the best of us

This is a caricature of how science works. There are pioneering papers published every year that have literally thousands of authors.

K: and how do we achieve this BREAKTHROUGH? Science is not done
as an isolated pursuit… Newton for example said about his work,

“If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants”

And Einstein stated he could not have done his work without
the current work going on in math and physics for example the work
of David Hilbert and Max Plank and Hendrik Lorentz… so you are
simply wrong… ALL science is done by consensus and working together…

Kropotkin

Nicely put, and I suppose I agree. One trick is, it is hard to falsify. Now, while I think that even if we somehow could count all the times people went against consensus and were right and this has not been recorded - cause they killed them, cause they were ignored, etc. - it still would be a minority. That’s my intuitive guess. My intuitive guess is also that not well recorded instances are much more numerous than we realize. That people are getting shut down with great regularity on political, paradigmatic and personal grounds. And how many backed off in the face of consensus, most without even knowing it. Perhaps our knowledge and perception have been evolving at a snail’s pace.

And I suppose some of them present theories, though generally on a small scale, filling in the gaps in already consensus-believed in models. Theories that change the way we view things probably are based on a few people strugging against current models.

Yes, obviously. We know this for a fact.

It is extremely offensive to me that people actually believe this consensus shit. What a stupid joke modern man is.

Democracy is a political system. If the Greeks knew people would go and try to claim science with it I doubt they’d have risked it.

Newton, Keppler, Galilei, what a caricatures of what science is. How dare they stand in the way of our thousand authored articles. Pah. They’re like, Sooo irrelevant, losers. Our Commission knows best because we Agree with each other.

It’s so warm we are all hugging. Newton, Copernicus, theyre just bums. We are Science. We voted and: we agree.

It sounds like you wish there were a consensus around how much shit consensus is. That’s weird.

OK, you’ve named three people in the history of science. Let’s go ahead and round up to say there have been 1000 Einsteins.

Compare that with the roughly 10 million scientists operating today, and you can see that most of science is not the lone genius shifting paradigms.

Moreover, as Peter points out, even the Einsteins weren’t operating in a vacuum. There was already a scientific consensus at the time of Einstein that luminiferous ether theory didn’t match observation. Einstein’s contribution was within that consensus, providing a theoretical model for the consensus about what we’d observed, and drawing on theoretical advances provided by others.

Yes, another hypothetical , that if not for that 1 Einstein , there may not have been another, nor thousands more.

Karpel!

All active posters should be up for nomination, as all active posters make these boards what they are… even Guide ; )

That’s how you know someone is useless, empty. When they suggest that the exceptional were just “first in line”.

Why socialism will never produce genius.

Thanks :smiley:

K: ummmm, listed is three winners of the Nobel prize for literature,
all of them Russians during the communist years,
Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Sholokhov and of course Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn…

of course, no genius there……

Kropotkin

I don’t think Pasternak was a socialist and he was born in 1890 and seems to have been pretty cranky in conforming to what communist, not socialist leaders wanted. Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism, he was raised in the Orthodox Church by his mother, his family’s land was taken and made communal, and he had to hide his father’s wealthy past. Mikhail Sholokhov sort of works, though again, here we are dealing with communism, not socialism, and large scale communism

I suppose if one is arguing that som geniuses might be created by communism if they hate and rebel against it, the other two might be good examples.

Better examples might come from, say, Scandanavia.

You guys are unforgivable for leaving off Dostoevski.

But Scandinavia never abandoned capitalism.

Good repudiation of Peter.

HAHAHA HA
Fjodor a Socialist…

If you’d read any of his work you’d see the humour in such a remark.

Funny.

Thanks, but if you consider Scandanavia capitalist, with free health care, free education, free dental for kids, an extensive social support system, extremely high taxes rates capitalist,
then most of US liberals you classify as socialists are extreme capitalists by comparison.

Obviously I’m not the most perceptive poster since I’m only now discovering this thread :laughing:

But I vote Carleas because he’s the most likely to concede points in earnest aspiration for truth and I think his respectful style of interaction with members should be a model for us all.

Hell yeah, on the scoreboard! Suck it, Meno!