3 ms·

It sounds to me like the who of science doesn't matter as much as the where and the when. There are ideas floating around in the ether, and the discovery of the

It sounds to me like the who of science doesn't matter as much as the where and the when. There are ideas floating around in the ether, and the discovery of these ideas generate more ether for future discoveries. To a large extent being a scientific luminary is being in the right place at the right time. Which doesn't seem at odds with the grandparent post, given that we shouldn't expect throwing more people at the problem to accelerate discoveries.

ants_everywhere 3y ago
> It sounds to me like the who of science doesn't matter as much as the where and the when. There are ideas floating around in the ether, and the discovery of these ideas generate more ether for future discoveries. To a large extent being a scientific luminary is being in the right place at the right time. I think it's really an empirical question how it works. My own take is that it takes both. You need the ideas floating around and you need an obsessive synthesizer. A music example might be Bob Dylan. Folk music could have been a passing local fad, but Dylan studied all of it, distilled it down, and produced a version that seems different in kind than what came before. Without Dylan, we could look back on that era as being like the swing revival of the 90s. Just a period where a kind of music was popular again but with no real lasting change. Similarly, there could be areas of math that are ripe for a Newton figure to come in and clarify everything. But that field could wait 100 years in the backwaters of math journals before anyone took notice. So you can't directly jump from the ideas floating around to the synthesis, you do need some sort of figure who will read and understand everything and put all the pieces together into a coherent piece of writing that people can read.

3 ms·

It sounds to me like the who of science doesn't matter as much as the where and the when. There are ideas floating around in the ether, and the discovery of the

by jackcosgrove 3y ago

ants_everywhere 3y ago
> It sounds to me like the who of science doesn't matter as much as the where and the when. There are ideas floating around in the ether, and the discovery of these ideas generate more ether for future discoveries. To a large extent being a scientific luminary is being in the right place at the right time. I think it's really an empirical question how it works. My own take is that it takes both. You need the ideas floating around and you need an obsessive synthesizer. A music example might be Bob Dylan. Folk music could have been a passing local fad, but Dylan studied all of it, distilled it down, and produced a version that seems different in kind than what came before. Without Dylan, we could look back on that era as being like the swing revival of the 90s. Just a period where a kind of music was popular again but with no real lasting change. Similarly, there could be areas of math that are ripe for a Newton figure to come in and clarify everything. But that field could wait 100 years in the backwaters of math journals before anyone took notice. So you can't directly jump from the ideas floating around to the synthesis, you do need some sort of figure who will read and understand everything and put all the pieces together into a coherent piece of writing that people can read.