Comment by mannykannot
2 days ago
Sure - and climbing a mountain is just putting one foot down higher than it was before and repeating, once you abstract away all the hard parts.
2 days ago
Sure - and climbing a mountain is just putting one foot down higher than it was before and repeating, once you abstract away all the hard parts.
It is. If you're at the mountain, on the right trail, and have the right clothing and equipment for the task.
That's why those tiny steps of scientific and technological progress aren't made by just any randos - they're made by people who happen to be at the right place and time, and equipped correctly to be able to take the step.
The important corollary to this is that you can't generally predict this ahead of time. Someone like Einstein was needed to nail down relativity, but standing there few years earlier, you couldn't have predicted it was Einstein who would make a breakthrough, nor what would that be about. Conversely, if Einstein lived 50 years earlier, he wouldn't have come up with relativity, because necessary prerequisites - knowledge, people, environment - weren't there yet.
You are describing hiking in the mountains, which doesn’t generalize to mountaineering and rock-climbing when it gets difficult, and the difficulties this view is abstracting away are real.
Your second and third paragraphs are entirely consistent with the original point I was trying to make, which was not that it took Einstein specifically to come up with relativity, but that it took someone with uncommon skills, as evidenced by the fact that it blindsided even a good many of the people who were qualified to be contenders for being the one to figure it out first. It does not amount to proof, but one does not expect people who are closing in on the solution to be blindsided by it.
I am well aware of the problems with “great man” hagiography, but dismissing individual contributions, which is what the person I was replying to seemed to be doing, is a distortion in its own way.