And your point is, Marti? Here's an interesting analyogy again: how many poeple have heard of someone called Albert Einstein? Anyone? YOu all have, I bet. Now, how much has he actually contirbuted to the Theory of Relativity? All? Most? Some? Hardly any, in fact. Now tell me this: why have you all heard of him, when in actual fact all he has done was to shed light on 1%, say, of this theory? 98 per cent of developments in Relativity Theory have been made by people I have never even heard of, and I've met some of them. All Einstein did was to flick a switch to a new room, and since then people have rushed in, added a chair here, a table there, moved that cabinet to the right and put the vase under the window instead of on teh mantelpiece so that it is no essentially nothing like how Al saw it.
My point is, we remember only the select few who start something off, and forget about the rest. So to ask questions like "greatest Scientist/ Guitarist/ Mathematician/ Farmer/ Teacher etc., is pointless and meaningless, because so many giants in each field are forgotten. In 50 years' time, the likelihood is that no-one will have heard of Steve Vai, so how can he meaningfully be compared with Jimi Hendrix then?
"Oh, what rot you are talking jim", I hear you cry. And yet, the reason I can say this is I've just attended a talk which has showed - again - how ignorant I am about the history behind my favourite subject, maths. More specifically, ancient Greek Mathematics. One small, tiny, almost forgotten quote by someone reveals that, for about two hundred years, things were going on in Greek Maths that seem impossible, but we know nothing about it at all. Because people only seem to care about the new and the old, and nothing in between. SO you have all heard of Pythagoras (who didn't exist) and Archimedes, and maybe some of you have heard of a guy called Ptolemy, but in between, for at least 300 years, there is essentially a blank page. THat's like the whole of US history having gone missing because everyone was interested in the American Indians instead. In those 300 years, it is fairly clear that someone developed the conept of a fourth dimension 1800 years before it was reintroduced, but who and how, when and where we don't know.
So who is the greatest guitarist of all time? Who knows? Why even ask? In 500 years the answer will be different, and many of those greats listed above will be forgotten. Because it is always like this.
