4 ms·
Yes, but because human knowledge is so much greater than it was 100 years ago, a given lifetime of work is able to push knowledge forward less. Yes, we still ha
by qq66 9y ago
Yes, but because human knowledge is so much greater than it was 100 years ago, a given lifetime of work is able to push knowledge forward less. Yes, we still have CRISPRs and other titanic discoveries, but even those are collaborations. There is no more room for an Isaac Newton who basically invents three different scientific fields.
- wahern 9y agoStephen Wolfram might disagree.
- nostrademons 9y agoA field depends on the body of work that comes afterwards. At the time of its invention, it's just a paper. I could imagine several people in computing alone that might end up inventing three different fields. Remember that at one point, "computer science" was considered a subfield of "electrical engineering", and both of them have their roots in Claude Shannon's masters thesis. That's because after he published his result and it became widely known, thousands of others piled into those fields to study the consequences of digital circuits. Similarly, I'd bet that in a hundred years "computer science" isn't one field, it's at least half a dozen, and people will be studying the subfields of version control, distributed systems, CRDTs, neural nets, computer graphics, data storage, compression, information retrieval, and others. Actually, that isn't a hundred years, that's today.
- cedex12 9y ago> I could imagine several people in computing alone that might end up inventing three different fields. I'm curious, who would those be?
- qq66 9y agoWhen Isaac Newton was old, he used to give his visitors a lock of his hair in a small gold case, because he knew, and they knew, that they would be museum pieces one day. He was right, I saw one of them in a museum. I don't think any living scientist could confidently do that today.