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"Everything that can be invented has already been invented" - Charles H. Duell, 1899. Please don't use that quote. It's apocryphal; he almost certainly never
by david927 9y ago
"Everything that can be invented has already been invented" - Charles H. Duell, 1899.
Please don't use that quote. It's apocryphal; he almost certainly never said that.
It's not about how close we are to "knowing most things," but about how accessible new learning is. In a game of musical chairs, all the easy chairs are taken.
- DrJid 9y agoI think he used that quote with the year timestamp to show how silly that quote is.
- tome 9y agoYes, and david927 is making the counterpoint that the quote is not silly now, nor was it silly then (because it was not made then).
- FeepingCreature 9y agoOr to be exact, it's not that the quote isn't silly but that it's not a quote.
- lkbm 9y agoHow about this quote from Lord Kelvin: > The beauty and clearness of the dynamical theory, which asserts heat and light to be modes of motion, is at present obscured by two clouds. I. The first came into existence with the undulatory theory of light, and was dealt with by Fresnel and Dr. Thomas Young; it involved the question, how could the earth move through an elastic solid, such as essentially is the luminiferous ether? II. The second is the Maxwell–Boltzmann doctrine regarding the partition of energy.[0] As I understand it, the two clouds were dealt with via special relativity and quantum mechanics. [0] https://books.google.com/books?id=YvoAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA363#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=YvoAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA363#v=on...