Comment by lanstin
7 hours ago
Because the 1890s and 1930s were famous for their population wide critical thinking, of course. Good heavens, what do they teach in the schools these days.
7 hours ago
Because the 1890s and 1930s were famous for their population wide critical thinking, of course. Good heavens, what do they teach in the schools these days.
I mean you may be trying to make a point but the counterpoint is Einstein, Bohrs, Planck, Shannon, Turing, Von Nuemann, Feynman, Bohr and most of the other big names all came out during that time.
In contrast since then we've had almost not noteable physicists or Computer Scientists that I'm aware, we've got a couple, Hawking and Knuth. But apart from that I don't know if there is a single scientist I could point out today that has revolutionized our understanding or even done any real breakthrough work in the field of Physics since Einsteins era.
We have gotten better at working as a group. The standard model is a tour de force. It was a collaborative effort over decades but is a lot more complex than anything Einstein did. To some extent we haven’t gotten new physics since then because of reality - we have built higher energy experiments but haven’t got new results.
But my reply was I guess implicitly assuming the post I was replying to was talking about the median level of critical thinking. Your reply is talking about the peaks of creative accomplishment which is not what I was addressing.
Not a good argument. Those were big names because they were (co)founders of major fields. Physics and CS aren’t like fashion where you can come out with a new color or design every six months.
You also seem to be restricting yourself to pop science knowledge of who’s made breakthroughs. That’s because our collective understanding of physics has become much more detailed, to the point where it starts to lose the ability to be meaningfully comprehensible to the average layperson.
Consider AdS/CFT, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34358663 ) is beautiful and kind of amazing, but not a result that you’re going to hear much about outside of PhD programs and the like. CS is chock-full of such work. The entire field of programming language theory has come a long, long way since Turing and Von Neumann’s time, to pick a broader example.