I am just curious, every time I watch a physics show on TV almost all the Physicists they interview are Jewish. Are Jewish people regarded as being naturally better at physics than everybody else?

how do you know they are all jewish :\?

Their names are names Jewish people usually have, I don't know for sure. Here is a big list I found. BTW I'm not anti Jewish by any means, I was just wondering.

http://www.jinfo.org/Physicists.html

Originally posted by haynewp
I am just curious, every time I watch a physics show on TV almost all the Physicists they interview are Jewish. Are Jewish people regarded as being naturally better at physics than everybody else?

i have noticed the same thing. off the top of my head

einstein
heisenberg
von neumann
feynman
glashow
weinberg
smolin
witten

these are the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, and they are all jewish. this list includes almost all the architects of modern physics. for comparison, it is worth noting some other brilliant minds that are not jewish:

newton
gauss
leibnitz
riemann
poincaré
lorentz
bose
dirac
schrödinger
gödel
yukawa
yang
hawking
sen

but i think the names on the first list stand out more than the names on the second. and even if they do not, jews make up an extremely small percentage of the world population. far less than 1%, i believe. so the list is extremely disproportionate, certainly.

the numbers are clear, and it is hard to discount them. i believe that the number of asians appearing on the list will grow steadily, and may one day outnumber the nonasian. however, a discussion of race may be inappropriate for this forum.

That list is a bit misleading.

Only Neils Bohr mother was jewish, and I don't believe he was at all brought up in the faith.

There have undoubtedly though been many great jewish physicists, but I would say just as many great christian ones as well. Arguably 2 of the greatest physicists of all time, Albert Einstein and R.P.Feynmann are jewish, but I would also argue that most of the people on this list would call themselves physicists, scientists, humanitarianists, fathers, husbands tec before they would call themselves jewish. I would also say that about nearly all scientists who have some religious background, the main reason being thst it is so difficult to accomodate the 2 school's of thought.
The greatest thing about science is that it is one of only a few human endevevours whose dictum is essentially void from the influence of religious undermining. Although sometimes you get religiously minded people claiming scientific results as being proof of the existence of someone god.

P.S.

To a lot of people, I would argue that science is their religion. There can be problems with this also though.

lethe,

You might add a note that we don't see "Smith" or "Jones" (or McCoin):D

What about mathematicians. Would you say that a large proportion of great mathematicians are jewish? I know that in the middle ages, great mathematics was done by arabs.

Originally posted by ryans
That list is a bit misleading.

Only Neils Bohr mother was jewish, and I don't believe he was at all brought up in the faith.

There have undoubtedly though been many great jewish physicists, but I would say just as many great christian ones as well.

even if there are just as many Gentile physicists as Jewish, it is worth noting, since Jews make up less than 1% of the worlds population, so the proportion is way out of wack.

Arguably 2 of the greatest physicists of all time, Albert Einstein and R.P.Feynmann are jewish

yes, i would agree that these may be two of the greatest physicists of all time

but I would also argue that most of the people on this list would call themselves physicists, scientists, humanitarianists, fathers, husbands tec before they would call themselves jewish.

i would also agree with this. i think physicists tend to not have very strong faith in religion. which is understandable, since the really great physicists are those who questioned everything they had been taught, and discovered truth on their own terms. i imagine it would be very hard to believe the unverifiable claims in the bible/tora/q'oran if that is your personal mindset.

I would also say that about nearly all scientists who have some religious background, the main reason being thst it is so difficult to accomodate the 2 school's of thought.
can you check that sentence? i don t think you wrote what you meant to write.


The greatest thing about science is that it is one of only a few human endevevours whose dictum is essentially void from the influence of religious undermining. Although sometimes you get religiously minded people claiming scientific results as being proof of the existence of someone god.

i couldn t agree more.

Originally posted by ryans
P.S.

