Scientists versus The Media
A second essay on “The Cult of the Amateur” concentrating on some aspects of professional scientists versus amateurs.
The Three Greatest Scientific Thinkers of the Last Millennium
When it comes to science names such as Einstein, Newton, Galileo, stand out above all the rest when it comes to understanding those scientific aspects of the universe around us.
However, the world did not accept these as scientists at the time when they focused their imagination on things the rest of world’s experts would sooner have left unexplored.
Einstein has been thrown out of school and did what many feel the greatest scientific work of the last millennium while he was just puttering around in his spare time.
If you feel Newton was more important than Einstein, that doesn’t change things much, as Newton was also home away from school when he did what many feel to be his greatest work.
I presume I don’t have to remind too many of our readers that the work of Galileo was so well received that he was put under “house arrest” for pretty much the rest of his life as a reward.
Note bene: Shakespeare was born the same year as Galileo and put the written word of the amateur right alongside these greatest of the scientific world, which will be mentioned in Part III of this series, which will include The Arts.
Galileo, however, amateur that he might have been when it came to the sciences, being much more of a worker in metals and the other materials of the age, making and selling his “military compasses” and other little gizmos in his own shop, literally turned world’s perspectives in their heads in other ways, as he reinvented those telescopes from Flanders to the point they changed both the world of trade and the world of astronomy. . .but. . .in the process he changed the whole world of science itself. . .inventing what this modern world calls “The Scientific Method.”
Galileo built new technologies for the purpose of research, and a publication of the results followed. . .”The Scientific Method.”
However, it should never be forgotten that Galileo, no matter the intellect, the ability to build his own tools from scratch to the point of excellence that he outcompeted all professional artisans from the world around, no matter his ability to write up his work in a manner that still survives today as a guidebook for sciences not even invented yet in his time, and no matter the Inquisition, and his resistance to it. . .let there be no mistake that Galileo was an outsider, one of those our current “professionals” are yet calling for the removal of as amateurs.
In each of these cases the work was done outside an establishment of any educational or scientific community and purely as a matter of self-directed inquiry into the nature of the universe.
OK, you might say, but Einstein was a century ago, Newton was far beyond that, and Galileo might as well have been in the Dark Ages for all the good having been born after Gutenberg did him, and it could no longer happen this way in modern times.
The Greatest Scientific Efforts of the Modern Age
- The Human Genome Project
- The Computer Revolution
No room for amateurs in modern times???
How quickly the world forgets that we owe Craig Venter for making the Human Genome Project get up off its stodgy academic ass to do the research he wanted to do 6 years earlier, and was pretty much shown the door as a result.
Have we already forgotten that we owe The Computer Revolution for all intents and purposes to two garage tinkerers from Cupertino’s reject pile who could see what no one else could see, just as the previous people in this list could see?
The Human Genome
If not for Craig Venter we would just now be finishing up the one first pass of mapping the human genome, one step at a time in the old-fashioned way, step after step, all those millions of steps– without anything like a plan, or even a flashlight to look ahead, to figure out which are the important parts to look at.
The comparable story from a century ago would be to disassemble a pyramid one stone at a time to figure out how it was put together and only then to follow the flashlight through the pathways to go to the places of most interest.
As far as _I_ am concerned, no race can be said to have matured a step beyond the genetic rolling of the dice who has not measured, calculated, and reworked its own genetic structure.
Otherwise, we’re less well planned than our racehorses, and roses they wear in the winner’s circle, not to mention our dogs, cats & entire hosts of other plants and animals we have bred better than we have bred ourselves down through the ages.
The Computer Revolution
When I first learned I had access to the Internet back in 1971 it was as if one of those lights you see in the comics went off with a flash right over my head.
That very day I started talking about being able to carry library collections of the very largest size in one hand, but I had years to wait before Wozniak and Jobs made the first feasible computers I could use at home, quickly followed by CP/M machines powered by Gary Kildall’s operating system, and eventually, because Kildall, as history tells us, was interested in too many other things, IBM chose Bill Gates to build their operating system, and I went that direction simply because I loved batch macro commands and working from a command structure that went from here to there rather than from there to here [PIP = Peripheral Interchange Program]. Yes I never really mastered “Reverse Polish Notation” either, for a new device known as calculator, and instead chose the competing place with an “Electronic Slide Rule.”
However, without Woz and Jobs, we would have continued at a mercy of the people at IBM and the like, who said that the world didn’t need any more than half a dozen computers, or Bill Gates who said we didn’t need any more than 640K of memory.
Well, Bill was wrong about that, but he learned. . . .
You don’t become the richest person in the world without learning a few things along the way.
By the way, Bill was a school dropout, just like so many others a world owes so much to, including those on this list, for whatever reasons they were not at school at the time of their inventions.
What If We Waited for Authoritarians to Make These?
You’ve most certainly heard experts argue and discuss everything, and still come to no conclusion.
Like the media editors of the previous “Cult of the Amateur,” the authoritarians and the scholars rarely come to the action points.
The world of authoritarians and scholars is a world of inaction.
Even if every great invention or discovery took just 1% longer to accomplish for every year it was in development, that will mean a 70 year timespan will cut advancement by half!
Just as any investment broker what 1% per year means.
More Examples
Socrates, perhaps the smartest person of all time was an opposite of authoritarian, he invented logic and the syllogism so plebians could argue successfully against the sophists, and rhetorititians in the public assemblies, and they sentenced him to death for it, over and over and over again they sentenced him to death for it– but the first few times their state lasted a shorter span than of Socrates life, and he walked away a free man in the new state.
Yet Socrates kept his loyalty to those states, even to the point, as is so well told, of refusing to escape when his friends bribed his way out of prison, instead choosing to honor the law that had condemned him to death.
Socrates left behind a trail of the greatest philosopher of time, including his student Plato, and his student Aristotle, and, then even his student Alexander, just to mention one line, but look up the Stoics, the Cynics, etc., to see Socrates’ overall effect.
But nothing overshadows his logic. . .his mathematics. . .or, his syllogism. . .for sheer impact on the world.
The Reason for Socrates’ Impact
Simple. . .everyone could understand and use syllogisms. . . .
Not everyone could understand and use the works of Plato, and his student Aristotle.
Their world was an elitist school of thought.
Too elitist to change the world for the public.
by Michael S. Hart
Internet User #199
Founding Member of
Project Gutenberg,
World eBook Fair &
General Cyberspace
There are four parts to this article by Michael Hart. Follow the links below to continue reading.
The Cult of the Amateur – Part I
The Cult of the Amateur – Part II
The Cult of the Amateur – Part III
The Cult of the Amateur – Part IV