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both fuel each other
wild ideas of philosphers entice those who like concrete data to see if they hold useful value
i think it’s like science fiction and science - sure one is often a collage of various wild ideas - but some of them could inspire a person in a fancy lab coat to say “huh, that’s cool, i wonder if i could make that real” (that’s how we got mobile phones!)
being a scientist can sometimes trap you into the world of concrete data that’s very detail orientated, scientists need their philosopher friends who just say wild shower thoughts without thinking too much about specifics. Small picture and big picture are not opposing forces after all, they complete each other
I think the differentiating factor is bulk intelligence, the guy in the bath is a one or two per generation mind and PhD students are ten a penny. I was one, I know. I saw a mechanical engineering doctorate banging a screw into the wall with a hammer.
I did that once when I was a kid. I was testing the hypothesis that it would still spin, and therefore save time. My hypothesis was wrong, and it just punched the giant hole in the fence.
Like you said, the people that we read about today were generational talents, but they also had the advantage of living in a world where fairly simple observations could be considered new discoveries. We’ve discovered so much since then, and know so much about the world, that it takes something quite elaborate to be groundbreaking now.
there is however the bias of now knowing what is right and what is wrong about those old observations, and therefore trivializing them in our heads. to our ancestors they weren’t actually all too trivial, and they struggled a lot to try and figure out the world with what they had.
Simulation theory is just Plato’s cave…
“If a tree falls…” is Schrodinger’s cat…
We’re still talking about the same stuff, we’re just focused on details and aware that we might not yet be working with complete data.
The absolute smartest brains in the planet readily admit they don’t know what the fuck is going on. That’s a good thing.
We shouldn’t be listening to anyone that insists they have all the answers because no one does.
The absolute smartest brains in the planet readily admit they don’t know what the fuck is going on.
And to our detriment, the idiots are quite certain that they know everything.
It’s Dunning-Kruger.
Smart people know enough about a topic to know that they don’t know everything. Whereas less smart people don’t know what they don’t know so they think they know it all.
That’s a lot pf knows.
What was the bottleneck that caused 3 centuries to pass between Gutenberg recreating the 4 century old movable type Chinese printing press, and the bulk of scientific discoveries? I know the basics of the industrial revolution were metallurgy, cyclical power safety with steam boiler pressure regulation (Watt), and the discovery that a lathe screw is capable of cutting a more accurate lathe screw. I don’t know anything about the cultural evolution that made the age of discovery relevant, accessible, or most importantly made it stick.
Idk, but I recently learned that there was a 300 year gap in new inventions in Ireland after they invented whiskey. Then 300 years later they codified chemistry, probably to make better whiskey.
War might be a good answer
It took a slow runup like all things and it stuck because it worked. Science begat technology which improved living standards, not just in a rarified way but universally and was very evident. In turn technical advancement shone a light back onto science as its enabler. The new discoveries were not only intellectual like those in the arts they altered the practicalities and aspirations of common life within all classes of society. A thing science continues to do unlike any other pursuit of humanity and it is relevant and sticks for this reason.