To a lot of people, I would argue that science is their religion. There can be problems with this also though.

science is my religion.

well a trend for great physics minds seems to be that none of them are devout. feynman didnt care much for religion in general.

i don t think that the argument is much about the mixing of religion with physics. i think that jewish physicists are about as religious as christian physicists, which is to say, not at all.

in my mind, i wonder whether the fact that they are descended from a different race can account for the greater ability to understand nature. "christian" physicists are of european descent, while "jewish" physicists are of middle eastern descent. i don t think the faith enters in in either case.

well race is social construct. the entire concept of it was invented by social scientists. it has been shown there is more genetic variation on average within the proposed "races" than there is between them. i would say, if anything, it is more a question of culture than genetics or religion

Originally posted by shrubby pegasus
well race is social construct. the entire concept of it was invented by social scientists. it has been shown there is more genetic variation on average within the proposed "races" than there is between them. i would say, if anything, it is more a question of culture than genetics or religion

that study, which showed that there is more genetic variation among a single race than between races, is deeply flawed. it was done in brasil, where the notion of "native" "white" and "black" have been intermarrying for decades.

any good geneticist can tell from your genome quite a lot about you. your race is quite easy to discern, in most cases. if the same study had been done by comparing nigerians against icelanders against japanese, the results would have been quite clear.

the results of this brasilian experiment have been widely touted as discrediting the notion of race, however, in scientific circles, not only was it discredited immediately, it was never given credence to begin with.

that race is a social construct is total nonsense. there are obvious physical differences between autralian aborigines and south american natives. the most cursory of censuses will show this. the belief that these differences are social, when the average height, bone structure, color, weight, etc, are extremely different (and measurably so), is total nonsense.

the only question that is open is to what extent your race determines your ability to succeed in western society, versus to what extent your social background limits the same. this is, of course, an ill understood question. i think one of the reasons this sociological question is so poorly understood is that most scientific funding agencies are entirely unwilling to support such research that is such a source of political controversy.

well i dont know the issue of race is as definitive as you say. academic circles dont seem to be as convinced as you are. if it was so definite, they wouldnt be teaching the issue as race as more of a social issue than a genetic issue. anthropology was one of my 3 majors as an undergrad and i was taught differently than you said previously. there are in fact genetic similarities between regional groups. this makes sense based simply on the selective pressures they were exposed to throughout history. this changes nothing though. i still contend there is more genetic variation in a given "race" than there is on average between the races." i am only one year out of undergrad so i dont think the given theories and facts have changed that significantly since then

for the most part the only way i could see you defining race is based on aesthetics. of course australian aborigines and icelanders look different. fundamentally though, there is no difference.

Originally posted by shrubby pegasus
well i dont know the issue of race is as definitive as you say. academic circles dont seem to be as convinced as you are. if it was so definite, they wouldnt be teaching the issue as race as more of a social issue than a genetic issue. anthropology was one of my 3 majors as an undergrad and i was taught differently than you said previously. there are in fact genetic similarities between regional groups. this makes sense based simply on the selective pressures they were exposed to throughout history. this changes nothing though. i still contend there is more genetic variation in a given "race" than there is on average between the races." i am only one year out of undergrad so i dont think the given theories and facts have changed that significantly since then

for the most part the only way i could see you defining race is based on aesthetics. of course australian aborigines and icelanders look different. fundamentally though, there is no difference.

not only do icelanders and australian aborigines look different, they also have discernable differences in their genome.

since the brasilian study, lots of people have claimed that there is no genetic basis for ethnicity. this is unscientific. i believe these claims are motivated by political factors. there have been genetic surveys of icelanders, for example, and they show a remarkable degree of homogeneity (to be expected for a population living on a small island). the difference between icelanders and other races is easily seen from the genome. thus, one concludes that ones race is encoded in ones genome, and is not a "social construct".

brasilian society has a great amount of intermarriage between races, and there are many different races living there. in brasil they call it a "racial democracy". in fact, it is to be expected that it would be harder to distinguish races by their genetic heritage. what that study showed (by sergio pena) is that even individuals that look completely "white" have characteristically "black" genes as often as not. in fact there was little correlation between skin color and genetic makeup.

ok, so race is not the same thing as skin color. i agree with this. but to extrapolate from this that there is no genetic basis for race is unbased, and untrue.

by the way, telling me how many majors you had doesn t really lend any weight to your argument. and the fact that your anthropology class told you that race is a social construct does not surprise me. if you were doing research in genetic surveys of human beings, i think you would have learned something else.

lethe,

I certainly can't speak for shrubby, but my impression of what he has said seems technically valid from a "DNA" point of view only.

