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[–] 60 points 1 year ago (3 children)

What was it Isaac Newton said about standing on the shoulders of giants?

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  • [–] 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    There is a wonderful book by Johannes Kepler about snowflakes. It's a great read, because he's one of the all-time greats and his thinking is fascinating and insightful and wrong at just about every turn, but he's doing his best. Though knowing what we know now he never even stood a chance. I mean, the guy didn't know that water and ice are the same thing.

    Highly recommended.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I mean, the guy didn't know that water and ice are the same thing.

    The summaries I find reference him theorizing that water may be spherical, leading to the hexagon pattern. He also related the feathery ends to steam hitting a cold window.

    It seems to me that he knew that steam, water, and ice were the same thing.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago

    Well, you'd be wrong. He thought they were different substances, one turning into another.

    I really recommend finding the book and reading it. It's short and fairly easy to read. IIRC it was written as a Christmas present for someone, not as a super serious scientific treatise.

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  • [–] 31 points 1 year ago
    [–] 31 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    There's a Sean Carrol video somewhere talking about how the average graduate student in physics understands Relativity far better than Einstein did, and it's because lots of people with lots of different specialties and insights have thought really long and hard about it and come up with deeper, more elegant ways to describe it.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    I had a similar realization when studying undergrad linguistics.

    One of the classes had us read Chomsky's "Remarks on Nominalization" paper. The overwhelming sense I got from it was that the author did not understand X-Bar theory, despite knowing that Chomsky was the one who came up with it (and not realizing at the time that this paper was essentially Chomsky's first paper on the subject).

    I will also say that it is a credit to his writing that the paper still holds up pretty well; even if it spends an entire section coming up with bad answers to what was literally a syntax 201 homework assignment.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It's complicated. I know that Newton's model of light as a particle was wrong. If I had a time traveling Newton in front of me, could I explain all the experiments in between him and Einstein about light that get us knocking on the door of Quantum Physics? More importantly, could I show it well enough to satisfy the level of evidence he would need (even ignoring his giant ego)?

    Probably not. Maybe if I had months to prepare.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago*

    None of them beat Dark Souls 3, so i'm significantly better than both of them combined.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago

    That's crazy, I am also better at handling radioactive material than Marie Curie. It's because she's dead and I'm not.

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  • "Jimmy Page wrote Stairway to Heaven when he was 23, but I learned to play it at 18."

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Everyone thinks Newton is smart until they read his cure for the plague

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
    [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    There's bound to be a hard drive out there with more knowledge of physics than all of us!

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    One would expect the whole of humanity to be above that level by now, yet ...

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