Sunday, May 26, 2019

Asked on Quora - Is Noam Chomsky one of the greatest minds since Isaac Newton?


My answer

Maybe if you were sampling his relatives and the student radicals who keep the Chomsky cult alive. Yes.
From an objective sense. No bloody way. Not even close.
Noam Chomsky has made a significant contribution to linguistics. Give him that. I do value his critique of our media system (all the more relevant now) and his take down of postmodernism, however he does not fall into the greatest minds category. Not by a long shot.
Politically he has been a walking disaster despite the fanfare given to him by the hate-America crowd.
Check out the list of his lies
In the field of Physics alone (since you bring up Sir Issac Newton) I would place Bardeen, Bohr, Boltzmann, Curie, Einstein, Faraday, Feynman, Fourier, Gauss, Gell-Mann, Heisenberg, Hubble, Laplace, Maxwell, Noether, Pauli, Planck, Rutherford, Schrödinger , Weinberg, Witten ahead of him.
That is just one discipline.
If we go across the intellectual bandwidth Chomsky can barely hold a candle to Darwin, Pasteur, Hayek, Hegel, Cantor, Euler, Russell, Wittgenstein, Turing etc.
In fact even in the contemporary sense there are far great minds alive than Chomsky today - Kripke, Tau, Perelman, Searle and Thorne. That was just off the top of my head.

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