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That's similar to the argument you sometimes hear that Columbus didn't discover America - people already lived there. But from the perspective of Europeans, he
by miracle2k 7y ago
That's similar to the argument you sometimes hear that Columbus didn't discover America - people already lived there. But from the perspective of Europeans, he certainly did. Similarly, it's not surprising you can "discover" a waterfall if you live right beside it.
Surely, humankind can legitimately claim to discover a planet, even if an alien race might have done so before us.
What is maybe fair is to ask in whose name something was discovered, and how we tell these stories. We can't say Christopher Columbus discovered America for mankind, but it was news to a smaller proportion of people.
- dmix 7y agoTypically for Nobel prizes it's the person who wrote the paper who played the biggest role in early correct identification of the source and causes combined with spreading that in the wider scientific community, it's not merely who recognized it as a unique disease or simply studied it first. The bar is simply higher and what's being awarded and therefore incentivized is the science part (which includes communication) not simply the discovery. People running around trying to be the first to label it in their personal diary or in a local community isn't what is being incentivized.