I actually dont think ive seen this board
not have a Lidstrom thread with several hundred posts on the first page.
Couple of things.
First of all Newton would most likely easily have a much better understanding of a lot classical mechanics (and other areas like optics) than almost all physics undergraduates at the least. You are giving today's kids way too much credit most of us just memorize the formulas and then **** up big time when the question is more than a simple algebraic usage of them. Kids today struggle majorly with Kleppner and Kolenkow; Newton would make that book his *****. Also for Einstein you can definitely point to "personality" as a major factor in why the guy has such a place as the quintessential genius in the imagination of popular culture and you can definitely say that later scientists may have surpassed him and his contemporaries. As Feyerabend says: "The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach and so on. But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth..." So i guess we can draw analogy to some of the positions on this board that hockey players today have better skillsets drilled into them but less creativity and hockey sense than players from the past.
Secondly why does everything have to be a relative ranking? Instead of fretting over what the talent pool was at this time and how to quantify some kind of competition level on a yearly basis and other questions that are almost impossible to answer with any degree of satisfactory precision maybe just go with who you think is better on just watching them play if you have watched enough of whoever is in question and dont try to convince the other side to change their opinion after so much effort has already been spent?
NHL.com has nick the king on pace to win another Norris this year.
I hope he does so Rhiessan can cry himself into his Bourque themed pillow case uttering, "Raymond, Raymond."
I have noticed that a lot of ppl so convinced about Bourque's or whoever elses superiority over Lidstrom still worry a lot about Lidstrom winning more Norrises. Who cares if he wins again? If he hasnt been playing at a level that was better than you think Bourque was would it make a difference how many trophies he had (except maybe in longevity)? The obsession with trophies here is sometimes scary...
Current thread title on the main board: "No clear Norris winner? Give it to Lidstrom"
The guy who originally made that thread (it got merged with another one) intended that title in a disapproving way of the NHL.com article in question i think.