5 ms·

The example from the article is really ignorant and self-defeating. Maxwell didn't come up with anything himself, he just formalized and turned into Greek squig

by ucee054 13y ago

The example from the article is really ignorant and self-defeating. Maxwell didn't come up with anything himself, he just formalized and turned into Greek squiggles what Faraday had discovered. And Faraday's claim to fame was working for Davy, doing things like inventing electric motors and lamps. So if you want to use that history as an example, it says applications come first, and hypotheses and research papers and scientific conferences and the rest of that crap are just the documentation of the new invention.

mchouza 13y ago
Maxwell didn't come up with anything himself [...] Maxwell "invented" the displacement current: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_current http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_current
- jjoonathan 13y ago
  The discovery of the displacement current was extremely important: it proved that light was an electromagnetic wave, paving the way for how we would come to understand the interactions between light and matter. It's no mistake that it took a theorist to find the displacement current since it mostly appears between the plates of capacitors and that valume is one that engineering demands call for minimization of!
  - ucee054 13y ago
    No, the application comes first, the theory follows. I don't know that Maxwell would have been anywhere near that discovery if it hadn't been for Faraday's work first. Go take a look at first year engineering PhD students, and see how they flail around looking for a "hypothesis". They have no idea what to look for because their work isn't grounded in anything. In the end they often end up bodging together two or three previous research papers and going with that rather than solving a real problem. Because who cares about applications, right? The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto.
    - kyzyl 13y ago
      > The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto. No, no, no, no, NO! That is just wrong. Yes, a lot of PhD work is highly specialized and remains largely unapplied (at least directly). But that is the nature it; science is an affair of serendipity. You simply do not know what problem you're going to figure out, what problem you're going to make progress on, or where you're going to get stuck. In fact, science largely has very little to do with YOU in particular. It's about building a body of work that many people to come can work with. This notion that most of science is brilliant people going "ahah!", and subsequently publishing a seminal work in their field that drives industry for decades to come is bullshit. That is not how it works. In very rare circumstances people have really significant eureka moments, but even then it takes the body of researchers, engineers, undergrads, and all their combined work to make things really happen. Most breakthroughs do not come from drop-outs in silicon valley hacking on Rails apps, or building PCs out of wood and spite, or figuring out how to make lasers encode information at very high density. Those are the exceptions. As a culture we just love to hear about the exceptions that made it big, complete with the highly biased, over-simplified and glory hogging narratives that accompany them. So stop spreading disinformation and putting down PhD students, and other academics, who are devoting years of their life to figuring out how to cure your ailments, build your LCD screens and save you from dying of hunger.
      - ucee054 13y ago
        save you from dying of hunger The reason I'm not dying from hunger is because of mostly Fritz Haber and partly Norman Borlaug. The work of everybody else is irrelevant. So, two geniuses. And Fritz Haber wasn't working in "theory", he was working in "application" for the Second Reich. Maybe you should stop using such terrible examples and maybe you should stop being so damn badly informed. There's a whole field called History of Science and Technology about how this stuff happens, as opposed to the self-serving narratives academics give you about how it happens. Try learning some of it. So stop spreading disinformation I'm not, the standard academic propaganda that you stated above is the disinformation. The truth is that academics often don't give a shit about applications. They care about getting publications and about getting tenure. Try working on a project for an academic. If you give him a hypothesis to investigate that you can submit to a big journal, he'll give you the go ahead. If you instead suggest something which you can actually make, which will be helpful for Aunt Tillie, which she actually might be able to buy in her local shop, he'll say something like "That's not SCIENCE!" and veto you. Go on, try it. I dare you.

by ucee054 13y ago

mchouza 13y ago

Maxwell didn't come up with anything himself [...] Maxwell "invented" the displacement current: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_current http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_current

jjoonathan 13y ago
The discovery of the displacement current was extremely important: it proved that light was an electromagnetic wave, paving the way for how we would come to understand the interactions between light and matter. It's no mistake that it took a theorist to find the displacement current since it mostly appears between the plates of capacitors and that valume is one that engineering demands call for minimization of!
- ucee054 13y ago
  No, the application comes first, the theory follows. I don't know that Maxwell would have been anywhere near that discovery if it hadn't been for Faraday's work first. Go take a look at first year engineering PhD students, and see how they flail around looking for a "hypothesis". They have no idea what to look for because their work isn't grounded in anything. In the end they often end up bodging together two or three previous research papers and going with that rather than solving a real problem. Because who cares about applications, right? The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto.
  - kyzyl 13y ago
    > The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto. No, no, no, no, NO! That is just wrong. Yes, a lot of PhD work is highly specialized and remains largely unapplied (at least directly). But that is the nature it; science is an affair of serendipity. You simply do not know what problem you're going to figure out, what problem you're going to make progress on, or where you're going to get stuck. In fact, science largely has very little to do with YOU in particular. It's about building a body of work that many people to come can work with. This notion that most of science is brilliant people going "ahah!", and subsequently publishing a seminal work in their field that drives industry for decades to come is bullshit. That is not how it works. In very rare circumstances people have really significant eureka moments, but even then it takes the body of researchers, engineers, undergrads, and all their combined work to make things really happen. Most breakthroughs do not come from drop-outs in silicon valley hacking on Rails apps, or building PCs out of wood and spite, or figuring out how to make lasers encode information at very high density. Those are the exceptions. As a culture we just love to hear about the exceptions that made it big, complete with the highly biased, over-simplified and glory hogging narratives that accompany them. So stop spreading disinformation and putting down PhD students, and other academics, who are devoting years of their life to figuring out how to cure your ailments, build your LCD screens and save you from dying of hunger.
    - ucee054 13y ago
      save you from dying of hunger The reason I'm not dying from hunger is because of mostly Fritz Haber and partly Norman Borlaug. The work of everybody else is irrelevant. So, two geniuses. And Fritz Haber wasn't working in "theory", he was working in "application" for the Second Reich. Maybe you should stop using such terrible examples and maybe you should stop being so damn badly informed. There's a whole field called History of Science and Technology about how this stuff happens, as opposed to the self-serving narratives academics give you about how it happens. Try learning some of it. So stop spreading disinformation I'm not, the standard academic propaganda that you stated above is the disinformation. The truth is that academics often don't give a shit about applications. They care about getting publications and about getting tenure. Try working on a project for an academic. If you give him a hypothesis to investigate that you can submit to a big journal, he'll give you the go ahead. If you instead suggest something which you can actually make, which will be helpful for Aunt Tillie, which she actually might be able to buy in her local shop, he'll say something like "That's not SCIENCE!" and veto you. Go on, try it. I dare you.