Comment by ants_everywhere | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ants_everywhere | Hacker News Reader

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ants_everywhere

These big names are usually promoted beyond their actual achievements [0] because of the tendency to make stories about great people who changed the world.

The reality is murkier. Huge names like Lorentz and Poincare had worked on relativity before Einstein. Gregory and Barrow had proved the fundamental theorem of calculus before Newton, not to mention Leibniz's work.

If you mythologize the past it's easier to look around and wonder why we don't have immortals like Zeus or incredible warriors like Achilles anymore. But the truth is science always proceeds by steps that look small at the time and it's often only in retrospect that things seem amazing and unprecedented.

Semi-relatedly, I used to attend a seminar with a well-known Russian mathematician who would often chime in with Russian/Soviet priority over historical results mentioned by visiting speakers. The cold war created two mathematical cultures that had limited contact. So famous European and American mathematical results from, say the 40s to the 90s often had Soviet versions worked out independently in journals nobody here had ever heard of and written in a language they can't read.

So this is all just a way of saying that empirically, the big kahuna theory of mathematical development seems more fiction than reality. And it should be treated with skepticism when you hear things framed in those terms.

[0] Not that their achievements aren't great. They are all incredible. I just mean they seem more incredible than they are if we forget all the other incredible achievements. Shoulders of giants etc etc.

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.

> 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.

Where all of today's Lorentzes and Poincares?

Realistically, a lot of them are probably training AI algorithms to get people to click on ads and questioning their life choices.

But math keeps advancing at a good clip, there are tons of brilliant young people. Physics IIUC is largely gated on waiting for new experimental results. Einstein, Poincare, Newton and many others arrived at a time when the experimental physics data was perplexing and theoretical advances were needed to clear up the picture.

The reverse is true now if I understand. People are just waiting for more funding to build larger accelerators or whatever big expensive astronomy things they need to test the many predictions we have from the various mathematical attempts to unify quantum mechanics and relativity.

Biology seems to be moving pretty briskly. I can't speak to chemistry or any of the other sciences.

EDIT: I should add that when I left academia about 8 years ago, the mood was that academia was increasingly hostile to smart people who just wanted to do research. The move toward running universities like businesses has pushed out a lot of people who would be candidates for the next Einstein or Poincare. Poincare happened to be independently wealthy, so wealth may again be more of a factor than it was during the last century.

> mood was that academia was increasingly hostile to smart people who just wanted to do research.

Exactly these people are more likely to be spending their time speed running Mario.

working for ad companies hiding as tech companies?

I have a sad guess that attention economics kills them. Imagine being Poincare but having a smartphone addiction.

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