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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

> But it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it.

Unless you're Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Or Darwin and Wallace.

Which suggests these ideas might be a product of their zeitgeist with a number of contempories bording on being the first to publish.

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The Darwin vs Wallace example is completely different from the Newton vs Leibniz.

In both cases, neither stole ideas from the other. However, at least my understanding, is that Newton and Leibniz did the work at the same time, but because Newton already had a reputation, Newton took all the credit. In the case of Darwin vs Wallace instead, Darwin had years and years of research, notes, and writings done but unpublished, but he rushed to publish when he heard that Wallace had similar ideas. So in a sense, Darwin didn't walk away with more credit than he deserved, as he was there first anyway. Newton vs Leibniz doesn't look as clear cut.

(By the way, in before Edison vs Tesla, that's yet another entirely different situation of plain exploiting and stealing of Tesla by Edison)

I don't know if it is that different. Darwin and Wallace still came up with the same radical theory within decades of one another, quite a coincidence. The natural explanation is that the theory was a result of other human developments making their observations possible.

I agree. For reference, the underlying cause of the Darwin and Wallace coincidence was the establishment of modern geology by Hutton (which established the earth was old and naturally mutable), along with the large-scale collection of biological observations by naturalists such as Darwin and Wallace.

Fun unrelated Darwin fact: he's the person who figured out the geology of how and why coral reefs and atolls form where they do.

Yes, I thought using Calculus as an example actually eroded the point they were trying to make since it was independently developed by Leibniz and Newton.

Not to cast any shade on either of those two brilliant people, but it does suggest Calculus was "ready" for 17th-century mathematicians (or, you know, the other way around).

So why didn't that occur much earlier in history?

You are looking at this the wrong way. It might have occured much earlier in history, but only after the invention of industrialized book-printing could that knowledge be actually be transfered between different geographies and generations in an efficient way.

Book-printing presses have been one of the most influential inventions ever for precisely that reason.

And for precisely the same reason, the internet is now the most influential invention today. The fact that knowledge is available at a click of your finger tips is astounding. After all, the only thing differentiating humans from animals is the way humans can encode and transmit knowledge beyond their own life times.

I would imagine the next biggest influential invention is AGI.

You miss my point. If human society had developed earlier then we would have had the book printing earlier too.

Because there was no way to make money on it. Before the Age of Discovery, there wasn't much money in being able to find out one's coordinates in the open sea - and Age of Discovery only started because a long, grinding war to liberate Spain and Portugal from Muslims had to finish first to provide both economic base for seafaring, and safety of sailing too. And maths mainly developed for the goal of improving navigation.

I don't think either Newton or Leibniz was primarily motivated by money. Far from it, in fact.

Newton was Master of the Royal Mint for something like 30 years and put people to death for clipping coins. He spent decades trying to manufacture gold. I would say money was a very big motivator. Don’t know about Leibniz.

That wasn't his money, though. He apparently received a salary between £500 and £600 per year, While that was a lot more money than it is now, an inflation calculator at the Bank of England suggests that it was the equivalent of around £43,000 today (around $US53,000 at today's exchange rate).

Not starvation wages, certainly, but neither was it vast riches.

He received a percentage of metal minted on top of that salary and died wealthy.

IIRC the money motivation for Newton made him pursue alchemy, that didn't lead anywhere and just wasted time that would be more fruitful if applied to calculus and physics.

> made him pursue alchemy, that didn't lead anywhere and just wasted time that would be more fruitful

You wouldn't have known in Newton's time if alchemical transmutation into gold worked. Certainly, you knew then that some substances could be transformed into other substances, and it was such research that developed into modern high-school chemistry.

Ironically, eventual solution to the problem of navigation required no math at all.

Some of it kinda did (Archimedes + a long line of mathematicians up to at least Fermat).

So why not earlier? Because the others didn't have Fermat to learn from.

I thought the point was made with the comment about the "zeitgeist" (although the word is misused a bit in this context).

In as much as things build upon other things, you were not likely to get Calculus before, say, Algebra. But once all the pieces are in place the field is wide open for the smart people of the time to plunder it.

Words are there to be abused :-)

Or at least bent to purpose, in this case the narrow zeitgeist of the 17th Century European numerate intellectuals .. those were the days of very slow limited copy exchanges of the latest thoughts by mail and by word of mouth via salons.

Somewhat like Mastodon with the bandwidth of a hikers backpack full of parchment.

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