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History of science isn't "filler" -- you can't understand a scientific field today and the questions it is asking without understanding how it developed. A hist
by jhbadger 7y ago
History of science isn't "filler" -- you can't understand a scientific field today and the questions it is asking without understanding how it developed. A historical perspective is also useful because many students and early researchers get caught up in the issue of rival camps favoring Theory A or Theory B. History teaches us that more often than not, the reason for rival camps isn't that one theory is right and the other wrong, but that the experimental data isn't completely explained by either existing theory and that a new theory will come along that will cover both sets of cases.
- decebalus1 7y agoLet me give you an example. Every pop-sci book I pick up about quantum mechanics is at least 30% the Bohr–Einstein debates and 'spooky action'. Getting tired of reading the same stories about Claude Shannon whenever I pick up a book which touches Information theory and of course, Newton's quirks every time I read a book which touches on gravity. It's boring, tedious and quite frankly irrelevant. If I want to read a book about the history and evolution of a particular branch of science, that's fine. But whenever I start reading a quantum mechanics book and it starts off with 'It was a sunny day in Athens and Epicurus was pondering..' oh.. fuck off.
- Breza 7y agoI agree with you. Practitioners not knowing the history of their fields is a problem. In grad school, we learned the canon of managerial theory over the past century. Knowing the tradeoffs between different schools of thought makes me a better manager.