That is we know that we are 97% Ape. That is there is less than a 3% difference between Apes and man. So certainly I would expect that the races have more in common than they do in difference.

But I don't believe that goes to a cultural driven change.

Oh gee-golly and here I thought they all sounded German. Oh well so much for the master race.

My question is so what? Lets just keep learning from whoever can teach us about anything. I know for centuries the Chinese were amongst the leaders of the scienctific world for so much was done by them that you never hear about. So it goes with others that aren't as prominant in the scientific community , they are just as valued as those with well known names for many assistants are really the ones who help those do much of the digging for answers.

Originally posted by cosmictraveler
My question is so what? Lets just keep learning from whoever can teach us about anything.

i agree with this sentiment. i don t care if most physicists are jewish, women, or aliens.

lethe i see you think that anthropology is strictly limited to the study of culture. this is in fact not true. there is an intermingling going on between evolutionists, biologists, and anthropologists. they are not necessarily independent of each other. the entire idea of classifying a race is arbitrary. for instance, i could classify a race as those people who are allergic to pollen, people who are short, people who are tall, people who are green, people with big noses, etc. the genome can give you evidence of a disposition for these things. picking at random two members of some population of the same "race" does not guarantee that the will meetyour genomic criteria for race. what if two "white people" were to have a child, but due to some random mutation this child ended up having parts of its genome that did not resemble their two "white" parents genome enogh to be considered of the "white race?" have we just encountered new race? another example could be, what if there was some sort of epidemic. this epidemic killed everyone on iceland who had some gene dormant. now we are left with only the population had was exhibiting that gene. does this mean that iceland really had two races? there is significant genetic variability in a "homogenous" population. we are not asexual creatures.

my contention is still that race is irrelevant. you can find just as much if not more genetic disparity with in a "race" as you do between "races."

the study of brazil shows nothing to me. an issue as salient as this will not be left to some half assed study. and the fact that in the academic world, amongst anthropologists, who are also evolutionists, who are also geneticists, seem to accept the idea as fact enough to teach it and publish books about it tells me something.

macm can you elaborate on this: "But I don't believe that goes to a cultural driven change."

Originally posted by shrubby pegasus

the study of brazil shows nothing to me. an issue as salient as this will not be left to some half assed study. and the fact that in the academic world, amongst anthropologists, who are also evolutionists, who are also geneticists, seem to accept the idea as fact enough to teach it and publish books about it tells me something.

well i am under a different impression, but the fact is, i am not in a field even remotely related to genetics, so i suppose i will have to defer.

shrubby,

[Quote]macm can you elaborate on this: "But I don't believe that goes to a cultural driven change."[UnQuote]

What I mean is the differences between the 3% Ape/Man clearly is not culturual driven diffference; hence differences between races are also not likely curturally driven.

Originally posted by shrubby pegasus
well race is social construct. the entire concept of it was invented by social scientists. it has been shown there is more genetic variation on average within the proposed "races" than there is between them. i would say, if anything, it is more a question of culture than genetics or religion

A pretty tiresome debate. Does it really matter if it has "been shown" that there is more genetic variation on average within ...
blah? If people in asia have a slighly different body type, coloured skin and black hair, it doesn't take an Einstein to realise that those differences must be represented in the genome.
If different genes is good or bad, make people of a different race or make them smarter or dumber is a whole other question.

you missed the point.

The greatest physicist here seems to be James, is his last name Rothstein?:cool:

Originally posted by shrubby pegasus
you missed the point.

Yes, probably because it is extremely vague.

not really it was stated 3 times

The greatest physicist here seems to be James, is his last name Rothstein?

HA:eek: