> The moral of this story is that modesty is not always a virtue. Maxwell and Mendel were both excessively modest. Mendel's modesty setback the progress of biol

> The moral of this story is that modesty is not always a virtue. Maxwell and Mendel were both excessively modest. Mendel's modesty setback the progress of biology by fifty years. Maxwell's modesty setback the progress of physics by twenty years. It is better for the progress of science if people who make great discoveries are not too modest to blow their own trumpets. If Maxwell had had an ego like Galileo or Newton, he would have made sure that his work was not ignored. Maxwell was as great a scientist as Newton and a far more agreeable character. But it was unfortunate that he did not begin the presidential address in Liverpool with words like those that Newton used to introduce the third volume of his Principia Mathematica, “It remains that, from the same principles, I now demonstrate the frame of the system of the world”. Newton did not refer to his law of universal gravitation as “another theory of gravitation which I prefer” It's a good thing Maxwell is not alive and that he did not follow Dyson's advice, lest Hacker News accuses him of attempting to abuse the attention economy and promote his research like a salesman. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33043945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33043945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22297855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22297855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39144845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39144845