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You are assuming a causal relation direct link between underlying factors and outcomes. It may well be that if Gottingen didn't exist some other place would hav
by openrisk 2y ago
You are assuming a causal relation direct link between underlying factors and outcomes. It may well be that if Gottingen didn't exist some other place would have been the epicenter of a scientific revolution that was ripe to happen. One would then try to figure out what made that place special.
- booleandilemma 2y agoBut if some other place had been the epicenter of a scientific revolution would Gottingen have prevented that? Wouldn't we have just seen people in two different areas discovering things independently? We could ask, why only Gottingen?
- Barrin92 2y ago>Wouldn't we have just seen people in two different areas discovering things We did. Göttingen was an important place, but not the epicenter of math. Mathematicians were working all over the globe from China to India, Russia to Britain, America and Germany. Just to mention one of the maybe most gifted people of that period in the world, Srinivasa Ramanujan, people are literally still going through his work and finding novel things. It's just that we're much better story tellers when it comes to some regions of the world. If you went by movies and biographies you'd think Alan Turing did half of all computer science, who remembers Konrad Zuse? That's one area where Germany routinely gets snubbed in the public imagination.