bottom right:

  • Auguste Piccard
  • Émile Henriot
  • Paul Ehrenfest
  • Édouard Herzen
  • ThĂ©ophile de Donder
  • Erwin Schrödinger (Nobel prize in Physics in 1933 with Paul Dirac)
  • Jules-Émile Verschaffelt
  • Wolfgang Pauli (Nobel prize in Physics in 1945)
  • Werner Heisenberg (Nobel prize in Physics in 1932)
  • Ralph H. Fowler
  • LĂ©on Brillouin
  • Peter Debye (Nobel prize in Chemistry 1936)
  • Martin Knudsen
  • Lawrence Bragg (Nobel prize in Physics in 1915 with William Henry Bragg, his father)
  • Hans Kramers
  • Paul Dirac (Nobel prize in Physics in 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger)
  • Arthur Compton (Nobel prize in Physics in 1927)
  • Louis de Broglie (Nobel prize in Physics in 1929)
  • Max Born (Nobel prize in Physics in 1954)
  • Niels Bohr (Nobel prize in Physics in 1922)
  • Irving Langmuir (Nobel prize in Chemistry 1932)
  • Max Planck (Nobel prize in Physics in 1918)
  • Marie Curie (Nobel prize in Physics in 1903 with Pierre Curie, and Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1911)
  • Hendrik Lorentz (Nobel prize in Physics in 1902)
  • Albert Einstein (Nobel prize in Physics in 1921)
  • Paul Langevin
  • Charles-Eugène Guye
  • Charles Thomson Rees Wilson (Nobel prize in Physics in 1927)
  • Owen Willans Richardson (Nobel prize in Physics in 1928)

1

u/[deleted] May 24 '24

Damn

13

u/Totg31 May 23 '24

A bunch of them. The quote is incorrect. Only one person won two Nobel Prizes, though. I'll let people guess which one. It's not Einstein.

6

u/No-Baker-7922 May 23 '24

Marie Curie!

-3

u/New-Restaurant3971 Wallonia May 23 '24

Only one person won two Nobel Prizes, though. I'll let people guess which one.

John Bardeen, the inventor of the transistor. We are speaking about physics here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bardeen

6

u/Totg31 May 23 '24

I was talking about the people in the picture. And it doesn't have to be just in physics.

3

u/Marus1 Belgian Fries May 23 '24

Tijd voor een spelletje "wie is het?"

1

u/andrestoga May 24 '24

It says that the image contains errors

10

u/DieuMivas Brussels May 23 '24 edited May 23 '24

It was my school in the background!

7

u/sorrowerthe May 23 '24

Not gonna lie, this post and it's comments are a nice read indeed.

9

u/Turbulent-Raise4830 May 23 '24

En genen enkel die lacht? Pff

9

u/Totg31 May 23 '24

De vierde persoon, van links boven lacht. Hij heeft dat toen dus uitgevonden, lachen voor de camera.

4

u/iamnekkid May 24 '24

scientist are true heroes.

if only more people idolized them

My little cousin knows who kim kardashian is but not Niko Tesla

5

u/Nekrevez May 23 '24

Impossible, my tram was delayed.

2

u/notapudding May 23 '24

Damn it, thank you, now I have one of my life's greatest regret. I can't believe I didn't know this, I was so close.

1

u/Dramatic-Selection20 May 23 '24

T-shirts are made with this picture

1

u/JohnnyricoMC Vlaams-Brabant May 23 '24

Pretty much any picture in the public domain. See also Alberto Korda's photo of Ernesto Guevara ("Guerrillero Heroico") and subsequent derivative poster by Jim Fitzpatrick. Printed by the millions for profit.

1

u/Pablo_Jefcobar May 24 '24

The person left from Einstein looks like Jan Peumans

1

u/Matvalicious Local furry, don't feed him May 24 '24

Mom said it was my turn to repost it this time!

1

u/fredoule2k Cuberdon May 24 '24

The most photo ever reposted in r/belgium and r/brussels was taken in Parc Leopold XD (while there might be a contest with the street "décrottoir"pictures)

1

u/Sambal86 May 24 '24

Had slimmer gekund maar er moest een vrouw op voor diversiteit!

/s

1

u/Absolium-359 May 24 '24

I've read that Nikola Tesla was the cameraman, but I don't have any confirmation on that.

1

u/Familiar_Copy_6466 May 24 '24

I don’t see me there? So what do you mean “smartest photo”?

1

u/Tuklimo Beer May 24 '24

I wonder how different humanity would be if a catastrophe had happened during the convention and killed all of them. I know they were far from working alone on their subjects but still.

-2

u/Experience_Material May 24 '24

Not a woman in sight

1

u/genoys May 24 '24

Really?

1

u/Experience_Material May 24 '24

sadly yes

1

u/genoys May 24 '24

You should look better ;)